But on the night of October 3d, which was a sloppy night in the mountains, there was not a great deal to take anybody back through the Lalla Rookh. Even the porter of the dead car deserted his official corpse, and after Number One pulled out of Medicine Bend and stuck her slim, aristocratic nose fairly into the big ranges the Lalla Rookh was left as dead as a stringer to herself and her reflections--reflections of brilliant aisles and staterooms inviting with softened lights, shed on couples that resented intrusion; of sections bright with lovely faces and decks ringing with talk and laughter; of ventilators singing of sunshine within, and of night and stars and waste without--for the Lalla Rookh carried only the best people, and after the overland voyage on her tempered springs and her yielding cushions they felt an affection for her. When the Lalla Rookh lived she lived; but to-night she was dead. This night the pretty car sped over the range a Cinderella deserted, her linen stored and checked in her closets, her pillows bunked in her seats, and her curtains folded in her uppers, save and except in one single instance--Section Eleven, to conform to certain deeply held ideas of the porter, Raz Brown, as to what might and might not constitute a hoodoo, was made up. Raz Brown did not play much: he could not and hold his job; but when he did play he played eleven always whether it fell between seven, twenty-seven, or four, forty-four. And whenever Raz Brown deadheaded a car through, he always made up section eleven, and laid the hoodoo struggling but helpless under the chilly linen sheets of the lower berth. Glover had spent the day without incident or excitement on the Wind River branches, and the evening had gone, while waiting to take a train west to Medicine Bend, in figuring estimates at the agent's desk in Wind River station. He was working night and day to finish the report that the new board was waiting for on the rebuilding of the system. At midnight when he boarded the train he made his way back to look for a place to stretch out until two o'clock. The Pullman conductor lay in the smoking-room of the head 'Frisco car dreaming of his salary--too light to make any impression on him except when asleep. It seemed a pity to disturb an honest man's dreams, and the engineer passed on. In the smoking-room of the next car lay a porter asleep. Glover dropped his bag into a chair and took off his coat. While he was washing his hands the train-conductor, Billy O'Brien, came in and set down his lantern. Conductor O'Brien was very much awake and inclined rather to talk over a Mexican mining proposition on which he wanted expert judgment than to let Glover get to bed. When the sleepy man looked at his watch for the fifth time, the conductor was getting his wind for the dog-watch and promised to talk till daylight. "My boy, I've got to go to bed," declared Glover.