It was an odd thing about the towns through which the train kept passing—all of the houses in all the towns looked cold and forbidding. “Dang it all.” In Bidwell, before the night when his father got so badly burned being such a fool about old Bill Bardshare’s party—all the houses had always seemed warm cozy places. When one was alone, one walked along the streets whistling. At night warm lights shone through the windows of the houses. “John Wyatt, the drayman, lives in that house. His wife has a wen on her neck. In that barn over there old Doctor Musgrave keeps his bony old white horse. The horse looks like the devil, but you bet he can go.” * * * * * Will squirmed about on the car seat. The old man who sat beside him was small, almost as small as Fred, and he wore a queer-looking suit. The pants were brown, and the coat checked, grey and black. There was a small leather case on the floor at his feet. Long before the man spoke Will knew what would happen. It was bound to turn out that such a fellow played a cornet. He was a man, old in years, but there was no dignity in him. Will remembered his father’s marchings through the main street of Bidwell with the band. It was some great day, Fourth of July, perhaps, and all the people were assembled and there was Tony Appleton, making a show of blowing his cornet at a great rate. Did all the people along the street know how badly he played and was there a kind of conspiracy, that kept grown men from laughing at each other? In spite of the seriousness of his own situation a smile crept over Will’s face. The little man at his side smiled in return. “Well,” he began, not stopping for anything but plunging headlong into a tale concerning some dissatisfaction he felt with life, “well, you see before you a man who is up against it, young fellow.” The old man tried to laugh at his own words, but did not make much of a success of it. His lip trembled. “I got to go home like a dog, with my tail ’twixt my legs,” he declared abruptly. The old man balanced back and forth between two impulses. He had met a young man on a train, and hungered for companionship and one got oneself in with others by being jolly, a little gay perhaps. When one met a stranger on a train one told a story—“By the way, Mister, I heard a new one the other day—perhaps you haven’t heard it? It’s about the miner up in Alaska who hadn’t seen a woman for years.” One began in that way, and then later perhaps, spoke of oneself, and one’s affairs.