Twenty minutes later, Lavinia, in her room, Mrs. Marley, at her prayers, and Doctor Marley sitting in deep absorption at his desk, heard the sonorous whistle of a locomotive sound ominously over the dark and quiet town. CHAPTER XXIV THE GATES OF THE CITY It was a relief to Marley when morning came and released him from the reclining chair that had held his form so rigidly all the night. He had not taken a sleeper because he felt himself too poor, and he had somewhere got the false impression that comfort was to be had in the chair car. He had stretched himself in the cruel rack when the porter came through and turned the lights down to the dismal point of gloom, but he had not slept; all through the night the trainmen constantly passed through the car talking with each other in low tones; the train, too, made long, inexplicable stops; he could hear the escape of the weary engine, through his window he could see the lights of some strange town; and then the trainmen would run by outside, swinging their lanterns in the darkness, and calling to each other, and Marley would fear that something had happened, or else was about to happen, which was worse. Finally the train would creak on again, as if it were necessary to proceed slowly and cautiously through vague dangers of the night. Through his window he could see the glint of rails, the two yards of gleaming steel that traveled always abreast of him. Toward morning Marley wearily fell asleep, and then the sorrow and heart-ache of his parting from Lavinia and his home distorted themselves in fearful dreams. When he awoke at last, and looked out on the ugly prairie that had nothing to break its monotony but a few scraggly scrub-oak bushes, and some clumps of stunted trees, the dawn was descending from the gray sky. The car presented a squalid, hideous sight; all about him were stretched the bodies of sleeping passengers, flaccid, inert, having cast aside in utter weariness all sense of decency and shame; the men had pulled off their boots, and sprawled on the chairs, their stockinged feet prominently in view; women lay with open mouths, their faces begrimed, their hair in slovenly disarray. The baby that had been crying in the early part of the night had finally gone to sleep while nursing, and its tired mother slept with it at her breast. The Jewish drummer across the aisle was sleeping in shirt-sleeves; his head had rolled from the little rest on the back of his chair and now lolled off his shoulder, his sallow face turned toward Marley was greasy with perspiration; his closed eyes filled out their blue hemispherical lids, and his cheeks puffed with his intermittent snoring. At times his snoring grew so loud and so troubled that it seemed as if he must choke; he would reach a torturing climax, then suddenly the thick red lips beneath his black mustache would open, his sallow cheeks would collapse, and relief would come.