At the railroad station they met friends, but satisfied them with a word about the charm of the country in the winter. The train ploughed bravely through snow that made a white tunnel of the whole distance. The black smoke writhing in the vortex of writhing white seemed to RoBards to express something of his own thoughts. Travelers by rail usually expected death. Not long since, a train on the Baltimore and Ohio had turned four somersaults in a hundred-foot fall with frightful loss of life, and at Norwalk, Connecticut, a while ago, forty-four people had been slaughtered and a hundred and thirty mangled. But RoBards felt that such a solution of his own riddles would be almost welcome. Suddenly Patty leaned close to him and brought him down to realities. She muttered: “You must get the Albesons off the farm, somehow.” “How?” “I don’t know. You’re a lawyer. Think up something. They must not stay there. They must not suspect. They know too much as it is.” “All right,” he sighed. He realized the shrewdness of her wisdom, but the problem she posed dazed him. The rest of the way he beat his thought on an anvil, turning and twisting it and hammering till his brain seemed to turn red in his skull. What simpler thing than to ask them to leave his farm? But they were such simple souls that they would be as hard to manage as sheep. And they must be sent away for a long time. He and Patty and Immy must manage without a servant. But no sacrifice was too great. The train ran all the way to Kensico now. Here they encountered trouble in finding someone to drive them over the unbroken roads, but at length they bribed a man to undertake the voyage. The horses picked their way with insect-like motions, and went so slowly that the bells snapped and clinked instead of jingling. The runners of the sleigh mumbled and left long grooves in the white. The rain of flakes upon the eyelids had the effect of a spell; it was like this new thing everybody was talking about, “hypnotism,” a mere disguise for the worn-out fraud of mesmerism. Surging along in a state betwixt sleep and waking, RoBards’ mind fell into a sing-song of babble. Every man has in him at least one poem and RoBards, like most of his profession, had a love of exalted words. He lacked the magniloquence of Webster (whose recent death had swathed most of New York’s buildings in black); but he could not resist even in a foreclosure proceeding or the most sordid criminal case an occasional flight into the realm betwixt prose and poesy. And now he lulled himself with an inchoate apostrophe to the snow: