CHAPTER II

A RAILROAD ACCIDENT AND WHAT CAME OF IT

SUBDUED light reigned in the hospital ward.

The two rows of white beds could be but dimly discerned amid the shadows, while in the centre of the room at a table the figure of a whiteclad nurse was clearly seen in the glow of a shaded electric light. She was writing, but her busy pen did not keep her mind preoccupied and at the slightest sound she would glance up quickly, noticing the movement of any patient in the long line of sleepers. When she did so, the light that had shone only on spotless cap and apron, caught the outline of her face and shone in the warm tints of her hair, making a pretty picture of this graceful and womanly figure.

Muriel Morris, head nurse of Ward 7, was not the care-free, lovely girl whom we found listening to the lark songs on the wind-blown cliffs of a far English village. The strong, supple figure was the same, but with perhaps an added touch of conscious

strength. The hair, where it escaped from the white cap, showed as much desire to curl and even in this light revealed its Rembrandt tints, but the face was changed, so changed, in its lines and expressions that one who had known her five years before would have asked whether this were not an elder sister by whom the stronger traits of some old ancestor had been inherited. The mouth was firm almost to sternness when the features were in repose; the eyes that seemed larger, perhaps, because the face was thinner than of yore, were very steady and intense in their concentration. It was only as she smiled that one could catch a hint of the old merry twinkle that had been so characteristic of the joyous girl, whose pet name had so well described her. Now one would hardly dream of shortening her name to the playful diminution.

She was listening, her pen poised, her letter forgotten. A patient had roused from a state of coma and was muttering incoherently while she could see his hand weakly groping along the white bedspread as if to find something he knew not what, a hold, perhaps, on the tangible world from which he seemed to be slipping.

Laying aside her papers, Muriel crossed over and seated herself at the bedside. She knew that the

case was a well-nigh hopeless one. The poor broken body that lay there bound and bandaged, was not only helpless to move but so many bones were shattered that one could hardly wish for life to remain. To live would mean for him to be chained to a cripple's existence. The man had been brought in by the ambulance the day before. They had hardly expected him to last the night out. Not far from the hospital a freight train had been wrecked. The fireman and engineer, pinned beneath the locomotive, had been past aid when the doctors arrived, but this poor fellow had been found in the wreckage of one of the cars in which he had been stealing a ride. All that could be done for him had been done in the operating room, and if it had been impossible to save life they had at least given him relief from pain.

Now as the nurse's trained fingers felt for the pulse and her eye noted the respiration, she was surprised to see a marked return of strength. To withstand such injury, the man must have been of sturdy constitution, and there was a chance that the quickening of the vital flame might bring a full return of consciousness. Muriel hoped and prayed it might be so. To her it proved a never ending tragedy, that passing of unknown, unclaimed patients to a grave marked merely by a

number. If the accident victim only regained consciousness, some clue to his or her identity could be gained, and one of Muriel's special interests had been the piecing together of scraps of information and the finding of friends who could come to the bedside or at least claim the poor still body after the soul had fled.

In this case there had been no mark, no letter, nothing that could give them the man's identity, but his worn shoes and tattered clothing, added to the manner of travel he had adopted, marked him very clearly as a tramp, and many would have thought Muriel's desire to bring him to consciousness hardly worth while.

Even a tramp may have a home and a mother somewhere, far away, in a world very different from the freight car or the roadside, and it was this thought that constantly haunted her and made her long in this case, as in others, to probe into the clouded, wandering mind for some gleam of light on his life's mystery. So, while her other charges slept, she worked earnestly to restore and strengthen one who seemed so hopeless and worthless.

As the hours passed, she was cheered by a marked improvement, and by-and-bye, as dawn was lighting the windows and the sound of the

waking city came to her from the streets, the man struggled fully back from incoherent wanderings and fixed seeing eyes upon her face.

"Where am I?" he asked.

"In a hospital bed after a railroad accident, she answered. "Who are you and where do your people live?"

He was silent a moment. Then a smile twisted his scarred face and he answered, "I am the Dook of Monrose and I live on Fifth Avenoo." She knew enough of his tribe to take this joke and to press her question with some seriousness while smiling with him at his attempt at the jocular.

"No, Miss," he said at last, "I have no mother. She's dead and gone years ago and thank God for that! And as to my name, well that's dead and buried too. I am only a number and that would not be worth telling you, though I thank you kindly for your interest.'

When the day nurses came to relieve Muriel, her tramp was asleep and she had to leave his possible awakening to them.

Going on duty again that night, she learned that all through the day he had dozed fitfully, waking from time to time only to groan and mutter. In the early watch of the night consciousness returned and he rallied perceptibly, talking to her quite