Daniel the Mystic raised his head. The light from a tin reflector lamp. shone on his face and showed its abundant damages. You would hardly have known Daniel the Mystic for the same person. His gorgeousness and grandeur of person had fallen from him like a discarded garment, and his nose dripped redly. “I--had--what?” he answered, speaking somewhat thickly because of his swollen lip. “A mighty signal honor,” said Judge Priest, in his thin whine. “In the presence of a representative gatherin' of our best people you were licked by the most efficient and the quickest-actin' scout that ever served in General John Morgan's entire cavalry command.” But the reply of Daniel the Mystic, if he made one, was never heard of living man, because at that moment the 10:50 accommodation came in and her locomotive began exhausting. V. UP CLAY STREET ONE behind the other, three short sections of a special came sliding into the yard sidings below the depot. The cars clanked their drawheads together like manacles, as they were chivied and bullied and shoved about by a regular chain-gang boss of a switch engine. Some of the cars were ordinary box cars, just the plain galley slaves of commerce, but painted a uniform blue and provided with barred gratings; some were flat cars laden with huge wheeled burdens hooded under tarpaulins; and a few were sleeping cars that had been a bright yellow at the beginning of the season, with flaring red lettering down the sides, but now were faded to a shabby saffron. It was just getting good broad day. The sleazy dun clouds that had been racked up along the east--like mill-ends left over from night's remnant counter, as a poet might have said had there been a poet there to say it--were now torn asunder, and through the tear the sun showed out, blushing red at his own nakedness and pushing ahead of him long shadows that stretched on the earth the wrong way. There was a taste of earliness in the air, a sort of compounded taste of dew and dust and maybe a little malaria. Early as it was, there was a whopping big delegation of small boys, white and black, on hand for a volunteer reception committee. The eyes of these boys were bright and expectant in contrast to the eyes of the yard hands, who looked half dead for sleep and yawned and shivered. The boys welcomed the show train at the depot and ran alongside its various sections. They were mainly barefooted, but they avoided splinters in the butts of the crossties and sharp clinkers in the cinder ballast of the roadbed with the instinctive agility of a race of primitives.