The ten-twenty had departed by a bare two minutes. The next and last
train for Greenfields was to leave at ten-fifty-nine. Maitland with
assumed nonchalance composed himself upon a bench in the waiting-room
to endure the thirty-seven minute interval. Five minutes later an
able-bodied washerwoman with six children in quarter sizes descended
upon the same bench; and the young man in desperation allowed himself
to be dispossessed. The news-stand next attracting him, he garnered a
fugitive amusement and two dozen copper cents by the simple process of
purchasing six "night extras," which he did not want, and paying for
each with a five-cent piece. Comprehending, at length, that he had
irritated the news-dealer, he meandered off, jingling his
copper-fortune in one hand, lugging his newspapers in the other, and
made a determined onslaught upon a slot machine. The latter having
reluctantly disgorged twenty-four assorted samples of chewing-gum and
stale sweetmeats, Maitland returned to the washerwoman, and sowed
dissension in her brood by presenting the treasure-horde to the eldest
girl with instructions to share it with her brothers and sisters.
It is difficult to imagine what folly might next have been recorded
against him had not, at that moment, a ferocious and inarticulate howl
from the train-starter announced the fact that the ten-fifty-nine was
in waiting.
Boarding the train in a thankful spirit, Maitland settled himself as
comfortably as he might in the smoker and endeavored to find surcease
of ennui in his collection of extras. In vain: even a two-column
portrait of Mr. Dan Anisty, cracksman, accompanied by a vivacious
catalogue of that notoriety's achievements in the field of polite
burglary, hardly stirred his interest. An elusive resemblance which he
traced in the features of Mr. Anisty, as presented by the
Sketch-Artist-on-the-Spot, to some one whom he, Maitland, had known in
the dark backwards and abysm of time, merely drew from him the comment:
"Homely brute!" And he laid the papers aside, cradling his chin in the
palm of one hand and staring for a weary while out of the car window at
a reeling and moonsmitten landscape. He yawned exhaustively, his
thoughts astray between a girl garbed all in grey, Bannerman's earnest
and thoughtful face, and the pernicious activities of Mr. Daniel
Anisty, at whose door Maitland laid the responsibility for this most
fatiguing errand....
The brakeman's wolf-like yelp--"Greenfields!"--was ringing in his ears
when he awoke and stumbled down aisle and car-steps just in the nick of
time. The train, whisking round a curve cloaked by a belt of somber
pines, left him quite alone in the world, cast ruthlessly upon his own
resources.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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