When the goal is in sight, do we dwell on the hazard, the strained muscles, the blistered feet, and the fierce thirst the long race-course cost us?  Who know that they are weary and spent, while the prize brightens, nears as they stretch panting to grasp it?

The certainty of meeting her brother, the anticipation of all that she felt assured he would promise concerning his future, when he learned the severity of the ordeal which she had endured in his behalf, blotted out the costliness of the accomplishment.  Like that glorious violet haze of Indian Summer, which was drawing its opalescent drapery along the vanishing iron railway track blackened with cinders, and softly shrouding the grim outlines of wreck, that told where a vessel had foundered on the lake in the early autumn gale, an overruling Providence seemed shedding peace even upon her troubled past.  In the swift flash of the divine fire that sanctified the accepted sacrifice, she was too dazzled to remember the moan of the slaughtered victim, the agony of the death struggle; and now, her thoughts spanned the gulf of time, and painted the eternal reunion of the broken and dishonored family group.

From these comforting reflections she was aroused by a piercing cry that made her spring forward, and scan the crowd of human faces collected close to the rails, at a small town where the cars had halted.

On a side track in front of her window, was a train which had just dashed in from Buffalo, and amid the surging mass of jeering spectators, two officers stepped down from the platform, each with a hand on the arm of a man, who was heavily handcuffed.  At the sight, a white-haired, withered woman leaning from a carriage and staring with horror-haunted eyes, had screamed, and was falling back insensible.

“That is his mother.  Poor thing, why did they let her come?  He is her only boy,” said a man to his comrade, who stood near Beryl’s seat.

“What is the matter?” asked a gentleman, sitting immediately in front of her.

“Two of our officers winged a bird, who thought it was safe flying over yonder, with the lake between him and the county jail.  Canada is handy hunting-ground, when the game happens to be runaway thieves; and we have bagged one.  He was the cashier of our Savings Bank, and not satisfied with tampering with the books, and forcing balances, he finally robbed the vault of a lot of gold, and flew across the line.  His wife met him at St. Catherine’s, and he met the iron bracelets he was dodging.”

The train moved on, and once more Beryl heard the howling of the wolves, that she had hoped were left forever behind; that now seemed in full cry bearing down upon their prey.  Should she return to the “Anchorage”, and advertise Bertie’s danger?  So vague were her ideas relative to the limits of extradition, that she had regarded Canada as a city of refuge; considered its protection of United States’ criminal fugitives as efficacious, as meeting a Vestal Priestess on the way to his execution, proved in rescuing a Roman malefactor from the penalty of violated law; but this shred of comfort had parted, when most she required its aid.