It was dark when Anderson reached Laggan, if that can be called darkness which was rather a starry twilight, interfused with the whiteness of snow-field and glacier.

He first of all despatched a message to Banff for Elizabeth's commissions.

Then he made straight for the ugly frame house of which Delaine had given him the address.

It was kept by a couple well known to him, an Irishman and his wife who made their living partly by odd jobs on the railway, partly by lodging men in search of work in the various construction camps of the line.

To all such persons Anderson was a familiar figure, especially since the great strike of the year before.
The house stood by itself in a plot of cleared ground, some two or three hundred yards from the railway station.