The material was not promising. Two old ladies dozing in the section diagonally across the aisle, four school-girls munching chocolates and restlessly shifting from seat to seat in the farther half of the car, and the conductor methodically making out his reports in the section opposite, summed up the human interest, or at least the visible part of it. Half-way down the car one of the sections was still curtained and bulkheaded; and when Miss Grierson curled up in her seat and closed her eyes she was wondering vaguely why the porter had left this one section undisturbed in the morning scene-shifting. The northward-flying train was crossing a river, and the dining-car waiter was crying the luncheon summons, when Margery awoke to realize the comforting fact that she had successfully slept the forenoon away. With the eye-opening came a recurrence of the last-remembered waking thought--the wonder why the curtained section was still undisturbed. When she was leaving the _Anita_ with her father, the explanation suggested itself: of course, the occupant of the middle section must be ill. Luncheon over, there was nothing to remind her of the probable invalid in Number Six until late in the afternoon when, looking through the open door of the drawing-room, she saw the porter carrying a glass of water to the invisible sufferer. Quite suddenly her interest became acute. Who was the sick one? and why was he, or she, travelling without an attendant? With Margery Grierson, to question was to ascertain; and the Pullman conductor, once more checking his diagrams in Section Eleven, offered the readiest means of enlightenment. A few minutes later Margery rejoined her father in the private compartment. "Do you remember the nice-looking young man who sat at the table with us in the Chouteau last night?" she began abruptly. The gray-wolf Jasper nodded. He had an excellent memory for faces. "What did you think of him?" The query followed the nod like a nimble boxer's return blow. "I thought he paid a whole lot more attention to you than he did to his supper. Why?" "He is on this car; sick with a fever of some kind, and out of his head. He is going to Wahaska." "How do you know it's the same one?" "I made the conductor take me to see him. He talked to me in Italian and called me '_Carlotta mia_.'" "Humph! he didn't look like a dago." "He isn't; it's just because he is delirious." There was a long pause, broken finally by a curt "Well?" from the father. "I've been thinking," was the slow response. "Of course, there is a chance that he has friends in Wahaska, and that some one will be at the train to meet him. But it is only a chance." "Why doesn't the conductor telegraph ahead and find out?" "He doesn't know the man's name. I tried to get him to look for a card, or to break into the suit-cases under the berth, but he says the regulations won't let him."