There was a considerable delay before the carriage could leave the hotel, and he was glad of the hot coffee which the maids prepared for him. Early as it was, the great road to the pass now became alive with peasants coming down into Italy or returning to the Valley of the Rhone. These seldom travel by the train, and for them the Hospice upon the summit of the pass is kept open during the winter months. Benny watched them as they tramped stolidly through the darkness, their eyes set upon a visionary city, and their faces pinched with the cold. When he spoke to one of them at the door of the inn yard, an old man whose sister was ill at Baveno, the veteran told him that there had been a dreadful storm on the heights last night, and that a bruit of accidents was abroad. He also spoke of the railway, and of the mishap above Brigue; but that, he said, had now been put right, and the trains were running as usual. When he left, with a five-franc piece for his gratuity, he confessed that it was seldom an Englishman was met upon the pass nowadays—bad luck to all this craze for railway travelling which robbed so many of their dues. Benny was pleased at the news about the trains, for it fitted in very well with the idea which had come to him at the shanty, and had not been abandoned during the journey. He perceived that all now depended upon what the gendarme Philip had done—whether the lad had attempted to reach Italy by the pass, or had waited for the line to Milan to be reopened. In the former case, nothing could save Luton Delayne from arrest—or worse. In the latter, it might very well be that the baronet would reach Sierre, and, having met his wife, would be persuaded to take the express to Paris. Should that be done, his escape was almost assured, for the heat of the hue and cry had subsided by this time, and but for Philip Gaillarde might have been forgotten altogether. The gendarme, truly, was the key to the whole situation, and Benny was almost tempted to ring up the abbé at the Hospice and ask if he had news of him. This, however, would have been a concession to mere curiosity, and, set upon his purpose of overtaking the baronet if he could, he entered his carriage about four o’clock and departed immediately for Brigue. Many know the Simplon Pass by name, but to few of this generation is it more than a name. Sometimes, in the history lesson, the boy learns that the great road was built at Napoleon’s command immediately after the battle of Marengo, and that it took no fewer than six years to construct. By here and there in an old painting there are pictures of the Ponto Alto, or, more commonly, of the Gallery of Gondo, with its wondrous black-mouthed tunnel and arched bridge, and mighty ramparts uplifted, as it were, to the very heavens. But these things are but traditions to the flitting tourist, who climbs mountains in a railway carriage and would have his waterfalls illuminated.