out the living, leaving the dead where they were for a time, and I had crawled under the wreck of the sleeper.  I was sure that I had heard a cry, and crawled in among the debris, shoving a lantern ahead of me.  About where Berth Number Ten should have been, the timbers had telescoped upward, leaving an open space four or five feet high.  I was on my hands and knees, bareheaded, and my lantern lighted up things as plain as day.  At first I saw nothing, and was listening again for the cry when I felt something soft and light sweeping down over me, and I looked up.  Heavens—­”

Billinger was mopping his face again, leaving streaks of char-black where the perspiration had started.

“Pinned up there in the mass of twisted steel and broken wood was a woman,” he went on.  “She was the most beautiful thing I have ever looked upon.  Her arms were reaching down to me; her face was turned a little to one side, but still looking at me—­and all but her face and part of her arms was smothered in a mass of red-gold hair that fell down to my shoulders.  I could have sworn that she was alive.  Her lips were red, and I thought for a moment that she was going to speak to me.  I could have sworn, too, that there was color in her face, but it must have been something in the lantern light and the red-gold of her hair, for when I spoke, and then reached up, she was cold.”

Billinger shivered and urged his horse into a faster gait.

“I went out and helped with the injured then.  I guess it must have been two hours later when I returned to take out her body.  But the place where I had seen her was empty.  She was gone.  At first I thought that some of the others had carried her out, and I looked among the dead and injured.  She was not among them.  I searched again when day came, with the same result.  No one has seen her.  She has completely disappeared—­and with the exception of my shanty there isn’t a house within ten miles of here where she could have been taken.  What do you make of it, Steele?”

Philip had listened with tense interest.

“Perhaps you didn’t return to the right place,” he suggested.  “Her body may still be in the wreck.”

Billinger glanced toward him with a nervous laugh.

“But it was the right place,” he said.  “She had evidently not gone to bed, and was dressed.  When I returned I found a part of her skirt in the debris above.  A heavy tress of her hair had caught around a steel ribbing, and it was cut off!  Some one had been there during my absence and had taken the body.  I—­I’m almost ready to believe that I was mistaken, and that she was alive.  I found nothing there, nothing—­that could prove her death.”

“Is it possible—­” began Philip, holding out the handkerchief.

It was not necessary for him to finish.  Billinger understood, and nodded his head.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” he said.  “Is it possible?  What in God’s name would they want of her, unless—­”