I can always get along in a cold car. It is a hot one that incites me to murder the porter or the brakeman. I took off the coat I was wearing and laid it flat on a seat. Then came a layer of myself with the grip for a pillow, and then a top crust of my old friend. They might have knocked out the end of the car now and I should have been comfortable. Not to sleep--forty minutes wouldn't be of the slightest service to a night watchman, let alone an all-night traveller--but so as to be out of the way of porterless-passengers lugging grips. The weather now took a hand in the game. The cold grew more intense, creeping stealthily along, blowing its frosty breath on the windows; so dense on some panes that the lights of the stations no longer shone clear, but were blurred, like lamps in a fog. The incoming passengers felt it and stamped their feet, shedding the snow from their boots. Now and then some traveller, colder than his fellow, stopped at the fraudulent heater to warm his fingers before finding a seat, and, strange to say, passed on satisfied--due to his heated imagination, no doubt. The blanket of white was now six inches thick, and increasing every minute. The wind was still asleep. "Guess we're in for it," said the conductor to a ticket stuck in the hat of a man seated in front. "I hear No. 6 is stalled chuck-a-block this side of Schoolcraft. We'll make Battle Creek anyway, and as much furder as we can get, but there ain't no tellin' where we'll bring up." I thrust my ticket hand through the crust of my overcoat and the steel nippers perforated the bit of cardboard with a click. I was undisturbed. Battle Creek was where I was to get off; what became of the train after that was no affair of mine. Only one thing worried me as I lay curled up like a cocoon. Was there a hotel at Battle Creek within reasonable distance (walking, of course; no hack would be out a night like this), with a warm side to its stove and two more chairs in which I could pass the time of my stay, or would there be only the railroad station--and if the last, what sort of a railroad station?--one of those bare, varnished, steam-heated affairs with a weighing machine in one corner and a slot machine in the other? or a less modern chamber of horrors with the seats divided by iron arms--instruments of torture for tired, sleepy men which must have been devised in the Middle Ages? The wind now awoke with a howl, kicked off its counterpane and started out on a career of its own. Ventilators began to rattle; incoming passengers entered with hands on their hats; outgoing passengers had theirs whipped from their heads before they touched the platforms of the stations. The conductor as he passed shook his head ominously: "Goin' to be a ring-tailed roarer," he said to a man in the aisle whose face was tied up in a shawl with the ends knotted on top of his cap, like a boy with the toothache. "Cold enough to freeze the rivets in the b'iler. Be wuss by daylight."