2

The accommodation train made innumerable stops. It stopped at “South Upton.” It puffed into motion and paused at “East Upton.” A little later it drew up grandly at “Upton.” Then it passed through “North Upton.”

The comfortable-looking man opposite Cunningham looked across and smiled.

“Now, if we stop at West Upton,” he suggested, “we can go on to a new name.”

Cunningham nodded and on impulse pulled the Geographic Magazine out of his pocket and held it up.

“Same trail?” he asked.

The other man frowned and looked keenly at him. Then his face relaxed.

“I belong to the lodge,” he admitted. “Here’s my copy.”

Cunningham jerked his head at the third man.

“He had one too. He just tore it up. It seemed to make him mad.”

“That so?” The other looked steadily back at the foreign-seeming man, who was staring out of the window with his face pale with fury. “Let’s ask him.”

He caught the foreigner’s eye an instant later and held up the magazine, opened at the article on the Strange People.

“How about it? You going there too?” he asked pleasantly.

The foreigner went purple with fury.

“No!” he gasped, half-strangled with his own wrath. “I do not know what you are talking about!”

He jerked himself around in his seat until they could see only his profile. But they could see his lips moving as if he were muttering savagely to himself.

“My name’s Cunningham,” said Cunningham. “I want to see those people. They sound sort of interesting.”

“And my name’s Gray,” said the other, shifting to a seat beside Cunningham. “I’m interested, too. I want to hear them talk. Dialect, you know. It’s my hobby.”

“But they’re supposed to talk perfectly good English——” began Cunningham, when he stopped short.

The train had halted leisurely at a tiny station and the conductor was gossiping with an ancient worthy on the station platform. A single passenger had boarded the coach and entered the door. He looked unmistakably unlike the other natives in the car, though he was dressed precisely in the fashion of the average New Englander. But as he came into full view at the end of the aisle he caught sight of the foreign passenger Cunningham had puzzled over.

The newcomer turned a sickly gray in color. He gave a gasp, and then a yell of fear. He turned and bolted from the train, while the foreign passenger started from his seat and with the expression of a devil raced after him. The newcomer darted into a clump of trees and brushwood and vanished. The well-dressed passenger stood quivering on the platform of the day-coach. The conductor gaped at him. The other passengers stared.

Then the well-dressed man came quietly back inside and to his seat. Veins were standing out on his forehead from fury and his hands were shaking with rage. He sat down and stared woodenly out of the window, holding himself still by a terrific effort of will.

Gray glanced sidewise at Cunningham.

“It looks,” he observed in a low tone, “as if our trail will have some interesting developments. That man who just ran away was one of the Strange People. He looks like the pictures of them. It ought to be lively up in the hills when our friend yonder arrives. Eh?”

“I—I’ll say so,” said Cunningham joyously.

He talked jerkily with Gray as the train finished its journey. Without really realizing it, he told Gray nearly everything connected with his journey and his quest. Cunningham was busily weaving wild theories to account for the scene when the first of the Strange People appeared before the third passenger. Otherwise he might have recognized the fact that Gray was very cleverly pumping him of everything he knew. But that did not occur to him until later.

Gray looked more at ease when the train reached Bendale and he and Cunningham sought a hotel together. They saw the third man sending a telegram and, again, arranging for a horse and buggy at a livery stable. He ignored them, but his lips were pressed together in thin, cruel lines.

Cunningham was very well satisfied as he arranged for his room and for a team to take him to Coulters the next day. Ostensibly he was going to try for some fishing, though nothing larger than minnows would be found in that section. But Cunningham considered that the route to romance and adventure was beginning to offer promise.

Still, next morning both he and Gray were startled when the hotel-keeper came to them agitatedly.

“There was three strangers on the train yesterday, wa’n’t there?” he asked in a high-pitched voice that trembled with excitement.

“Yes,” said Cunningham. “Why?”

“D’ye know the other man?” asked the hotelkeeper excitedly. “Know who he was or anything?”

“No, not at all,” Cunningham answered alertly, while Gray listened.

“Would ye recognize him if ye saw him?” quavered the hotel-keeper.

“Of course,” said Cunningham. “Why? What’s the matter?”

Gray had struck a match to light a cigar, but it burned his fingers as he listened.

“He rented a horse an’ buggy last night,” quavered the native. “He drove off to Coulters way, he said. An’ this mornin’ the horse came back with him in the buggy, but he was dead.”

“Dead!” Cunningham jumped and found himself growing a trifle pale.

“Yes, dead, that’s what he is!” said the innkeeper shrilly. “Them Strange People done it! Because it looks like he was beat to death with clubs an’ maybe fifty men was on the job!”