He remembered then that he had neglected to put on his outer shirt and that his red flannel undergarment was informal even for morning wear. So he pulled in his head like a sulky old turtle. "Don't want nothing to do with your railroad," he repeated. "Never. No time!" He clapped the shutters fast and locked them with a wooden pin. Presently he felt the pattering passage of her heels on the porch. She was going off and leaving him alone. Let 'em all go off and leave him alone. He dressed slowly, climbing to the cold attic for his shoes. From the mail sack he rummaged the key and opened the back door. As it swung back, shrieking, a dozen vari-colored cats suddenly appeared from different places of waiting and streaked eagerly into the house. Henry clumped back, sopped bread in the sausage grease, congealed from the night before, soaked it in sweetened tea and set out half a dozen plates which instantly became the centers for a petal-like array of flashing pink tongues. Then he trudged through the brief strip of garden left to him, tossed a handful of corn to a charging troup of guineas, and arrived at the fence. Down the track he could see a line of blue-clad laborers. The lift of their sledges and their flashing fall came to him soundlessly. They were tearing up the old spur. [Illustration] He swung a leg over the fence and tramped on to the village, nodding to people whom he met. Women smiled at him, men gave him friendly nods. He was a personage. He had saved the Limited from a wreck. Something which survived in Henry's queer, cramped old soul laughed aloud. He was safe. Nobody in Elsie would suspect him. His war could go on. But now he would have to think of something new--now that they were tearing up the spur. He felt lost and empty. For eighteen years he had comforted the thwarted vindictiveness in him with plans for that colossal wreck. Now it was all ended. Days of toil which had gone into the sharpening of that wedge were wasted. Nobody had been killed though. That was something. He had never thought much about the people being killed. He was glad that there were no awful bloody bodies lying around in Elsie. Henry hated blood. He kept his chickens till they died of old age because he could not slay them. At the station he surveyed the new length of platform with grim satisfaction. He had made the B. & A. a little trouble, anyway--paid them back a trifle for the outraging of his bit of garden. He tramped across the new planks marked the oozing pitch and the shining nail heads with the avidness of lonely people for inconsequential things. Then he felt eyes on his back. Deafness had made him supersensitive. He turned quickly, and in the window of the little bay where the telegraph instruments lurked under the green light, he saw the girl--the red-headed girl.