The engine screamed. “That’s St. Jacobs,” said McGuire to his wife, and the station was behind them. Here the President had his first disappointment. The man who stood upon the platform in his shirt sleeves was a stranger. The old agent was in Texas. Now the train sank into the sag at East Silver, lifted again, as an ocean steamer lifts her huge form over a high sea, screamed on the ridge, and then went roaring down toward the bridge. How dwarfed and mean things looked! The old saw-mill was gone, and only a brown heap of sawdust marked the place. The mill-pond, into which he had taken many a run and jump from the railroad grade, was a slimy, stagnant pool covered with green scum. “Now look, dear!--here--there! There’s where the White Mail got mixed up with me and the mule.” “But where’s the bridge, dear? Show me the bridge you used to guard, and the--” “There, that’s it. Isn’t it little? Why, I used to fancy that was about the biggest bridge on the road.” “But you’re a big boy now, Tommy,” said his wife, patting him playfully on the back, “and things look different.” The whistle sounded again, and the “Maid of Erin” whipped round the curve at Hagler’s tank. There was a steady pull against the grade for a few moments, and then the President felt the train falling into the broad bottoms and saw the bluffs lift in their wake. He turned, and stole a look at the handsome woman who had left a luxurious home on the Atlantic to follow him into the West. He began now to appreciate his prize, and his other successes grew insignificant and mean, like the bridge, and the pond, and the mill-site. Feeling his glance, she turned her smiling face to him, bright and beautiful as the breaking morn, and he thought then that he had tasted what men call happiness. With a rush and a roar, they swept up the incline, and McGuire, glancing up and down the river, said, as a man might say in a dream: “We’re crossing the big bridge on the White Mail.” TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: Minor silent changes have been made to regularize hyphenation and punctuation. Dialect, slang and archaic spellings have been retained as typeset.