Then the howl of a fiend, and a mile-long checkerboard of lighted car-windows, and cinders rattling against them like hail. A fire-boweled engine with a grimy-faced demon leaning out of his red-hot cab, and, on every alternate night, a green eye with a black pupil which winked a signal from that same heat-roaring cab and from a dirt-colored frame shanty in a dirt-brown yard, where a naked tree stretched its thin arms against the sky, an answering eye which gleamed through a bandana-bound lantern and outlined the Hebe-like silhouette of a woman in the window. Then the flash of a mahogany-lined dining-car with nodding _vis-a-vis_, pink-shaded candles and white-coated, black-faded genii of the bowl and weal; an occasional vague figure peering through cupped hands out from an electric-lighted berth; a plate-glass observation-car with figures lounging in shallow leather chairs like oil-kings and merchant princes and only sons in a Fifth Avenue club, and a great trailing plume of smoke that lingered for a moment and died in the still tingling air. For a full half-hour, even an hour, after the Imperial flyer had gouged through the village the yellow lights of Slateville burned on behind its unwashed windows, which were half opaque with train-dust and the grimy finger-prints of children. Then they began to flick out, here, there--here, there. In a slate-roofed shanty beside the quarry, in an out-of-balance bookkeeper's office in the Slateville Varnish Factory, in the Red Trunk general store and post-office, the parson's study, a maiden's bedroom, in the dirt-colored frame house, another slate-roofed shanty beside the quarry, another, and yet another. Here, there--here, there. The clerk in the signal-tower slumped in his chair, the doctor's tin-tired buggy rattled up a hilly street that was shaped like a crooked finger, and away beyond the melancholy stretches of close-bitten grazing-land and runty corn-fields the flyer shrieked upward, and the miles scuttled the echoes back to Slateville. On an alternate night that was as singingly still as the inside of a cup the flyer tore through the village with the cinders tattooing against its panes and the white eye searching like a near-sighted cylcopean monster. But from the red fireman's cab the green lantern with the black bull's-eye painted on the outward side dangled unlit, and in the dirt-colored house, behind drawn shades, the Hebe-like figure was crouched in another woman's arms, and, in the room adjoining, John Blaney lay dead with a dent in his head. Who-o-o-p! Who-o-o-p! "Listen, Cottie, listen!" "'Sh-h-h-h, darlin'." The crouching women crouched closer together, a dove-note in the crooning voice of one like the coo of a mate. "'Sh-h-h, darlin'." "There it goes, Cottie. Gawd, just like nothing had happened." "'Sh-h-h, dearie; lay still!" "Listen. The engine's playin' a different tune on the tracks; it's lighter and smoother." "Yes--yes--'sh-h-h."