Rl ee —————— LLM». HR ph pm ET —— PRIA, : imagined, unnerved Eaton. He “Because vor weie in such a situa- | as he realized this. his mind was | feigned recognition as he gave him started up. then eonk hack for her. | tion that, if Mr. Warden defended | full of what he Lad to do in San- | his name in return. SYNOPSIS CHAPTER 1.—Gabriel Warden, Seattle capitalist, tells his butler he is expecting a caller, to be admitted without question. He informs his wife of danger that threatens him if he pursues a course he considers the only honorable one. War- den leaves the house in his car and meets man whom he takes into the machine. en the car returns home, Warden is found dead, murdered, and alone. The caller, a young man, has been at War- den’s house, but leaves unobserved. CHAPTER I11.—Bob Connery, conductor, receives orders to hold train for a party. Five men and a girl board the train The father of the girl, Mr. Dorne, is the Poison for whom the train was held hilip D. Eaton, a young man, also boarded the train. Dorne tells his daugh- ter and his secretary, Don Avery, to find out what they can concerning him. CHAPTER III.—The two make Eaton's acquaintance. The train is stopped by snowdrifts. CHAPTER IV.—Eaton receives a tele- gram addressed to Lawrence Hillwara, which he claims. It warns him he is being followed. CHAPTER V.—Passing through the car, Connery notices Dorne’s hand hanging outside the berth. He ascertains Dorne’s has recently rung. Perturbed, he investigates and finds Dorne with his skull crushed. He calls a surgeon, Dr. Sinclair, on the train, CHAPTER VI.—Sinclair recognizes the injured man as Basil Santoine, who, al- though blind, is a peculiar power in the financial world as adviser to ‘big inter ests.” His recovery is a matter of doubt CHAPTER VIIL.—Eaton is practically placed under arrest. He refuses to make explanations as to his previous move- ments before boarding the train, but its he was the man who called on arden the night the financier was mur ed. CHAPTER IX.—Eaton riet Santoine to withhold judgment, tell- ing her he is in serious danger, though johocent of the crime against her father feels the girl believes him, (Continued from last week), Her color deepened, and for an in- stant, he thought he saw full belief in him growing in her eyes; but if she could not accept the charge against him, neither could she consciously deny it, and the hands she had been pressing together suddenly dropped. “I—I'm afraid nothing I could say would have much effect on them, knowing as little about—about you as I do!” They dashed the door open then— silenced and overwhelmed him; and leads with Har- They Dashed the Door Open, Then— they took her from the room and left him alone again. But there was something left with him which they could not take away; for in the moment he had stood alone with her and passionately pleading, something had passed between them—he could give no name to it, but he knew that Harriet Santoine never could think of him again without a stirring of her pulses which drew her toward him. The following morning the relieving snowplows arrived from the Fast, and Eaton felt it was the beginning of the end for him. He watched from his window men struggling in the snow about the forward end of the train; then the train moved fwrward past the shoveled and trampled snow where rock and pieces of the snowplow were piled beside the track—stopped, waited; finally it went on again and began to take up its steady progress. The attack upon Santoine having taken place in Montana, Eaton thought that he would be turned over to the police somewhere within that state, and he expected it would be done at the first stop; but when the train slowed at Simons, he saw the town was nothing ore than a little hamlet beside a side-track. They surely could not deliver him to the village authorities here. It made no material difference to him, Eaton realized, whether the pu Uece took him in Mentana or Chi- cago, since In either case recogni. tion of him would be certain in the end; but in Chicago this recognition must be immediate, complete, and ut- terly convincing, The train was traveling steadily and taster than its regular schedule; fit evidently was running as a special, © DLIND MANS EYES BY WILLIAM MACHARGEDWIN BALMER. Mustrations by R.H.Livingstone COPYRIGHT BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. ec eome other train taking the ordinary traffic; it halted now only at the largest cities. In the morning it crossed inte Minnesota; and in the late afternoon, slowing, it rolled into some large city which Eaton knew must be Minneapolis or St. Paul. The car here was uncoupled from the train #nd picked up by a switch engine; as dusk fell, Eaton, peering out of his window, could see that they had been left lying in the railroad yards; and about midnight, awakening in his berth, he realized that the car was still motionless. He could account for this stoppage in their progress only by some change in the condition of Santoine. Was Santoine sinking, so that they no longer dared to travel? Was he, perhans—dead? No sounds came to him from the car to confirm Eaton in any con- clusion; there was nothing to be learned from anyone outside the car. Eaton lay for a long time, listening for other sounds and wondering what was occurring—or had occurred—at the other end of his car. Toward morning he fell asleep. CHAPTER X Publicity Not Wanted. “Basil Santoine dying! Blind mil- lionaire lawyer taken ill on train!” The alarm of the cry came to answer Llaton's question early the next morning He threw up the curtain and saw a vagrant newsboy, evidently passing through the railroad yards to sell to the trainmen. Eaton, hail- ing the boy put out his hand for a paper. He spread the news-sheet be fore him and read that Santoine’s con- dition was very low and becoming rapidly worse. But below, under a Montana date-line, Eaton saw it pro- claimed that the blind millionaire was merely sick; there was no suggestion anywhere of an attack. stated only that Basil Santoine, re- turning from Seattle with his daugh- ter and his secretary, Donald Avery, had been taken seriously ill upon a | days in the snow in Montana. The column ended with the statement that Mr. Santoine had passed through Minneapolis and gone on to Chicago under care of Dr. Douglas Sinclair. Eaton stared at the newspaper with- out reading, after he saw that. He had not realized, until now that he was told that Harriet Santoine had | gone—for if her father had gone on. of course she was with him—the ex- tent to which he had felt her fair- ness, almost her friendship to him. At least, he knew now that, since she had spoken to him after he was first ac- cused of the attack on her father, he had not felt entirely deserted or friendless till now. But why, if Santoine had been taken away, or was dead or dying, had they left Eaton all night in the car in the yards? Since Santoine was dying, would there be any longer an object in concealing the fact that he had been murdered? He dressed and then paced back and forth the two or three steps his compartment allowed him, He stopped now and then to listen; from outside came the noises of the yard; but he made out no sound within the car. If it had been occupied as on ‘he days previous, he must have heard some one coming to the washroom at his end. Was he alone in the car now, or had the customary moving about taken place before he awoke? Finally, to free himself from his nervous listening for sounds which never came, he picked up the paper again. He read: “The news of Mr. Santoine’s visit of a week on: the Coast, if not known already in great financial circles, is likely to prove interesting therc. For years he has been the chief agent in keeping peace among some of the great conflicting interests, and more than once he has advised the declar- ing of financial war when war seemed to him the correct solution. Thus, five years ago, when the violent death of Matthew Latron threatened to pre- cipitate trouble among western capitalists, Santoine kept awder in what might very well become financial chays. If his recent visit to the Pacific coast was not purely for personal reasons but was also to adjust antagonisms such as charged by Gabriel Warden before his death, the loss of Santoine at this time may orecipitate troubles which, living, his advice and information might have been ahle to prevent.” Having read and reread this long paragraph, Eaton thrust the sheet out the window. As he sat think- ing, with lips tight closed, he heard for the first time that morning foot-