There weren't any platforms to the box cars, just small end doors. Once in camp, and stationary on a siding, the cars would be connected up with little wooden gangways, you understand? Bradley, from the platform of the caboose, stepped across the buffer, and made his way through several cars. One was pretty much like another; a stove going, and stuffy hot; the foreigners stretched out in their bunks, some of them; some of them playing cards on the floor; some asleep; some quarrelling, chattering, jabbering; a hard looking lot for the most part, black-visaged, scowling, unshaven, gold circlets dangling in their ears--bar the Swedes. Bradley worked along with scarcely more than a glance at the occupants, until, in the fourth car, he halted suddenly and shoved his lamp into the face of a giant of a man, who squatted in the corner, sullen and apart, with muttering lips. "What's wrong with you?" he demanded brusquely. The man drew back with a growl that was like a beast's, lips curling back over the teeth. Bradley stared at him coolly, then turned inquiringly to the crowd in the car. He was greeted with a burst of unintelligible, polyglot words, and spontaneous, excitable gesticulations. Bradley shrugged his shoulders, and slammed the door behind him. Outside on the buffer, he reached for the ladder, swung himself up the iron rungs to the top of the car, and, with his lantern hooked in his arm, sat down on the footboard, bracing himself against the brake wheel, and buttoned his reefer--there was another night--to think--ahead of him. To think--if he could only forget! It was that fearful sense of impotency--impotency--impotency. It seemed to laugh and jeer and mock at him. It seemed to make a plaything of this father love of his. There was nothing--nothing he could do to bring her back--that was it--nothing! Soul, life, mind and body, he would have given them all to have saved her--would give them now to bring her back--and there was only this ghastly impotency. It seemed at times that it would drive him mad--and he could not forget. And then the bitter, crushing grief; the rebellion, fierce, ungovernable, that his _all_ should have been taken from him, that the years he had planned should be turned to nothing but grinning mockery; and then that raging sense of impotency again, that rocked his turbulent soul as in an angry, storm-tossed sea.