When I came to life out of what seemed like an endless succession of bad dreams it was broad daylight and the sun was shining brightly through some filmy kind of curtain stuff in a big window that looked out toward the west. I was in bed, the room was strange, and my right hand was wrapped up in a lot of cotton and bandaged.

I hadn't more than made the first restless move before I saw a sort of pie-faced woman in a nurse's cap and apron start to get up from where she was sitting by the window. Before she could come over to the bed, somebody opened a door and tip-toed in ahead of nursey. I had to blink hard two or three times before I could really make up my mind that the tip-toer was Maisie Ann. She looked as if she might be the nurse's understudy. She had a nifty little lace cap on her thick mop of hair, and I guess her apron was meant to be nursey too, only it was frilled and tucked to a fare-you-well.

I don't know whether or not I've mentioned it before, but she was always an awfully wholesome, jolly little girl, with a laugh so near the surface that it never took much of anything to make it come rippling up through. But now she was as sober as a deacon—and about fourteen times as pretty as I had ever seen her before.

"You poor, poor boy!" she cooed, patting my pillow just like my grandmother used to when I was a little kid and had the mumps or the measles. "Are you still roaming around in the Oregon woods?"

That brought my dream, or one of them, back; the one about wandering around in a forest of Douglas fir and having to jump and dodge to keep the big trees from falling on me and smashing me.

"No more woods for mine," I said, sort of feebly. And then: "Where am I?"

"You are in bed in the spare room at Cousin Basil's. They wanted to take you to the railroad hospital that night, but when they telephoned up here to try to find Mr. Norcross, Cousin Basil went right down and brought you home with him in the ambulance."

"'That night,' you say?" I parroted. "It was last night that the door fell on me, wasn't it?"

"I don't know anything about a door, but the night that they found you all burnt and crippled, lying at the foot of your office stairs, was three days ago. You have been out of your head nearly all the time ever since."

"Burnt and crippled? What happened to me, Maisie Ann?"

"Nobody knows; not even the doctors. We've been hoping that some day you'd be able to tell us. Can't you tell me now, Jimmie?"

I told her all there was to tell, mumbling around among the words the best I could. When she saw how hard it was for me to talk, I could have sworn that I saw tears in the big, wide-open eyes, but maybe I didn't.

Then she told me how the headquarters watchman had found me about midnight; with my right hand scorched black and the rest of me apparently dead and ready to be buried. The ambulance surgeon had insisted, and was still insisting, that I had been handling a live wire; but there were no wires at all in the lower hall, and nothing stronger than an incandescent light current in the entire office building.

"And you say I've been here hanging on by my eyelashes for three days? What has been going on in all that time, Maisie Ann? Hasn't anybody been here to see me?"

She gave a little nod. "Everybody, nearly. Mr. Van Britt has been up every day, and sometimes twice a day. He has been awfully anxious for you to come alive."

"But Mr. Norcross?" I queried. "Hasn't he been up?"

She shook her head and turned her face away, and she was looking straight out of the window at the setting sun when she asked, "When was the last time you saw Mr. Norcross, Jimmie?"

I choked a little over a big scare that seemed to rush up out of the bed-clothes to smother me. But I made out to answer her question, telling her how Mr. Norcross had left the office maybe half an hour or so before I did, that night, going up-town with Mr. Ripley. Then I asked her why she wanted to know.

"Because nobody has seen him since a little later that same night," she said, saying it very softly and without turning her head. And then: "Mr. Van Britt found a letter from Mr. Norcross on his desk the next morning. It was just a little typewritten note, on a Hotel Bullard letter sheet, saying that he had made up his mind that the Pioneer Short Line wasn't worth fighting for, and that he was resigning and taking the midnight train for the East."

I sat straight up in bed; I should have had to do it if both arms had been burnt to a crisp clear to the shoulders.

"Resigned?—gave up and ran away? I don't believe that for a single minute, Maisie Ann!" I burst out.

She was shaking her head again, still without turning her face so that I could see it.

"I—I'm afraid it's all true, Jimmie. There were two telegrams that came to Mr. Norcross the night he went away; one from Mr. Chadwick and the other from Mr. Dunton. I heard Mr. Van Britt telling Cousin Sheila what the messages were. He'd seen the copies of them that they keep in the telegraph office."

It was on my tongue's end to say that Mr. Norcross never had seen those two telegrams, because I had them in my pocket and was on my way to deliver them when I got shot; but I didn't. Instead, I said: "And you think that was why Mr. Norcross threw up his hands and ran away?"

"No; I don't think anything of the sort. I know what it was, and you know what it was," and at that she turned around and pushed me gently down among the pillows.

"What was it?" I whispered, more than half afraid that I was going to hear a confirmation of my own breath-taking conviction. And I heard it, all right.

"It was what I was telling you about, that same evening, you remember—down in the hall when you brought the flowers for Cousin Sheila? You told him what I told you, didn't you?"

"No; I didn't have a chance—not any real chance."

"Then somebody else told him, Jimmie; and that is the reason he has resigned and gone away. Mr. Van Britt thinks it was on account of the two messages from Mr. Chadwick and Mr. Dunton, and that is why he wants to talk to you about it. But you know, and I know, Jimmie, dear; and for Cousin Sheila's sake and Mr. Norcross's, we must never lisp it to a human soul. A new general manager has been appointed, and he is on his way out here from New York. Everything has gone to pieces on the railroad, and all of Mr. Norcross's friends are getting ready to resign. Isn't it perfectly heart-breaking?"

It was; it was so heart-breaking that I just gasped once or twice and went off the hooks again, with Maisie Ann's frightened little shriek ringing in my ears as she tried to hold me back from slipping over the edge.