Read Ebook: At Close Range by Smith Francis Hopkinson

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Ebook has 972 lines and 45677 words, and 20 pages

"Corker, isn't it?" I answered. "Draw up a chair and make yourself comfortable."

"I am. Here, take a nip of this," and I handed him the other goblet and pushed the P. S. his way. Corrupting the Force, I know, but then consider the temptation, and the fact that I was stranded on a lone isle of the sea, or adrift on a detached ice floe , and he the only other human being within reach.

He raised the flask to his eye, noted the flow line, poured out three fingers, added one finger of water, said "How!" and emptied the mixture into his person. Then I handed him a cigar, laid aside my proofs and began to talk. I not only had a fire and a pile of wood, with something to smoke and enough P. S. for two, but I had a friend to enjoy them with me. Marvellous place--this Battle Creek!

"Anything doing?" I asked after the storm and the night had been discussed and my lighted match had kindled his cigar.

"Only a couple o' drunks lyin' outside a j'int," he answered, stretching his full length in the chair.

"Did you run 'em in?"

"No, the station was some ways, so I tuk 'em inside. I know the feller that runs the j'int an' the back dure was open--" and he winked at me. "They'd froze if I'd left 'em in the drift. Wan had the ears of him purty blue as it wuz."

"Anything else?"

"Well, there was a woman hollerin' bloody murther back o' the lumber yard, but I didn't stop to luk her up. They're allus raisin' a muss up there--it was in thim tiniments. Ye know the place." "Guess I'll be joggin' 'long" , "my beat's both sides of the depot an' I daren't stop long. Good luck to ye."

"Will you drop in again?"

"Yes, maybe I will," and he opened the door and stepped out, his hand on his cap as the wind struck it.

Half an hour passed.

Then the cough of a distant locomotive, catching its breath in the teeth of the gale, followed by the rumbling of a heavily loaded train, growing louder as it approached, could be heard above the wail of the storm.

When it arrived off my window I rose from my seat and looked out through the blurred glass. The breast of the locomotive was a bank of snow, the fronts and sides of the cars were plastered with the drift. The engineer's head hung out of the cab window, his eye on the swinging signal lights. Huddling close under the lee of the last box car I caught the outline of a brakeman, his cap pulled over his ears, his jacket buttoned tight. The train passed without stopping, the cough of the engine growing fainter and fainter as it was lost in the whirl of the gale. I regained my seat, lighted another cigar and picked up my proofs again.

Another half hour passed. The world began to awake.

First came the clerk with a cheery nod; then the man who had brought in the wood and who walked straight toward the pile to see how much of it was left and whether I needed any more; then the lone passenger who had gone to the hotel and who was filled to the bursting point with profanity, and who emitted it in blue streaks of swear-words because of his accommodations; and last the policeman, beating his chest like a gorilla, the snow flying in every direction.

The circle widened and another log was thrown on the crackling fire. More easy chairs were drawn up, the policeman in one and the clerk in another. Then the same old pantomime took place over the P. S. and the goblets, and the old collar-box had its lid lifted and did its duty bravely. The lone passenger, being ill-tempered and out of harmony with the surroundings, was not invited.

At 3.30 the clerk sprang from his chair. He had, with his quick ear, caught the long-drawn-out shriek of No. 8 above the thrash of the storm.

Into my overcoat again, in a hurry this time--everybody helping--the fur one, of course, the other on my arm--a handshake all round, out again into the whirl, the policeman carrying the grip; up a slant of snow on the steps of the cars--not a traveller's foot had yet touched it, and into an ordinary passenger coach: all in less than two minutes--less time, in fact, than it would take to shift the scenery in a melodrama, and with as startling results.

No sleeping corpses here sprawled over seats, with arms and legs thrust up; no mothers watched their children; no half-frozen travellers shivered beside ice-cold heaters. The car was warm, the lights burned cheerily, the seats were unlocked and faced both ways.

Not many passengers either--only six besides myself at my end. Three of them were wearing picture hats the size of tea-trays, short skirts, and high shoes with red heels. The other three wore Derbies and the unmistakable garb of the average drummer. Each couple had a double seat all to themselves, and all six were shouting with laughter. Packed in the other end of the car were the usual collection of travellers seen on an owl train.

I passed on toward the middle of the coach, turned a seat, and proceeded to camp for the night. The overcoat did service now as a seat cushion and the grip as a rest for my elbow.

It soon became evident that the girls belonged to a troupe on their way to Detroit; that they had danced in Kalamazoo but a few hours before, had supped with the drummers, and had boarded the train at 2.50. As their conversation was addressed to the circumambient air, there was no difficulty in my gaining these facts. If my grave and reverend presence acted as a damper on their hilarity, there was no evidence of it in their manner.

"Say, Liz," cried the girl in the pink waist, "did you catch on to the--" Here her head was tucked under the chin of the girl behind her.

"Oh, cut it out, Mame!" answered Liz. "Now, George, you stop!" This with a scream at one of the drummers, whose head had been thrust close to Mame's ear in an attempt to listen.

"Say, girls," broke in another--they were all talking at once--"why, them fellers in the front seat went on awful! I seen Sanders lookin' and--"

I began to realize now why the other passengers were packed together in the far end of the car. I broke camp and moved down their way.

The train sped on. I busied myself studying the loops and curls of snow that the eddying wind was piling up in the cuts and opens, as they lay glistening under the glow of the lights streaming through the car windows; noting, too, here and there, a fence post standing alone where some curious wind-fluke had scooped clear the drifts.

Soon I began to speculate on the outcome of the trip. I had at best only three hours leeway between 11.30 A.M., the schedule time of arriving in Cleveland, and 2.30 P.M., the hour of my lecture--not much in a storm like this, with every train delayed and the outlook worse every hour.

At Albion the drummers got out, the girls waving their hands at them through the frosted windows. When the jolly party of coryph?es regained their seats, their regulation smiles, much to my surprise, had faded. Five minutes later, when I craned my neck to look at them, wondering why their boisterousness had ceased, the three had wrapped themselves up in their night cloaks and were fast asleep. The drummers, no doubt, forgot them as quickly.

The conductor now came along and shook a sleepy man on the seat behind me into consciousness. He had a small leather case with him and looked like a doctor--was, probably; picked up above Battle Creek, no doubt, by a hurry call. He had been catching a nap while he could. Jackson was ten minutes away, so the conductor told the man.

More stumbling down the snow-choked steps and plunging through drifts , and I entered the depot at Jackson--my second stop on the way to Cleveland.

And yet I was not unhappy. I had only an hour to wait--perhaps two--depending on the way the tracks were blocked.

I unlocked the grip. There was nothing left of the P. S.--the policeman had seen to that; and the collar-box was empty--the clerk had had a hand in that--two, if I remember. The proofs were finished and ready to mail, and so I buttoned up my fur coat and went out into the night again in search of the post-box, tramping the platform where the wind had swept it clean. The crisp air and the sting of the snow-flakes felt good to me.

Soon my eye fell on a lump tied up with rope and half-buried in the snow. The up-train from Detroit had thrown out a bundle of the morning edition of the Detroit papers. I lugged it inside the station, brushed off the snow, dragged it to a seat beneath a flaring gas jet, cut the rope with my knife and took out two copies damp with snow. I was in touch with the world once more, whatever happened! I soon forgot the hardness of the seat and only became conscious that someone had entered the room when a voice startled me with:

"Say, Boss!"

I looked up over my paper and saw a boy with his head tied up in an old-fashioned tippet. He was blowing his breath on his fingers, his cheeks like two red apples.

"Well, what is it?"

"How many poipers did ye swipe?"

"Oh, are you the newsboy? Do these belong to you?"

"You bet! How many ye got?"

"Two."

"Ten cents, Boss. Thank ye," and he shouldered the bundle and went out into the night, where a wagon was standing to receive it.

"Level-headed boy," I said to myself. "Be a millionaire if he lives. No back talk, no unnecessary remarks regarding an inexcusable violation of the law--petty larceny if anything. Just a plain business statement, followed by an immediate cash settlement. A most estimable boy."

A road employee now came in, looked at the dull-faced clock on the wall, went out through a door and into a room where a telegraph instrument was clicking away, returned with a piece of chalk and wrote on a black-board:

"No. 31--52 minutes late."

This handwriting on the wall had a Belshazzar-feast effect on me. If I lost the connection at Adrian, what would become of the lecture in Cleveland?

Another man now entered carrying a black carpet-bag--a sleepy man with his hair tousled and who looked as if he had gone to bed in his clothes. He fumbled in his pocket for a key, went straight to the slot machine, unlocked it, disclosing a reduced stock of chewing-gum and chocolate caramels, opened his carpet-bag and filled the machine to the top. This sort of a man works at night, I thought, when few people are about. To uncover the mysteries of a slot machine before a gaping crowd would be as foolish and unprofitable as for a conjurer to show his patrons how he performed his tricks.

I became conscious now, even as I turned the sheets of the journal, that while my flask of P. S. and the contents of my collar-box were admirable in their place, they were not capable of sustaining life, even had both receptacles been full, which they were not. There was evidently nothing to eat in the station, and from what I saw of the outside, no one had yet started a fire; no one had even struck a light.

At this moment a gas jet flashed its glare through a glass door to my right. I had seen this door, but supposed it led to the baggage-room--a fact that did not concern me in the least, for I had checked my red-banded trunk through to Cleveland. I got up and peered in. A stout woman in a hood, with a blanket shawl crossed over her bosom, its ends tied behind her back, was busying herself about a nickel-plated coffee-urn decorating one end of a long counter before which stood a row of high stools--the kind we sat on in school. I tried the knob of the door and walked in.

"Is this the restaurant?"

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