As the boy entered the smoking compartment, the men who were talking together paused, and looked up at him briefly with the intent, curious, momentary stare of men interrupted in a conversation. The boy, a leggy creature racing into unfledged lengths of shank and arm and shoulder, fumbled nervously in his coat pocket for a package of cigarettes and then sat down abruptly on the upholstered leather seat beside one of the men.

The boy’s manner betrayed that mixture of defiance and diffidence which a young man going out into the world for the first time feels in the presence of older and more experienced men. And this was the way he felt. And for this reason in the sharp and casual stare which the men fixed briefly on him there may have been unconsciously something affectionate and tender as each one recalled a moment of his own lost youth.

The boy felt the powerful movement of the train beneath him and the lonely austerity and mystery of the dark earth outside that swept past for ever with a fanlike stroke, an immortal and imperturbable stillness. It seemed to him that these two terrific negatives of speed and stillness, the hurtling and projectile movement of the train and the calm silence of the everlasting earth, were poles of a single unity — a unity coherent with his destiny, whose source was somehow in himself.

It seemed to him that this incredible and fortunate miracle of his own life and fate had ordered all these accidental facts into coherent and related meanings. He felt that everything — the powerful movement of the train, the infinite mystery and lonely wildness of the earth, the feeling of luxury, abundance, and unlimited wealth that was stimulated by the rich furnishings of the Pullman, and the general air of affluence of these prosperous men — belonged to him, had come out of his own life, and were ready to serve him at his own behest and control.

It seemed to him that the glorious moment for which his whole life had been shaped, and toward which every energy and desire in his spirit had been turned, was now here.

As that incredible knowledge came to him, a fury, wild, savage, wordless, pulsed through his blood and filled him with such a swelling and exultant joy as he has never known before. He felt the savage tongueless cry of pain and joy swell up and thicken in his throat, he felt a rending and illimitable power in him as if he could twist steel between his fingers, and he felt an almost uncontrollable impulse to yell into the faces of the men with a demonic glee.

Instead he just sat down quickly with an abrupt, half-defiant movement, lit his cigarette, and spoke to one of the men quickly and diffidently, saying:

“Hello, Mr. Flood.”

For a moment, the man thus addressed said nothing, but sat staring at the boy stupidly with an expression of heavy surprise. He was a well-dressed but bloated-looking man in his fifties whose gross figure even in repose betrayed a gouty tendency. His face, which had the satiny rosy texture, veinous and tender, that alcoholism and a daily massage can give, was brutally coarse and sensual, but was given a disturbing and decisive character by his bulging yellow eyeballs and the gross lewd mouth which, because of several large buck teeth whose discoloured surfaces protruded under the upper lip, seemed always to be half opened and half smiling. And it was not a pleasant smile. It was a smile, faint, unmistakably sensual, and rather sly. It seemed to come from some huge choking secret glee and there was in it a quality that was jubilantly obscene.

For a moment more Mr. Flood stared through his bulging eyes at the boy who had just spoken to him, with an air of comical and stupid surprise. Then amiably, but with a puzzled undertone, he said gruffly:

“Hello. Oh, hello, son! How are you?”

And after looking at the boy a moment longer, he turned his attention to the other men again.

It was at just that season of the year when two events which are dear to the speculations of the American had absorbed the public interest. These events were baseball and politics, and at that moment both were thrillingly imminent. The annual baseball contests for “the championship of the world” were to begin within another day or two, and the national campaign for the election of the American president, which would be held in another month, was moving daily to its furious apogee of speeches, accusations, dire predictions, and impassioned promises. Both events gave the average American a thrill of pleasurable anticipation: his approach to both was essentially the same. It was the desire of a man to see a good show, to “take sides” vigorously in an exciting contest — to be amused, involved as an interested spectator is involved, but not to be too deeply troubled or concerned by the result.

It was just natural, therefore, that at the moment when the boy entered the smoking compartment of the train, the conversation of the men assembled there should be chiefly concerned with these twin sports. As he came in, there was a hum of voices, a sound of argument, and then he could see the hearty red-faced man — the politician — shaking his head dubiously and heard him say, with a protesting laugh:

“Ah-h, I don’t know about that. From what I hear it’s just the other way. I was talking to a man from Tennessee the other day, and from what he says, Cox is gaining everywhere. He said that a month ago he wouldn’t have given two cents for his chances, but now he thinks he’s going to carry the State.”

“It’s going to be close,” another conceded. “He may win yet — but it looks to me as if he’s got a hard uphill fight on his hands. Tennessee always polls a big Republican vote — in some of those mountain districts they vote two to one Republican — and this year it looks as if they’re all set for a change. . . . What do you think about it, Emmet?” he said, appealing to the small, swarthy and important-looking little man, who sat there, swinging his short little legs and chewing on a fat cigar with an air of wise reflection.

“Well,” that person answered slowly after a thoughtful moment, taking his cigar in his pudgy fingers and looking at it studiously — “it may be-it may be-that the country’s ready for a change — now don’t misunderstand me,” he went on hastily, as if eager to set their perturbed minds at rest —“I’m not saying that I want to see Harding elected — that I’m going to cast my vote for him — as you know, I’m a party man and have voted the Democratic ticket ever since I came of age — but,” again he paused, frowned importantly at his cigar, and spoke with careful deliberation —“it may just be that we are due for a change this year — that the country is ready for it — that we need it. . . . Now, I supported Wilson twice, in 1912, when he got elected to his first term of office, and again in 1916 —”

“The time he kept us out of war,” some one said ironically.

“And,” the little man said deliberately —“if he was running again — if he was well enough to run — if he wanted a third term —(although I’m against the third term in principle),” he amended hastily again —“why, I believe I’d go ahead and vote for him. That’s how much I think of him. But,” again he paused, and meditated his chewed cigar profoundly —“it may be we’re due now for a change. Wilson was a great president — in my opinion, the greatest man we’ve had since Lincoln — I don’t believe any other man could have done the job he did as well as he — BUT,” the word came out impressively, “the job is done! The war is over —”

“Yes, thank God!” some one murmured softly but fervently.

“The people want to forget about the war — they want to forget all their sacrifices and suffering —” said this little man who had sacrificed and suffered nothing —“they are looking forward to better times. . . . And in my opinion,” he spoke again with his air of slow deliberation, important carefulness —“in my opinion, better times are before us. I think that after this election we are going to witness one of the greatest periods of national development and expansion that the world has ever known. . . . Why, we haven’t begun yet! We haven’t even started!” he cried suddenly, with a note of passionate conviction in his voice —“Do you realize that this country is only a little more than a hundred years old? Why, we haven’t even begun to show what we can do yet! We’ve spent all that time in getting started — in building cities — settling the country — building railroads and factories — developing the means of production — making the tools with which to work. . . . The resources of this country are scarcely tapped as yet. And in my opinion we are on the eve of the greatest period of prosperity and growth the world has ever known. . . . Look at Altamont, for example,” he went on cogently. “Ten years ago, in 1910, the census gave us a population of 18,000. . . . Now, we have thirty, according to government figures, and that doesn’t begin to take the whole thing in: it doesn’t take in Biltburn, Lunn’s Cove, Beaver Hills, Sunset Parkway — a dozen other places I can mention, all really part of the town but not included in the census figures. . . . If all the suburbs were included we’d have a population of at least 40,000 inhabitants —”

“I’d call it nearer fifty,” said another patriot.

“And within another ten years we’ll go to seventy-five, perhaps a hundred. . . . Why, that town hasn’t begun to grow yet!” he said, bending his short body forward in his enthusiasm and tapping his fat knee —“It has been less than eight years since we established the Citizen’s Bank and Trust Company with a capital of $25,000 and capital stock at $100 a share. . . . Now,” he paused a moment, and looked around him, his swarthy face packed with strong conviction — “NOW, we have a capital of $2,000,000 — deposits totalling more than $18,000,000 — and as for the stock —” for a moment the little man’s swarthy face was touched with a faint complacent smile, he said smugly, “I don’t know exactly how much stock you gentlemen may hold among you, but if any of you wants to sell what he has, I will pay you $1000 a share — here and now,” he slapped a fat small hand down upon a fat small knee —“here and now! for every share you own.”

And he looked at them steadily for a moment with an air of challenge.

“Not for mine!” the florid heavy man cried heartily. “No, sir! I’ve only got ten shares, Emmet, but you can’t buy it from me at any price! I won’t sell!”

And the swarthy little man, pleased by the answer, smiled complacently about him before he spoke again.

“Yes, sir!” he said. “That’s the way it is. And the thing that’s begun to happen at home already is going to happen everywhere — all over the country. From now on you’re going to see a period of rising prices and high wages — increased production, a boom in real estate, stocks, investments, business of all kinds — rising values everywhere such as you never saw before and never hoped to see.”

“And where is it going to stop?”

“Stop!” the swarthy little man spoke almost curtly, and then barked, “It’s not going to stop! Not during OUR lifetime, anyway! I tell you, man, we’re just beginning! How can there be any talk of stopping when we haven’t STARTED yet? . . . There’s been nothing like it before,” he cried with passionate earnestness — “nothing to match it in the history of the world. We’ve had wars, booms, good times, hard times, slumps, periods of prosperity — but, I tell you, gentlemen!” and here he smote himself sharply on the knee and his voice rose with the strength of an unshakable conviction —“this thing is different! We have reached a stage in our development that no other country in the world has ever known — that was never dreamed of before — a stage that is beyond booms, depressions, good times, hard times — anything —”

“You mean that after this we shall never be affected by those things?”

“Yes, sir!” he cried emphatically. “I mean just that! I mean that we have learned the causes for each of those conditions. I mean that we have learned how to check them, how to control them. I mean that so far as we are concerned they don’t EXIST any more!” His voice had become almost shrill with the force of his persuasive argument, and suddenly whipping a sheaf of envelopes, tied with a rubber band, out of his inner pocket, and gripping a stub of pencil in his stubby hand, he crossed his short fat legs with an energetic movement, bent forward poised above the envelopes, and said quietly but urgently:

“See here, now! — I’d like to show you a few figures! My business, as you know, is to look after other people’s money — your money, the town’s money, everybody’s money — I’ve got to keep my fingers on the pulse of business at every moment of the day — my business is to KNOW— to KNOW— and let me tell you something,” he said quietly, looking directly in their eyes, “I DO know — so pay attention just a moment while I show these figures to you.”

And for some moments he spoke quietly, persuasively, his dark features packed with an energy of powerful conviction, while he rapidly jotted figures down upon the backs of the soiled envelopes, and they bent around him — their medicine-man of magic numerals — in an attitude of awed and rapt attentiveness. And when he had finished, there was silence for a moment, save for the rhythmic clack of wheels, the rocketing sound of the great train. Then one of the men, stroking his chin thoughtfully, and with an impressed air, said:

“I see. . . . And you think, then, that in view of these conditions it would be better for the country if Harding is elected.”

The little man’s manner became instantly cautious, non-committal, “conservative”:

“I don’t say that,” he said, shaking his head in a movement of denial —“I only say that whoever gets elected we’re in for a period of unparalleled development. . . . Now both of them are good men — as I say, I shall probably vote for Cox — but you can rest assured,” he spoke deliberately and looked around him in his compelling way — “you can rest assured that no matter which one gets elected the country will be in good hands. There’s no question about that.”

“Yes, sir,” said the florid-faced politician in his amiable and hearty way. “I agree with you. . . . I’m a Democrat myself, both in practice and in principle. I’m going to vote for Cox, but if Harding gets elected I won’t shed any tears over his election. We’ll have to give the Republicans credit for a good deed this time — they couldn’t have made a wiser or a better decision. He has a long and honourable career in the service of his country,”— as he spoke his voice unconsciously took on the sententious ring and lilt of the professional politician —“no breath of scandal has ever touched his name: in public and in private life he has remained as he began — a statesman loyal to the institutions of his country, a husband devoted to his family life, a plain American of simple tastes who loves his neighbours as himself, and prefers the quiet life of a little town, the democracy of the front porch, to the marble arches of the Capitol — so, whatever the result may be,” the orator concluded, “this nation need fear nothing: it has chosen well and wisely in both cases, its future is secure.”

Mr. Flood, during the course of this impassioned flight, had remained ponderously unmoved. In the pause that followed, he sat impassively, his coarse-jowled face and bulging yellowed eyes fixed on the orator in their customary expression of comic stupefaction. Now, breathing hoarsely and stertorously, he coughed chokingly and with an alarming rattling noise into his handkerchief, peered intently at his wadded handkerchief for a moment, and then said coarsely:

“Hell! What all of you are saying is that you are goin’ to vote for Cox but that you hope that Harding wins.”

“No, now, Jim —” the politician, Mr. Candler, said in a protesting tone —“I never said —”

“Yes, you did!” Mr. Flood wheezed bluntly. “You meant it, anyhow, every one of you is sayin’ how he always was a Democrat and what a great man Wilson is, and how he’s goin’ to vote for Cox — and every God-damn one of you is praying that the other feller gets elected. . . . Why? I’ll tell you why,” he wheezed coarsely, “— it’s because we’re sick an’ tired of Woodrow, all of us — we want to put the rollers under him an’ see the last of him! Oh, yes, we are,” he went on brutally as some one started to protest —“we’re tired of Woodrow’s flowery speeches, an’ we’re tired of hearin’ about wars an’ ideals an’ democracy an’ how fine an’ noble we all are an’ ‘Mister won’t you please subscribe?’ We’re tired of hearin’ bunk that doesn’t pay an’ we want to hear some bunk that does — an’ we’re goin’ to vote for the crook that gives it to us. . . . Do you know what we all want — what we’re lookin’ for?” he demanded, glowering brutally around at them. “We want a piece of the breast with lots of gravy — an’ the boy that promises us the most is the one we’re for! . . . Cox! Hell! All of you know Cox has no more chance of getting in than a snowball has in hell. When they get through with him he won’t know whether he was run over by a five-ton truck or chewed up in a sausage mill. . . . Nothing has changed, the world’s no different, we’re just the same as we always were — and I’ve watched ’em come an’ go for forty years — Blaine, Cleveland, Taft, McKinley, Roosevelt — the whole damned lot of ’em-an’ what we want from them is just the same: all we can get for ourselves, a free grab with no holts barred, and to hell with the other fellow.”

“So whom are you going to vote for, Jim?” said Mr. Candler smiling.

“Who? Me?” said Mr. Flood with a coarse grin. “Why, hell, you ought to know that without asking. Me — I’m a Democrat, ain’t I? — don’t I publish a Democratic newspaper? I’m going to vote for Cox, of course.”

And, in the burst of laughter that followed, some one could be heard saying jestingly:

“And who’s going to win the Series, Jim? Some one told me you’re for Brooklyn!”

“Brooklyn!” Mr. Flood jeered wheezingly. “Brooklyn has just the same kind of chance Cox has — the chance a snowball has in hell! Brooklyn! They’re in just the same fix the Democrats are in- they’ve got nothing on the ball. When Speaker and that Cleveland gang get through with them, Brooklyn is going to look just like Cox the day after the election. Brooklyn,” he concluded with brutal conviction, “hasn’t got a chance.”

And again the debate between the men grew eager, animated and vociferous: they shouted, laughed, denied, debated, jeered good-naturedly, and the great train hurtled onward in the darkness, and the everlasting earth was still.

And other men, and other voices, words, and moments such as these would come, would pass, would vanish and would be forgotten in the huge record and abyss of time. And the great trains of America would hurtle on through darkness over the lonely, everlasting earth — the earth which only was eternal — and on which our fathers and our brothers had wandered, their lives so brief, so lonely, and so strange — into whose substance at length they all would be compacted. And the great trains would hurtle on for ever over the silent and eternal earth — fixed in that design of everlasting stillness and unceasing change. The trains would hurtle onward bearing other lives like these, all brought together for an instant between two points of time — and then all lost, all vanished, broken and forgotten. The trains would bear them onward to their million destinations — each to the fortune, fame, or happiness he wished, whatever it was that he was looking for — but whether any to a sure success, a certain purpose, or the thing he sought — what man could say? All that he knew was that these men, these words, this moment would vanish, be forgotten — and that great wheels would hurtle on for ever. And the earth be still.

Mr. Flood shifted his gouty weight carefully with a movement of his fat arm, grunting painfully as he did so. This delicate operation completed, he stared sharply and intently at the boy again and at length said bluntly:

“You’re one of those Gant boys, ain’t you? Ain’t you Ben’s brother?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy answered. “That’s right.”

“Which one are you?” Mr. Flood said with this same brutal directness. “You ain’t the one that stutters, are you?”

“No,” one of the other men interrupted with a laugh, but in a decided tone. “He’s not the one. You’re thinking of Luke.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Flood stupidly. “Is Luke the one that stutters?”

“Yes,” the boy said, “that’s Luke. I’m Eugene.”

“Oh,” Mr. Flood said heavily. “I reckon you’re the youngest one.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy answered.

“Well,” said Mr. Flood with an air of finality, “I didn’t know which one you were, but I knew you were one of them. I knew I’d seen you somewhere.”

“Yes, sir,” the boy answered. He was about to go on, hesitated for a moment, and suddenly blurted out: “I used to carry a route on The Courier when you owned it. I guess that’s how you remembered me.”

“Oh,” said Mr. Flood stupidly, “you did? Yes, that’s it, all right. I remember now.” And he continued to look at the boy with his bulging stare of comic stupefaction and for a moment there was silence save for the pounding of the wheels upon the rail.

“How many of you boys are there?” The swarthy and important-looking man who had previously been addressed as Emmet now spoke curiously: “There must be five or six in all.”

“No,” the boy said, “there’s only three now. There’s Luke and Steve and me.”

“Oh, Steve, Steve,” the little man said with an air of crisp finality, as if this was the name that had been at the tip of his tongue all the time. “Steve was the oldest, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, sir,” said the boy.

“Whatever became of Steve, anyway?” the man said. “I don’t believe I’ve seen him in ten or fifteen years. He doesn’t live at home any more, does he?”

“No, sir,” the boy said. “He lives in Indiana.”

“Does he for a fact?” said the little man, as if this was a rare and curious bit of information. “What’s Steve doing out there? Is he in business?”

For a moment the boy was going to say, “No, he runs a pool room and lives up over it with his wife and children,” but feeling ashamed to say this, he said:

“I think he runs some kind of cigar store out there.”

“Is that so?” the man answered with an air of great interest. “Well,” he went on in a moment in a conciliatory tone, “Steve was always smart enough. He had brains enough to do almost anything if he tried.”

Emmet Wade, the man who had asked the boy all these questions, was a quick, pompous little figure, corpulently built, but so short in stature as to be almost dwarfish-looking. His skin was curiously and unpleasantly swarthy, and save for a fringe of thin black hair at either side, his head was completely bald. In that squat figure, the suggestion of pompous authority and mountainous conceit was so pronounced that even in repose, as now, the whole man seemed to strut. He was, by virtue of that fortuitous chance and opportunity which has put so many small men in great positions, the president of the leading bank of the community. Even as he sat there in the smoking compartment, with his short fat legs crossed, the boy could see him sitting at his desk in the bank, swinging back and forth in his swivel chair thoughtfully, his pudgy hands folded behind his head as he dictated a letter to his obsequious secretary.

“Where’s old Luke? What’s he doing, anyway?” another of the men demanded suddenly, beginning to chuckle even as he spoke. The speaker was the florid-faced, somewhat countrified-looking man already noted, who wore the string neck-tie and spoke with the rhetorical severity of the small-town politician. He was one of the town commissioners and in his hearty voice and easy manner there was a more genial quality than any of the others had. “I haven’t seen that boy in years,” he continued. “Some one was asking me just the other day what had become of him.”

“He’s got a job selling farm machinery and lighting equipment,” the boy answered.

“Is that so?” the man replied with this same air of friendly interest. “Where is he located? He doesn’t get home very often, does he?”

“No, sir,” the boy said, “not very often. He comes in every two or three weeks, but he doesn’t stay home long at a time. His territory is down through South Carolina and Georgia — all through there.”

“What did you say he was selling?” said Mr. Flood, who had been staring at the boy fixedly during all this conversation with his heavy expression of a slow, intent and brutal stupefaction.

“He sells lighting systems and pumps and farm equipment and machinery — for farms,” the boy said awkwardly.

“That’s Luke — who does that?” said Mr. Flood after a moment, when this information had had time to penetrate.

“Yes, sir. That’s Luke.”

“And he’s the one that stutters?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The one that used to have the agency for The Saturday Evening Post and did all that talking when he sold ’em to you?”

“Yes, sir. That’s Luke.”

“And what d’you say he’s doing now?” said Mr. Flood heavily. “Selling farm machinery?”

“Yes, sir. That’s what he’s doing.”

“Then, by God,” said Mr. Flood, with a sudden and explosive emphasis which, after his former attitude of heavy, brutal stupefaction, was startling, “he’ll do it!” The other men laughed and Mr. Flood shook his ponderous, crimson head slowly from side to side to emphasize his conviction in the matter.

“If any one can sell ’em, he’ll do it,” he said positively. “That boy could sell Palm Beach suits to the Esquimaux. They’d have to buy ’em just to keep him from talking them to death.”

“I’ll tell you what I saw him do one time,” said the politician, shifting his weight a little in order to accommodate himself more comfortably to the motion of the train. “I was standing in front of the post office one day talking to Dave Redmond about some property he owned out on the Haw Creek Road — oh, it must have been almost fifteen years ago — when here he comes hustling along, you know, with a big bundle of his papers under his arm. Well, he sails right into us, talking about a mile a minute and going so fast neither of us had a chance to get a word in edgeways. ‘Here you are, gentlemen,’ he says, ‘hot off the press, just the thing you’ve been waiting for, this week’s edition of The Saturday Evening Post, five cents, only a nickel, the twentieth part of a dollar.’ By that time,” said Mr. Candler, “he had the thing all opened up and shoved up right under Dave Redmond’s nose, and he was turning the pages and telling him all about the different pieces it had in it and who wrote them and what was in them, and what a bargain it was for five cents. ‘W-w-w-why,’ he says, ‘if you b-b-b-bought it in a book, why it’d cost you a d-d-d-dollar and a half and then,’ he says, ‘it wouldn’t be half as good.’ Well, Dave was getting sort of red in the face by that time,” Mr. Candler said, “and I could see he was sort of annoyed at being interrupted, but the boy kept right on with his spiel and wouldn’t give up. ‘I don’t want it,’ says Dave, ‘I’m busy,’ and he tries to turn away from him, but Luke moves right around to the other side and goes after him about twice as hard as before. ‘Go on, go on,’ says Dave. ‘We’re busy! I don’t want it! I can’t read!’ he says. ‘All right,’ says Luke, ‘then you can look at the p-p-p-pictures. Why, the pictures alone,’ he says, ‘are w-w-w-worth a half a dollar. It’s the b-b-b-bargain of a lifetime,’ he says. Well, the boy was pressing him pretty hard and I guess Dave lost his temper. He sort of knocked the magazine away from him and shouted, ‘Damn it, I told you that I didn’t want it, and I mean it! Now go on! We’re busy.’ Well,” said Mr. Candler, “Luke didn’t say a word for a moment. He took his magazine and put it under his arm again, and he just stood there looking at Dave Redmond for a moment, and then he said, just as quiet as you please, ‘All right, sir. You’re the doctor. But I think you’re going to regret it!’ And then he turned and walked away from us. Well, sir,” said Mr. Candler, laughing, “Dave Redmond’s face was a study. You could see he felt pretty small to think he had shouted at the boy like that, and acted as he did. And Luke hadn’t gone twenty feet before Dave Redmond called him back. ‘Here, son,’ he says, diving his hand down into his pocket, ‘give me one of those things! I may never read it but it’s worth a dollar just to hear you talk.’ And he gave him a dollar, too, and made him take it,” Mr. Candler said, “and from that day on Dave Redmond was one of the biggest boosters that Luke had. . . . ‘I think you’re going to regret it,’” said Mr. Candler again, laughing at the memory. “That’s the thing that did it — that’s what got him — the way the boy just looked at him and said, ‘All right, sir, but I think you’re going to regret it.’ That did the trick, all right.” And pleased with his story and the memory it evoked, Mr. Candler looked mildly out of the window for a moment, smiling.

“That was Luke that done that?” Mr. Flood demanded hoarsely after a moment, with his air of brutal and rather stunned surprise. “The one that stutters?”

“Yes, that’s the one all right,” said Mr. Candler. “That’s who it was.”

Mr. Flood pondered this information for a moment with his bulging eyes still fastened on Mr. Candler in their look of stupefied curiosity. Then, as the full import of what he had heard at length soaked into his intelligence, he shook his great coarse head once, slowly, in a movement of ponderous but emphatic satisfaction, and said with hoarse conviction:

“Well, he’s a good ’un! If any one can sell ’em, he’s the one.”

This judgment was followed by a brief but heavy pause, which was broken in a moment by the voice of the pompous, swarthy little man who, in a tone of detached curiosity, said:

“Whatever became of that other boy — the one who used to work there in The Courier office when you owned it? What was his name, anyway?”

“Ben,” said Mr. Flood heavily, but without hesitation. “That was Ben.” Here he coughed in an alarming, phlegmy sort of way, cleared his throat and spat chokingly into the spittoon at his feet, wiped his mouth with his wadded handkerchief and in a moment, panting for breath, wheezed:

“Ben was the one that worked for me.”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes!” the swarthy little man said rapidly, as if now it all came back to him. “Ben! That was the one! Whatever became of him? I haven’t seen him recently.”

“He’s dead,” said Mr. Flood, still wheezing rapidly for breath and gazing at the spittoon. “That’s the reason you haven’t seen him,” he said seriously. And suddenly, as if the long-awaited moment had come, he bent over, torn by a fit of choking and phlegmy sounds of really astounding proportions. When it was over, he raised himself, settled back slowly and painfully in his seat, and for a moment, with closed eyes, did nothing but wheeze rapidly. In a moment, still with closed eyes, he gasped almost inaudibly:

“Ben was the one that died.”

“Oh, yes! I do remember now,” the pompous little man declared, nodding his head sharply with an air of conviction. “That’s been some time ago, hasn’t it?” he said to the boy.

“He died two years ago,” the boy replied, “during the war.”

“Oh, that’s so, he did! I remember now!” the man cried instantly, with an air of recollection that somehow said that he remembered nothing. “He was overseas at the time, wasn’t he?” he asked smoothly.

“No, sir,” the boy answered. “He was at home. He died of pneumonia — during that big epidemic.”

“I know,” the man said regretfully. “That got a lot of the boys. Ben was in service at the time, wasn’t he?”

“No,” the boy answered. “He never got in. Luke was the one who was in service. Ben tried to get in twice but he couldn’t pass the examinations.”

“Is that so?” the man said vaguely. “Well, I was mighty sorry to hear about his death. Old Ben was one fine boy!”

Nothing was said for a moment.

“I’ll tell you how fine he was,” Mr. Flood, who had been wheezing with closed eyes, now grunted suddenly, glaring solemnly about him with an air of brutal earnestness. “Now I think I knew that boy about as well as any man alive — he worked for me for almost fifteen years — started out when he was ten years old as a route-boy on The Courier and kept right on working for my paper until just a year or two before he died! And I’m here to tell you,” he wheezed solemnly, “that they don’t come any better than Ben!” Here he glowered around him pugnaciously as if the character of a dead saint had been called in question. “Now he wasn’t one of your big talkers who’d promise everything and know nothing. Ben was a do-er, not a talker. You could depend on him,” said Mr. Flood, hoarsely and impressively. “When he told you he’d do a thing, you’d know it was going to get done! As regular as a clock and as steady as the day is long! And as quiet a fellow as you ever saw,” said Mr. Flood. “That was Ben for you! Am I right?” he demanded, suddenly turning to the boy. “Was that Ben?”

“Yes, sir,” the boy answered. “That was Ben.”

“And until you asked him something he’d go for days at a time without speaking to you, but I knew he didn’t mean anything by it, it was just his way. He believed in tending to his own business and he expected every one else to do the same.” And for a moment, exhausted by these eulogies, he wheezed rapidly.

“Well, the world would be a lot better off if there were more like him,” the pompous, swarthy little man now said virtuously, as if this sentiment expressed his own pious belief and practice. “There are too many people sticking their noses in other people’s business, as it is.”

“Well, they didn’t stick their noses in Ben’s business,” said Mr. Flood with grim emphasis, “not after the first time, anyway. But they didn’t come any better than that boy. I couldn’t have thought more of him if he’d been my own son,” he concluded piously and then gasped stertorously, lifted his cigar slowly to his lips with the thick, gouty tenderness that characterized all his movements and for a moment puffed slowly, wheezing reflectively over it.

“Not that he was ever much like a boy,” he grunted suddenly, with a surprising flash of insight. “He was always more like an old man — didn’t ever seem to be a kid like the others. Why,” suddenly he chuckled with a phlegmy hoarseness, “I remember when he first began to come down there in the morning as a carrier, the other kids all called him ‘Pop.’ That was Ben for you. Always had that scowl on his face, even when he was laughing — as serious and earnest as an old man. But he was one of the best — as good as they come.” Again he coughed chokingly, bent over with a painful grunt, and cleared his throat phlegmily into the polished brass spittoon beside him. Then, wheezing a little, he drew the wadded silk handkerchief from a side-pocket, wiped his mouth with it, raised himself up in his seat a little, and settled back slowly, tenderly, wheezing, with a sigh! Then for a moment he laboured painfully, eyes closed, with his rapid wheezing breath and finally, when it seemed he must be exhausted by his efforts and done with conversation for the evening, he wheezed faintly and unexpectedly.

“That was Ben.”

“Oh, I remember that boy now,” the swarthy pompous-looking man suddenly broke in with a flash of recollective inspiration —“Wasn’t Ben the boy who used to stand in the windows of The Courier offices when the World Series was being played, and post the score up on the score-board as they phoned it in to him?”

“Yes,” wheezed Mr. Flood, nodding heavily. “You got him now, all right. That was Ben.”

“I remember now,” the swarthy little man said thoughtfully, with a far-away look in his eye. “I was thinking about him the other day when I went by The Courier office. They were playing the Series then. They had another fellow in the window and I wondered what had become of him. So that was Ben?”

“Yes,” Mr. Flood wheezed hoarsely again. “That was Ben.”

For a moment as the gouty old rake had spoken of the boy’s dead brother, the boy had felt within him a sense of warmth: a wakening of dead time, a stir of grateful affection for the gross old man as if there might have been in this bloated carcass some trace of understanding for the dead boy of whom he spoke — an understanding faint and groping as a dog who bays the moon might have of the sidereal universe, and yet genuine and recognizable.

And for a moment present time fades out and the boy sits there staring blindly out at the dark earth that strokes for ever past the train, and now he has the watch out and feels it in his hands. . . . And suddenly Ben is standing there before his vision, smoking, and scowls down through the window of the office at the boy.

He jerks his head in a peremptory gesture: the boy, obedient to his brother’s command, enters the office and stands there waiting at the counter. Ben steps down from the platform in the window, puts the earphones on a table and walks over to the place where the boy is standing. For a moment, scowling fiercely, he stands there looking at the boy across the counter. The scowl deepens, he makes a sudden threatening gesture of his hard white hand as if to strike the boy, but instead he reaches across the counter quickly, seizes the boy by the shoulders, pulls him closer, and with rough but skilful fingers tugs, pulls and jerks the frayed string of neck-tie which the boy is wearing into a more orderly and presentable shape.

The boy starts to go.

“Wait!” says Ben, quietly, in a deliberately off-hand kind of tone. He opens a drawer below the counter, takes out a small square package, and scowling irritably, and without looking at the boy, he thrusts it at him. “Here’s something for you,” he says, and walks away.

“What is it?” The boy takes the package and examines it with a queer numb sense of expectancy and growing joy.

“Why don’t you open it and see?” Ben says, his back still turned, and scowling down into a paper on the desk.

“Open it?” the boy says, staring at him stupidly.

“Yes, open it, fool!” Ben snarls. “It’s not going to bite you!”

While the boy fumbles with the cords that tie the package, Ben prowls over toward the counter with his curious, loping, pigeon-toed stride, leans on it with his elbows and, scowling, begins to look up and down the ‘want-ad.’ columns, while blue, pungent smoke coils slowly from his nostrils. By this time, the boy has taken off the outer wrapping of the package, and is holding a small case, beautifully heavy, of sumptuous blue velvet, in his hands.

“Well, did you look at it?” Ben says, still scowling up and down the ‘want-ads.’ of the paper, without looking at the boy.

The boy finds the spring and presses it, the top opens, inside upon its rich cushion of white satin is a gold watch, and a fine gold chain. It is a miracle of design, almost as thin and delicate as a wafer. The boy stares at it with bulging eyes and in a moment stammers:

“It’s — it’s a watch!”

“Does it look like an alarm clock?” Ben jeers quietly, as he turns a page and begins to scowl up and down the advertisements of another column.

“It’s — for me?” the boy says thickly, slowly, as he stares at it.

“No,” Ben says, “it’s for Napoleon Bonaparte, of course! . . . You little idiot! Don’t you know what day this is? Have I got to do all the thinking for you? Don’t you ever use your head for anything except a hat-rack? . . . Well,” he goes on quietly in a moment, still looking at his paper, “what do you think of it? . . . There’s a spring in the back that opens up,” he goes on casually, “Why don’t you look at it?”

The boy turns the watch over, feels the smooth golden surface of that shining wafer, finds the spring, and opens it. The back of the watch springs out, upon the inner surface is engraved, in delicate small words, this inscription:

“To Eugene Gant
Presented To Him On His Twelfth Birthday
By His Brother
B. H. Gant
October 3, 1912”

“Well,” Ben says quietly in a moment. “Did you read what it says?”

“I’d just like to say —” the boy begins in a thick, strange voice, staring blindly down at the still open watch.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Ben says, lifting his scowling head in the direction of his unknown demon, and jerking his head derisively towards the boy. “Listen to this, won’t you? . . . Now, for God’s sake, try to take good care of it and don’t abuse it!” he says quickly and irritably. “You’ve got to look after a watch the same as anything else. Old man Enderby”— this is the name of the jeweller from whom he has bought the watch —“told me that a watch like that was good for fifty years, if you take care of it. . . . You know,” he goes on quietly, insultingly, “you’re not supposed to drive nails with it or use it for a hammer. You know that, don’t you?” he says, and for the first time turns and looks quietly at the boy. “Do you know what a watch is for?”

“Yes.”

“What is it for?”

“To keep time with,” says the boy.

Ben says nothing for a moment, but looks at him.

“Yes,” he says quietly at length, with all the bitter weariness of a fathomless resignation and despair, the infinite revulsion, scorn, disgust which life has caused in him. “That’s it. That’s what it’s for. To keep time with.” The weary irony in his voice had deepened to a note of passionate despair. “And I hope to God you keep it better than the rest of us! Better than Mama or the old man — better than me! God help you if you don’t! . . . Now go on home,” he says quietly in a moment, “before I kill you.”

“To keep time with!”

What is this dream of time, this strange and bitter miracle of living? Is it the wind that drives the leaves down bare paths fleeing? Is it the storm-wild flight of furious days, the storm-swift passing of the million faces, all lost, forgotten, vanished as a dream? Is it the wind that howls above the earth, is it the wind that drives all things before its lash, is it the wind that drives all men like dead ghosts fleeing? Is it the one red leaf that strains there on the bough and that for ever will be fleeing? All things are lost and broken in the wind; the dry leaves scamper down the path before us, in their swift-winged dance of death the dead souls flee along before us driven with rusty scuffle before the fury of the demented wind. And October has come again, has come again.

What is this strange and bitter miracle of life? Is it to feel, when furious day is done, the evening hush, the sorrow of lost, fading light, far sounds and broken cries, and footsteps, voices, music, and all lost — and something murmurous, immense and mighty in the air?

And we have walked the pavements of a little town and known the passages of barren night, and heard the wheel, the whistle and the tolling bell, and lain in the darkness waiting, giving to silence the huge prayer of our intolerable desire. And we have heard the sorrowful silence of the river in October — and what is there to say? October has come again, has come again, and this world, this life, this time are stranger than a dream.

May it not be that some day from this dream of time, this chronicle of smoke, this strange and bitter miracle of life in which we are the moving and phantasmal figures, we shall wake? Knowing our father’s voice upon the porch again, the flowers, the grape-vines, the low rich moons of waning August, and the tolling bell — and instantly to know we live, that we have dreamed and have awakened, and find then in our hands some object, like this real and palpable, some gift out of the lost land and the unknown world as token that it was no dream — that we have really been there? And there is no more to say.

For now October has come back again, the strange and lonely month comes back again, and you will not return.

Up on the mountain, down in the valley, deep, deep, in the hill, Ben — cold, cold, cold.

“To keep time with!”

And suddenly the scene, the shapes, the voices of the men about him swam back into their focus, and he could hear the rhythmed pounding of the wheels below him, and in his palm the frail-numbered visage of the watch stared blank and plain at him its legend. It was one minute after twelve o’clock, Sunday morning, October the third, 1920, and he was hurtling across Virginia, and this world, this life, this time were stranger than a dream.

The train had halted for a moment at one of the Virginia towns, and for a moment the people were conscious of the strange yet casual familiarity of all those sounds which suddenly will intercept the rhythmic spell of time and memory which a journey in a train can cast upon its passengers. Suddenly this spell was broken by the intrusion of peculiar things — of sounds and voices — the sense of instant recognition, union to a town, a life which they had never known, but with which they now felt immediately familiar. A railwayman was coming swiftly down the station platform beneath the windows of the train, pausing from time to time to hammer on the car-wheels of each truck. A negro toiled past below them with a heavy rattling truck in tow, piled high with baggage.

And elsewhere there were the casual voices of the railwaymen — conductors, porters, baggage masters, station men — greeting each other with friendly words, without surprise, speaking of weather, work, plans for the future, saying farewell in the same way. Then the bell tolled, the whistle blew, the slow panting of the engine came back to them, the train was again in motion; the station, and the station lights, a glimpse of streets, the thrilling, haunting, white-glazed incandescence of a cotton mill at night, the hard last lights of town, slid past the windows of the train. The train was in full speed now, and they were rushing on across the dark and lonely earth again.

Then one of the men in the compartment, the politician, who had been looking curiously out of the window at this town and station scene, turned and spoke with a casual interest to the boy:

“Your father’s in Baltimore now, isn’t he, son?” he said.

“Yes, sir. He’s at Hopkins. Luke’s up there with him.”

“Well, I thought I read something in the paper a week or two back about his being there,” said the man with the florid face.

“What’s wrong with him?” Mr. Flood demanded coarsely in a moment, after he had absorbed this information. “Ain’t he feeling good?”

The boy shifted nervously in his seat before he answered. His father was dying of cancer, but for some reason it did not seem possible or proper for him to say this to these men. He said:

“He’s got some kind of kidney trouble, I think. He goes up there for radium treatments.”

“It’s the same thing John Rankin had,” the florid-faced man glibly interposed at this moment. “Some sort of prostate trouble, isn’t it?” he said.

“Yes, sir, that’s it,” the boy said. For some reason he felt a sense of relief and gratefulness towards the man with the florid face. The easy, glib and false assurance that his father’s “trouble” was “the same thing John Rankin had” seemed to give the disease a respectable standing and to divest the cancer of its fatal, shameful and putrescent horror.

“I know what it is,” the florid-faced man was saying, nodding his head in a confident manner. “It’s the same thing John Rankin had. A lot of men get it after they’re fifty. John told me he went through agony with it for ten years. Said he used to be up with it a dozen times a night. It got so he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t rest, he couldn’t do anything but walk the floor with it. It got him down so that he was nothing but skin and bones, he was walking around like a dead man. Then he went up there and had that operation and he’s been a new man ever since. He looks better than he’s looked in twenty years. I was talking to him the other day and he told me he didn’t have an ache or a pain in the world. He said he was going to live to be a hundred and he looked it — the picture of health.

“Well,” he said in a friendly tone, now turning to the boy, “remember me to your father when you see him. Tell him Frank Candler asked to be remembered to him.”

“Are you and him good friends?” Mr. Flood demanded heavily, after another staring pause, with the brutal, patient, and somehow formidable curiosity which belonged to him. “You know him well?”

“Who? Mr. Gant?” Mr. Candler cried with the hearty geniality of the politician, which seemed to suggest he knew the man so well that the very question was amusing to him. “Why, I’ve known him all my life — I’ve known him ever since he first came to Altamont — let’s see, that’s all of forty years ago when he first came here?” Mr. Candler went on reflectively, “or no, maybe a little less than that. Wait a minute.” He considered seriously for a moment. “The first time I ever saw your father,” said Mr. Candler very slowly and impressively, with a frown on his face and not looking at any one, but staring straight before him, “was in October, 1882 — and I believe — I believe,” he said strongly, “that was the very year he came to town — yes, sir! I’m positive of it!” he cried. “For Altamont was nothing but a cross-roads village in those days — I don’t believe we had 2,000 people there — why, that’s all in the world it was.” Mr. Candler now interrupted himself heartily. “The courthouse up there on the square and a few stores around it — when you got two blocks away you were right out in the country. Didn’t Captain Bob Porter offer me three lots he owned down there on Pisgah Avenue, not a block from the square, for a thousand dollars, and didn’t I laugh at him to think he was fool enough to ask such a price as that and expect to get it! Why!” Mr. Candler declared, with a full countrified laugh, “it was nothing but a mud-hole down in the holler. I’ve seen old Captain Porter’s hawgs wallerin’ around in it many’s the time. ‘And you,’ I said to him, ‘you — do you think I’d pay you a price like that for a mud-hole? Why, you must think I’m crazy, sure enough.’ ‘All right,’ he says, ‘have it your own way, but you’ll live to see the day you’ll regret not buying it. You’ll live to see the day when you can’t buy ONE of those lots for a thousand dollars!’ ONE of them!” Mr. Candler now cried in hearty self-derision. “Why, if I owned one of those lots today, I’d be a rich man! I don’t believe you could buy a foot of that land today for less than a thousand dollars, could you, Bruce?” he said, addressing himself to the swarthy, pompous-looking man who sat beside the boy.

“Five thousand a front foot would come closer to it, I should think,” the pompous little man replied, with the crisp, brisk and almost strutting assurance that characterized all his words and gestures. He crossed and uncrossed his fat little legs briskly as he uttered these words and then sat there “all reared back” as the saying goes, unable even to reach the floor with his fat little legs, but smiling a complacent smile and simply exuding conceit and strutting self-satisfaction from every pore. “Yes, sir!” the swarthy little man continued, pompously, “I should doubt very much if you could buy a foot of that property for less than $5,000 today!”

“Well,” said Mr. Candler with a satisfied air. “That’s what I thought! I knew it would be way up there somewheres. But I could have had the whole thing once for a thousand dollars. I’ve kicked myself in the seat of the pants a thousand times since to think what a fool I was for not taking it when I had the chance! I’d be a rich man today if I had! It just goes to show you, doesn’t it?” he concluded indefinitely.

“Yes, sir,” the pompous, swarthy little man replied, in his dry, briskly assured tones, “it goes to show that our hindsight is usually a great deal better than our foresight!” And he glanced about him complacently, obviously pleased with his wit and convinced that he had said something remarkably pungent and original.

“It was about that time when I first met your father,” said Mr. Candler, turning to the boy again. “Along there in the fall of ‘82 — that’s when it was all right — and I don’t think he’d been in town then more than a month, for in a town that size, I’d have known if he’d been there longer. And yes, of course!” he cried sharply, struck by sudden recollection, “that very first day I saw him he was standing there in front of his shop with two nigger men, unloading some blocks of marble and granite and tombstones, I reckon, and moving them back into his shop. I guess he was just moving in at the time. He’d rented an old shack over there at the north-east corner of the square where the Sluder building is now. That’s where it was, all right. I was working for old man Weaver at the time — he had a grocery and general-goods store there opposite the old courthouse about where the Blue Ridge Coal and Ice Company is now. I was going back to work after dinner and had just turned the corner at the Square there from Academy Street when I saw your father. I remember stopping to watch him for a moment because there was something about his appearance — I don’t know what it was, but if you saw him once you’d never forget him — there was something about the way he looked and talked and worked that was different from any one I’d ever seen. Of course, he was an awful tall, big-boned, powerful-looking sort of man — how tall is your father, son?”

“He was about six feet five,” the boy answered, “but I guess he’s not that much now — he’s stooped over some since he got old.”

“Well, he didn’t stoop in those days,” said Mr. Candler. “He always carried himself as straight as an arrow. I noticed that. He was an awful big man — not that he had much weight on him — he was always lean and SKINNY like — but he LOOKED big — he had big bones — his FRAME was big!” cried Mr. Candler. “You’ll make a big man too when you fill out,” he continued, giving the boy an appraising look. “Of course, you look like your mother’s people, you’re a Pentland and they’re fleshy people, but you’ve got the old man’s frame. You may make a bigger man than he is when you put on weight and widen out — but it wasn’t that your father was so big — I think he looked bigger than he really was — it was something else about him — about the way he gave orders to the niggers and went about his work,” said Mr. Candler, in a rather puzzled tone. “I don’t know what it was, but I’d never seen any one like him before. For one thing he was dressed so good!” he said suddenly. “He always wore his good clothes when he worked — I’d never seen a man who did hard labour with his hands who dressed that way. Here he was, you know, sweating over those big blocks of stone with those two niggers and wearing better clothes than you and me would go to church in. Of course, he had his coat off, and his cuffs rolled back, and he was wearing one of those big striped aprons that go the whole way up across the shoulders — but you could see his clothes were GOOD,” said Mr. Candler. “Looked like black broadcloth that had been made by a tailor and wearing a BOILED shirt, mind you, and one of those wing collars with a black silk neck-tie — and not afraid to work, either! Why, the first thing I saw him do,” said Mr. Candler, laughing, “he let out a string of words at those niggers you could have heard from here to yonder because they were sweating and straining to get a big hunk of marble up on the rollers, that they hadn’t been able to budge an inch. ‘Merciful God,’ he says, that’s just the way he talked, you know —‘Merciful God! Has it come to this that I must do everything for myself while you stand there gloating at my agony? I could as soon look for help from a couple of God-damned wooden Indians! In the name of God, stand back. I’ll do it myself, sick and feeble as I am!’ Well,” said Mr. Candler, chuckling with the recollection, “with that he reaches down and gets a grip on that big hunk of stone and gives a heave and up she comes on to the rolling pins as nice and easy as anything you ever saw. Well, sir, you should have seen the look upon those niggers’ faces — I thought their eyes were going to pop out of their heads. And that’s the first time I ever spoke to him, you know. I can remember the very words I said. I said to him, ‘Well, if you call that being sick and feeble, most of the folks up in this part of the country are already dead and in their graves.’”

The man’s story had stirred in the boy’s mind a thousand living memories of his father. For a moment it seems to him that the lost world which these words evoked has never died, lives yet in all the radiant and enchanted colour of his childhood, in all its proud, dense, and single fabric of passion, fury, certitude and joy. Every memory that the story brought to life is part of him. There are a thousand buried, nameless and forgotten lives, ten thousand strange and secret tongues alive now, urgent, swarming in his blood, and thronging at the gateways of his memory. They are the lives of the lost wilderness, his mother’s people; they are the tongues, the faces of the secret land, the dark half of his heart’s desire, the fertile golden earth from which his father came.

He knows the farmer boy who stood beside the road and watched the dusty rebels marching past towards Gettysburg. He smells the sweet fragrance of that lavish countryside, he hears the oaths, the jests, the laughter of the marching soldiers, he hears the cricketing stitch of noon in drowsy fields, the myriad woodnotes, secret, green, and cool, the thrumming noises. He feels the brooding wait and murmur of hot afternoon, the trembling of the distant guns in the hot air, and the vast, oncoming hush and peace and silence of the dusk.

And then he is lying beside his father in the little gabled room upstairs. He is there beside his father and his father’s brothers in the darkness — waiting, silent, waiting — with an unspoken single question in their hearts. They are thinking of an older brother who that night is lying twelve miles away, shot through the lungs. He sees his father’s gaunt, long form in darkness, the big-boned hands, the gaunt, long face, the cold, green-grey, restless and weary eyes, so deep and untelling, so strangely lonely, and the slanting, almost reptilian large formation of the skull that has, somehow, its own strange dignity — as of some one lost. And the great stars of America blaze over them, the vast and lonely earth broods round them, then as now, with its secret and mysterious presences, and then as now the million-noted ululation of the night throngs up from silence the song of all its savage, dark and measureless fecundity. And he lies there in the darkness with his father and the brothers — silent, waiting — their cold, grey eyes turned upward to the loneliness of night, the blazing stars, having no words to say the thing they feel, the dream of time and the dark wonder of man’s destiny which has drenched with blood the old earth, the familiar wheat, and fused that day the image of immortal history in a sleepy country town twelve miles away.

He sees the gaunt figure of the stone-cutter coming across the square at his earth-devouring stride. He hears him muttering underneath his breath the mounting preludes of his huge invective. He sees him striding on for ever, bent forward in his haste, wetting his thumb and clearing his throat with an infuriated and anticipatory relish as he comes. He sees him striding round the corner, racing up-hill towards the house, bearing huge packages of meat beneath his arm. He sees him take the high front steps four at a time, hasten like a hurricane into the house, lay down the meat upon the kitchen table, and then without a pause or introduction, comes the storm — fire, frenzy, curses, woes and lamentations, and then news out of the streets, the morning’s joy, the smoking and abundant dinner.

A thousand memories of that life of constant and unresting fury brim in the boy’s mind in an instant. At this moment, with telescopic force, all of these memories of his father’s life become fused and blurred to one terrific image, in which it seems that the whole packed chronicle, from first to last, is perfectly comprised.

At the same moment the boy became conscious that the men were getting up around him, preparatory to departure, and that the florid-faced man, who had been speaking of his father, had laid his hand upon his shoulder in a friendly gesture, and was speaking to him.

“Good night, son,” the man was saying. “I’m getting off at Washington. If I don’t see you again, good luck to you. I suppose you’ll be getting off at Baltimore to see your father before you go on, won’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, sir,” the boy stammered confusedly, getting to his feet.

“Remember me to him, won’t you? Tell him you saw Frank Candler on the train and he sent his best regards.”

“Yes, sir — thank you — I will,” the boy said.

“All right. And good luck to you, boy,” the politician said, giving him his broad, fleshy and rather tender hand. “Give ’em hell when you get up there,” he said quietly, with a firm, friendly clasp and a good-natured wink.

“Yes — I certainly will — thank you —” the boy stammered, flaming in the face, with a feeling of proud hope, and with affection for the man who had spoken to him.

Then the man had gone, but his words had brought back to the boy suddenly the knowledge that in the morning he was to see his father. And that knowledge instantly destroyed all the exultancy of flight and darkness, the incredible realization of his escape, the image of new lands, the new life, and the shining city that had been swelling in his spirit all night long. It had interposed its leaden face between him and this image of wild joy towards which he was rushing onward in the darkness, and its grey oppressive cloud weighed down upon him suddenly a measureless weight of dull weariness, horror and disgust.

He knew that next day he must meet his brother and his father, he knew that the dreaded pause and interruption of his flight would last but two short days, and that in this brief time he might see and know for the last time all that was living of his father, and yet the knowledge of this hated meeting filled him with loathing, a terrible desire to get away from it as quickly as possible, to forget it, to escape from it for ever.

He knew in his heart that for the wretched, feeble, whining old man whom he must meet next day, he felt no love whatever. He knew, indeed, that he felt instead a kind of hate — the wretched kind of hatred that comes from intolerable pity without love, from suffering and disgust, from the agony of heart and brain and nerves, the poisonous and morbid infection of our own lives, which a man dying of a loathsome disease awakes in us, and from the self-hate, the self-loathing that it makes us feel because of our terrible desire to escape him, to desert him, to blot out the horrible memory we have for him, utterly to forget him.

Now the three men remaining in the compartment were rising to depart. Old Flood got up with a painful grunt, carefully dropped the chewed butt of his cigar into the brass spittoon, and walked tenderly with a gouty and flat-footed shuffle across the little room to the mirrored door of the latrine. He opened it, entered, and closed it behind him. The pompous swarthy little man got up, stretched his short fat arms out stiffly, and said, “Well, I’ll be turning in. I’ll see you in the morning, won’t I, Jim?”

The man with the thin, tight, palely freckled face, to whom these words had been addressed, looked up quickly from the magazine he was reading, and said sharply, in a rather cold, surprised and distant tone:

“What? . . . Oh! Yes. Good night, Wade.”

He got up then, carefully detached the horn-rimmed spectacles from his long, pointed nose, folded them carefully and put them in the breast pocket of his coat, and then took up the brief-case at his side. At this moment, a man, accompanied by Robert Weaver and by another youth who was about the same age as the boy, entered the smoking-room.

The man, who was in his middle thirties, was a tall lean Englishman, already bald, with bitten and incisive features, a cropped moustache, and the high hard flush of the steady drinker.

His name was John Hugh William Macpherson Marriott. He was the youngest son of an ancient family of the English nobility and just a year or two before he had married the great heiress, Virginia Willets. To the boy, and to all the other men in the train, except the man with the cold thin face and pointed nose, the Englishman was known only by sight and rumour, and his sudden entrance into the smoking-room had much the same effect as would the appearance of a figure from some legendary world of which they had often heard, but which they had never seen.

The reason for this feeling was that the Englishman and his wife lived on the great estate near town which her father had built and left to her. All the people in the town had seen this immense estate, had driven over some of its 90,000 acres, had seen its farms, its fields, its pastures, and its forests, its dairies, buildings, and its ranges of wild, smoke-blue mountains. And finally they had all seen from a distance its great mansion house, the gables, roof, and spires of a huge stone structure modelled on one of the great chateaux of France. But few of them had ever been inside the place or known the wonderful people who lived there.

All the lives of these fortunate people had become, therefore, as strange and wonderful to the people of the town as the lives of legendary heroes. And in a curious way that great estate had shaped the whole life of the town. To be a part of that life, to be admitted there, to know the people who belonged to it would have been the highest success, the greatest triumph that most of the people in the town could imagine. They could not admit it, but it was the truth. At the heart of the town’s desire was the life of that great house.

The Englishman had entered the smoking compartment with the driving movement of a man who has been drinking hard, but is used to it. The moment that he entered, however, and saw the other people there he stopped short, with a kind of stunned abruptness. In a moment, after an astounded silence, he spoke to them, greeting them with the rough, brief, blurted-out friendliness of a shy and reticent man:

“Hello! . . . Oh, hello! . . . How do?” He grinned formally and suddenly began to stare with an astounded expression at the gouty figure of old Flood who at just this moment had opened the door of the latrine and was shuffling painfully out into the compartment. Mr. Flood stopped and returned his look in kind, with his bulging and bejowled stare of comic stupefaction.

In a moment more the Englishman recovered himself, grimaced with his shy, quick, toothy grin, and blurted out at Flood, as to the other men:

“Oh, hello! Hello! How d’ye do?”

“I’m pretty good, thank you!” old Flood said hoarsely and slowly, after a heavy pause. “How are you?” and continued to stare heavily and stupidly at him.

But already the Englishman had turned abruptly from him, his face and lean neck reddening instantly and fiercely with the angry embarrassment of a shy man. And with the same air of astonished discovery he now addressed himself to the man with the long thin nose and palely freckled face, blurting his words out rapidly and by rushes as before, but somehow conveying to the others the sense of his intimacy and friendship with this man and of their own exclusion.

“Oh! . . . There you are, Jim!” he was saying in his astounded and explosive fashion. “Where the devil have you been all night? . . . I say!” he went on rapidly without waiting for an answer, “won’t you come in and have a spot with me before you turn in?”

Every suggestion of the disdain and cold aloofness which had characterized the other man’s manner towards his fellow-passengers had now vanished at the Englishman’s words. Indeed, in the way he now came forward, smiling, and put his hand in a friendly manner on the Englishman’s arm, there was something almost scrambling in its effusive eagerness. “Why yes, Hugh,” he said hastily. “I’d be delighted, of course! . . . Just a minute,” he said in an almost confused tone of voice, “till I get my brief-case. . . . Where did I leave it? Oh, here it is!” he cried, picking it up, and making for the door with his companion, “I’m all ready now! Let’s go!”

“Hugh! Hugh!” cried Robert who had accompanied the Englishman when he entered the compartment, and whom the Englishman now seemed to have forgotten entirely, “will I see you tomorrow before you get off?” The words were spoken in a deep, rapid, eager tone of voice, and in the tone and manner of the youth who spoke them there was the same suggestion of almost fawning eagerness that had characterized the older man.

“Eh! What’s that?” the Englishman cried in a startled tone, turning abruptly and staring at the young man who had addressed him. “Oh! Yes, Robert! I’m stopping at Washington! Look in for a moment, won’t you, if you’re up!”

Something in his tone and manner plainly and definitely said that the young man’s company was no longer wanted for the evening, but the youth immediately nodded his head energetically and decisively, saying in a satisfied manner:

“Good! Good! I’ll do that! I’ll be in to say good-bye tomorrow morning.”

“Right!” the Englishman said curtly. “Good night! . . . Good night! . . . Good night!” he blurted out, turning round and addressing every one, yet seeing no one, in a series of toothy grimaces. “Oh — good night!” he said suddenly, before going out, grinning and shaking hands briefly, in a gesture of permanent dismissal, with the other young man, who was a blond insignificant-looking youth, obviously a “hanger-on,” with whom the Englishman evidently cared to have no further acquaintance. Then, pushing his companion before him through the green curtain, he went out suddenly with the same desperate shy abruptness, and in a moment the other men, saying good night all around, had followed him, and the three young men were left alone in the compartment. It was now after one o’clock. Outside, the moon was up, flooding the dark earth of Virginia with a haunting light. That grand, moon-haunted earth stroked calmly past and, through the media of its changeless and unceasing change, the recession and recurrent movement of the enchanted scene, the train made on for ever its tremendous monotone that was itself the rhythm of suspended time, the sound of silence and for ever.

For a moment, after the men had gone, Robert stared down sternly and quizzically at the boy, with an expression of mock gravity, and then, in his rapid, eager, deep-toned and rather engaging voice, said:

“Well, Colonel? . . . What have you to say for yourself? . . . Was there grass on the back of her back, or was the foul deed perpetrated in your Hudson Super Six? . . . Come, sir! Explain yourself! Were you drunk or sober?” And suddenly lifting his thin, young, yet almost tortured-looking face and his restless eyes, which were inflamed with drink, and in whose haggard depths the incipient flashes of the madness which later would destroy him were already visible, he laughed suddenly, a strange, small, hoarsely falsetto kind of laugh, jerking his head towards the boy, and saying in an annoying and indefinite way:

“Crazy! Crazy! Crazy! . . . The craziest man I ever saw!” He stopped suddenly and, looking down at the boy for a moment with this same expression of haggard, over-driven restlessness, demanded impatiently:

“What have you been doing by yourself all night? Just sitting there all alone and doing nothing? . . . I’ll swear, I don’t see how you do it! . . . I’d go crazy sitting in one place like that without any one to talk to!” he said in an accusing and impatient tone of voice, as if the other youth had really done some extraordinary and unreasonable thing. He thrust one hand quickly and impatiently into the trousers pocket of his well-cut clothes in such a way that his Delta Kappa Epsilon pin was for a moment visible. Then he stood there, jingling some coins about in his pocket and looking at the boy with his inflamed, restless, furiously desperate eyes. Turning away suddenly, with a movement of impatience, he shook his head in a gesture of astounded disbelief, laughed his little hoarse falsetto laugh again, and said:

“It beats me! . . . Don’t see how he does it! . . . Damnedest man I ever saw! . . . It’d drive me crazy to be alone like that!”

He turned abruptly again, thrust both hands into his pockets, and for a moment stood looking at the boy with the old expression of mock gravity, and with a faintly malicious smile hovering about the edges of his thin, nervous, strongly modelled mouth.

“Do you know what they’re saying about you at home? . . . Do you know what those people think of you? . . . Do you know what all those old women up there are doing now?” he said hoarsely and accusingly, in his deep, sonorous, and rapid tone.

“Now, Robert!” the boy suddenly shouted, in a choking and furious tone, getting to his feet. “Don’t you start that stuff! I’m not going to listen to it! You can’t fool me! They’re not saying anything!”

Robert lifted his thin, finely drawn face and laughed again, his little annoying hoarse falsetto laugh, in which a note of malice and triumph was audible.

“Why, they ARE!” he said solemnly. “It’s the truth! . . . I think you ought to know about it! . . . I heard it everywhere, all over town!”

“Oh, Robert, you’re a liar!” the boy cried furiously. “WHAT did you hear all over town? You heard nothing!”

“Why, I DID!” said Robert solemnly, as before. “I’ll swear it to you. . . . Do you know what I heard the other day?” he went on in a blunt, accusing tone. “I heard that one of those women up there — some old sister in the Baptist Church — said she grew up with your mother and has known her all her life — well, she’s praying for you!” said Robert solemnly. “I’ll swear she is!”

“Praying for me!” the boy cried in an exasperated tone, but at the same time, feeling the numb white nauseous sickness of the heart which the intolerable thought that people are talking in a disparaging manner about him, his talents, or the success or failure of his life, can always bring to a young man. “Praying for me!” he fiercely shouted. “Why the hell should any one pray for me?”

“I know! I know!” said Robert, nodding his head vigorously, and speaking with grave agreement. “That’s what I told them. That’s just the way I felt about it! . . . But some of those people down there think you’ve gone to hell for good. . . . Do you know what I heard a woman say the other day? She said that Eugene Gant had gone straight to the devil since he went away to the State University —”

“Robert, I don’t believe you!” the boy shouted. “You’re making all this up!”

“Why, she did! So help me, God! I heard her say it, as sure as I’m standing here,” swore Robert solemnly. “She said you’d gone down there and taken Vergil Weldon’s courses in philosophy and that you were ruined for life! She said you had turned into a regular infidel — didn’t believe in God or anything any more. . . . Said she certainly did feel sorry for your mother,” said Robert maliciously.

“Feel sorry for my mother!” the boy fairly howled, dancing around now like a maniac. “Why the hell should the old bitch feel sorry for my mother! My mother can take care of herself; she doesn’t need any one to feel sorry for her! . . . All right, then!” he cried bitterly, with sudden acceptation of the other’s story. “Let ’em pray! If that’s the way they feel, let ’em pray till they wear corns on their God-damned knees! The dirty hypocrites!” he cried bitterly. “I’ll show them! Sneaking around behind your back to tell their rotten lies about you — and their talk of praying for your soul! I’m glad I’m out of that damned town! The two-faced bastards! I wouldn’t trust any of them as far as I could throw an elephant by his tail!”

“I know! I know!” said Robert, wagging his head in solemn agreement. “I agree with you absolutely. It’s awful — that’s what it is.”

It was extraordinary that this absurd story, whether true or not, should have had such a violent effect on the emotions of the boy. Yet now that he had been told of some unknown woman’s concern for the salvation of his soul, and that certain people of the praying sort already thought that he was “lost,” the words were fastened in his flesh like rankling and envenomed barbs. And instantly, the moment that he heard this story and had cursed it, he thought that it was true. Now, his mind could no longer remember the time just a moment before when Robert’s words had seemed only an idle and malicious fabrication, probably designed to goad him, or, even if true, of no great importance.

But now, as if the idle gossip of the other youth had really pronounced some fatal and inexorable judgment against his whole life, the boy’s spirit was set against “them” blindly, as against a nameless and hostile antagonist. Plunged suddenly into a dark weather of fatality and grim resolution, something in him was saying grimly and desperately:

“All right, then. If that’s the way they feel about me, I’ll show them.” And seeing the lonely earth outside that went stroking past the windows of the train, he suddenly felt the dark and brooding joy of desperation and escape, and thought again: “Thank God, I’ve got away at last. Now there’s a new land, a new life, new people like myself who will see and know me as I am and value me — and, by God, I’ll show them! I’ll show THEM, all right.”

And at just this moment of his gloomy thoughts, he muttered sombrely, aloud, with sullen face:

“All right! To hell with them! I’ll show them!”

— And was instantly aware that Robert was looking at him, laughing his little, malicious, hoarse, falsetto laugh, and that the other youth, who was a fair-haired, red-cheeked and pleasant-featured boy named Creasman, obviously somewhat inflamed by drink and by his social triumphs of the evening, was now, with an eager excessiveness of good-fellowship, slapping him on the back and saying boisterously:

“Don’t let him kid you, Gene! To hell with them! What do you care what they say, anyway?”

With these words, he produced from his pocket a flask of the raw, colourless, savagely instant corn whisky, of which both of them apparently had been partaking pretty freely, and tendering it to the boy, said:

“Here, take a drink!”

The boy took the flask, pulled out the cork, and putting the bottle to his lips, instantly gulped down two or three powerful swallows of the fiery stuff. For a moment, he stood there blind and choking, instantly robbed of breath, his throat muscles swelling, working, swallowing convulsively in an aching struggle to keep down the revolting and nauseous tasting stuff, and on no account to show the effort it was costing him.

“Is that the kick of the mule, or not?” said the Creasman boy, grinning and taking back his flask. “How is it?”

“Good!” the boy said hoarsely, gasping. “Fine! Best I ever tasted!” And he blinked his eyes rapidly to keep the tears from coming.

“Well, there’s lots more where that came from, boy,” said Creasman. “I’ve got two pint jars of it in my berth. Let me know when you want some more.” And putting the bottle to his lips with a smile, he tilted his head, and drank in long easy swallows which showed he was no novice to the act.

“Damn!” cried Robert, staring at him, in his familiar tone of astounded disbelief. “Do you mean to tell me you can stand there drinking that stuff straight! Phew!” he said, shuddering, and making a face. “That old pukey stuff! Why, it’d rot the guts of a brass monkey! . . . I don’t see how you people do it!” he cried protestingly, as he took the bottle. In three gulps he had drained it to the last drop, and even as he was looking around for a place to throw the empty flask, he shuddered convulsively again, made a contracted grimace of disgust, and said to the others accusingly, with his small falsetto laugh of astounded protest:

“Why, you’ll kill yourself drinking that stuff raw! Don’t you know that? You must be crazy! . . . Wait a minute,” he muttered suddenly, comically, dropping the bottle deftly into his pocket, as the swarthy, pompous little man named Wade entered, attired in blue pyjamas and a dressing-gown, and holding a tooth-brush and a tube of tooth-paste in his hand:

“Good evening, sir! . . . Ah-hah! . . . How d’ye do?” said Robert, bowing slightly and stiffly, and speaking in his grave, staccato, curiously engaging tone.

“Still up, are you, boys?” the pompous little man remarked, with his usual telling aptness.

“Ah-hah-hah!” said Robert appreciatively. “Yes, sir! . . . Just fixin’ to go! . . . Come on,” he muttered to the others, jerking his head towards the little man warningly. “Not here! . . . Well, good night, sir! . . . Goin’ now.”

“Good night, boys,” said the little man, who now had his back turned to them, and was standing at the silvery basin with his tooth-brush held in readiness. “See you in the morning.”

“Ah-hah-hah!” said Robert. “Yes, sir. That’s right. Goodnight.”

And frowning in a meaningful way at his companions, he jerked his head toward the corridor, and, with an air of great severity, led them out.

“Didn’t want him to see us with that bottle,” he muttered when they were outside in the corridor. “Hell! He’s got the biggest bank in town! Where’d you be if Emmet Wade ever got the idea you’re a liquor-head! . . . Wait a minute!” he said, with the dissonant abruptness that characterized so much of his speech and action. “Come outside here — on the platform: nobody to see you there!”

“I’ll meet you out there. I’ll go and get another bottle,” whispered Creasman, and disappeared along the darkened corridor in the direction of his berth. In a moment he returned, and the three of them went out upon the platform at the car-end, closed the door behind them and there, among the rocking and galloping noises of the pounding wheels, they took another long drink of the savage liquor. By this time the fiery stuff was leaping, pulsing, pounding the mounting and exuberant illusions of its power and strength through every tissue of their blood and life.

And outside, floating past their vision the huge pageant of its enchanted and immortal stillness, the old earth of Virginia now lay dreaming in the moon’s white light.

So here they are now, three atoms on the huge breast of the indifferent earth, three youths out of a little town walled far away within the great rim of the silent mountains, already a distant, lonely dot upon the immense and sleeping visage of the continent. Here they are — three youths bound for the first time towards their image of the distant and enchanted city, sure that even though so many of their comrades had found there only dust and bitterness, the shining victory will be theirs. Here they are hurled onward in the great projectile of the train across the lonely visage of the everlasting earth. Here they are — three nameless grains of life among the man-swarm ciphers of the earth, three faces of the million faces, three drops in the unceasing flood — and each of them a flame, a light, a glory, sure that his destiny is written in the blazing stars, his life shone over by the fortunate watches of the moon, his fame nourished and sustained by the huge earth, whose single darling charge he is, on whose immortal stillness he is flung onward in the night, his glorious fate set in the very brain and forehead of the fabulous, the unceasing city, of whose million-footed life he will tomorrow be a part.

Therefore they stand upon the rocking platform of the train, wild and dark and jubilant from the fierce liquor they have drunk, but more wild and dark and jubilant from the fury swelling in their hearts, the mad fury pounding in their veins, the savage, exultant and unutterable fury working like a madness in the adyts of their soul. And the great wheels smash and pound beneath their feet, the great wheels pound and smash and give a rhyme to madness, a tongue to hunger and desire, a certitude to all the savage, drunken, and exultant fury that keeps mounting, rising, swelling in them all the time!

Click, clack, clackety-clack; click, clack, clackety-clack; click, clack, clackety-clack; clackety-clackety-clack!

Hip, hop, hackety-hack; stip, step, rackety-rack; come and fetch it, come and fetch it, hickety-hickety-hack!

Rock, reel, smash, and swerve; hit it, hit it, on the curve; steady, steady, does the trick, keep her steady as a stick; eat the earth, eat the earth, slam and slug and beat the earth, and let her whir-r, and let her purr, at eighty perr!

— Whew-w!

— Wow!

— God-dam!

— Put ‘er there, boy!

— Put ‘er there — whah! — WHAH-H! you ole long-legged frowsle-headed son-of-a-bitch!

— Whoop-ee! Whah — WHAH-H! Why, Go-d-d-dam!

— Whee! Vealer rog?

— Wadja say? Gant hearya!

— I say ‘ja vealer rog? Wow! Pour it to her, son! Give ‘er the gas! We’re out to see the world! Run her off the god-damn track, boy! We don’t need no rail, do we?

— Hell no! Which way does this damn train go, anyway, after it leaves Virginia?

— Maryland.

— Maryland my —! I don’t want to go to Maryland! To hell with Mary’s land! Also to hell with Mary’s lamb and Mary’s calf and Mary’s blue silk underdrawers! Good old Lucy’s the girl for me — the loosier the better! Give me Lucy any day! Good old Lucy Bowles, God bless her — she’s the pick of the crowd, boys! Here’s to Lucy!

— Robert! Art there, boy?

— Aye, aye, sir! Present!

— Hast seen the damsel down in Lower Seven?

— I’ sooth, sir, that I have! A comely wench, I trow!

— Peace, fool! Don’t think, proud Princocke, thou canst snare this dove of innocence into the nets of infamous desire with stale reversions of thy wit! Out, out, vile lendings! An but thou carried’st at thy shrunken waist that monstrous tun of guts thou takest for a brain ‘twould so beslubber this receiving earth with lard as was not seen twixt here and Nottingham since butter shrove! Out, out upon you, scrapings of the pot! A dove, a doe, it is a faultless swan, I say, a pretty thing!

Now Virginia lay dreaming in the moonlight. In Louisiana bayous the broken moonlight shivers the broken moonlight quivers the light of many rivers lay dreaming in the moonlight beaming in the moonlight dreaming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight seeming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight to be gleaming to be streaming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight moonlight

— Mo-hoo-oonlight-oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight

— To be seeming to be dreaming in the moonlight!

WHAM!

SMASH!

— Now! God-dam, let her have it! Wow-w!

With slamming roar, hoarse waugh, and thunderbolted light, the southbound train is gone in one projectile smash of wind-like fury, and the open empty silence of its passing fills us, thrills us, stills us with the vision of Virginia in the moonlight, with the dream-still magic of Virginia in the moon.

And now, as if with recollected force, the train gains power from the train it passed, leaps, gathers, springs beneath them, smashes on with recollected demon’s fury in the dark . . .

With slam-bang of devil’s racket and God-dam of curse — give us the bottle, drink, boys, drink! — the power of Virginia lies compacted in the moon. To you, God-dam of devil’s magic and slam-bang of drive, fire-flame of the terrific furnace, slam of rod, storm-stroke of pistoned wheel and thunderbolt of speed, great earth-devourer, city-bringer — hail!

To you, also, old glint of demon hawk-eyes on the rail and the dark gloved hand of cunning — you, there, old bristle-crops! — Tom Wilson, H. F. Cline, or T. J. Johnson — whatever the hell your name is —

CASEY JONES! Open the throttle, boy, and let her rip! Boys, I’m a belly-busting bastard from the State of old Catawba — a rootin’ tootin’ shootin’ son-of-a-bitch from Saw Tooth Gap in Buncombe — why, God help this lovely bastard of a train — it is the best damned train that ever turned a wheel since Casey Jones’s father was a pup — why, you sweet bastard, run! Eat up Virginia! — Give her the throttle, you old goggle-eyed son-of-a-bitch up there! — Pour it to her! Let ‘er have it, you nigger-Baptist bastard of a shovelling fireman — let ‘er rip! — Wow! By God, we’ll be in Washington for breakfast!

— Why, God bless this lovely bastard of a train! It is the best damned train that ever pulled a car since Grant took Richmond! — Which way does the damn thing go? — Pennsylvania? — Well, that’s all right! Don’t you say a word against Pennsylvania! My father came from Pennsylvania, boys, he was the best damned man that ever lived — He was a stone-cutter and he’s better than any son-of-a-bitch of a plumber you ever saw — He’s got a cancer and six doctors and they can’t kill him! — But to hell with going where we go! — We’re out to see the world, boy! — To hell with Baltimore, New York, Boston! Run her off the God-damn rails! We’re going West! Run her through the woods — cross fields — rivers, through the hills! Hell’s pecker! But I’ll shove her up the grade and through the gap, no double-header needed! — Let’s see the world now! Through Nebraska, boy! Let’s shove her through, now, you can do it! — Let’s run her through Ohio, Kansas, and the unknown plains! Come on, you hogger, let’s see the great plains and the fields of wheat — Stop off in Dakota, Minnesota, and the fertile places — Give us a minute while you breathe to put our foot upon it, to feel it spring back with the deep elastic feeling, 8,000 miles below, unrolled and lavish, depthless, different from the East.

Now Virginia lay dreaming in the moonlight! And on Florida’s bright waters the fair and lovely daughters of the Wilsons and the Potters; the Cabots and the Lowells; the Weisbergs and O’Hares; the Astors and the Goulds; the Ransoms and the Rands; the Westalls and the Pattons and the Webbs; the Reynolds and McRaes; the Spanglers and the Beams; the Gudgers and the Blakes; the Pedersons and Craigs — all the lovely daughters, the Robinsons and Waters, the millionaires’ sweet daughters, the Boston maids, the Beacon Slades, the Back Bay Wades, all of the merchant, lawyer, railroad and well-moneyed grades of Hudson River daughters in the moon’s bright living waters — lay dreaming in the moonlight, beaming in the moonlight, seeming in the moonlight, to be dreaming to be gleaming in the moon.

— Give ’em hell, son!

— Here, give him another drink! — Attaboy! Drink her down!

— Drink her down — drink her down — drink her down — damn your soul — drink her down!

— By God, I’ll drink her down and flood the whole end of Virginia, I’ll drown out Maryland, make a flood in Pennsylvania — I tell you boys I’ll float ’em, I’ll raise ’em up, I’ll bring ’em down stream, now — I mean the Potters and the Waters, the rich men’s lovely daughters, the city’s tender daughters, the Hudson river daughters —

Lay dreaming in the moonlight, beaming in the moonlight, to be seeming to be beaming in the moonlight moonlight moonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight oonlight.

And Virginia lay dreaming in the moon.

Then the moon blazed down upon the vast desolation of the American coasts, and on all the glut and hiss of tides, on all the surge and foaming slide of waters on lone beaches. The moon blazed down on 18,000 miles of coast, on the million sucks and scoops and hollows of the shore, and on the great wink of the sea, that ate the earth minutely and eternally. The moon blazed down upon the wilderness, it fell on sleeping woods, it dripped through moving leaves, it swarmed in weaving patterns on the earth, and it filled the cat’s still eye with blazing yellow. The moon slept over mountains and lay like silence in the desert, and it carved the shadows of great rocks like time. The moon was mixed with flowing rivers, and it was buried in the heart of lakes, and it trembled on the water like bright fish. The moon steeped all the earth in its living and unearthly substance, it had a thousand visages, it painted continental space with ghostly light; and its light was proper to the nature of all the things it touched: it came in with the sea, it flowed with the rivers, and it was still and living on clear spaces in the forest where no men watched.

And in woodland darkness great birds fluttered to their sleep — in sleeping woodlands strange and secret birds, the teal, the nightjar, and the flying rail went to their sleep with flutterings dark as hearts of sleeping men. In fronded beds and on the leaves of unfamiliar plants where the tarantula, the adder, and the asp had fed themselves asleep on their own poisons, and on lush jungle depths where green-golden, bitter red and glossy blue proud tufted birds cried out with brainless scream, the moonlight slept.

The moonlight slept above dark herds moving with slow grazings in the night, it covered lonely little villages; but most of all it fell upon the unbroken undulation of the wilderness, and it blazed on windows and moved across the face of sleeping men.

Sleep lay upon the wilderness, it lay across the faces of the nations, it lay like silence on the hearts of sleeping men; and low upon lowlands, and high upon hills, flowed gently sleep, smooth-sliding sleep — sleep — sleep.

— Robert —

— Go on to bed, Gene, go to bed now, go to bed.

— There’s shump’n I mush shay t’you —

— Damn fool! Go to bed!

— Go to bed! I’ll go to bed when I’m God-damn good and ready! I’ll not go to bed when there’s shump’n I mush shay t’you —

— Go on to bed now, Gene. You’ve had enough.

— Creasman, you’re a good fellow maybe but I don’t know you. . . . You keep out of this. . . . Robert. . . . I’m gonna tell y’ shump’n. . . . You made a remark t’night I didn’ like — Prayin’ for me, are they, Robert?

— You damn fool! — You don’t know what you’re talkin’ ‘bout! Go on to bed! —

— I’ll go to bed, you bastard — I got shump’n to shay t’you! — Prayin.’ for me, are yuh? — Pray for yourself, y’ bloody little Deke!

— Damn fool’s crazy! Go on to bed now —

— I’ll bed yuh, you son-of-a-bitch! What was it that y’ said that day? —

— What day? You damned fool, you don’t know what you’re saying!

— I’ll tell yuh what day! — Coming along Chestnut Street that day after school with you and me and Sunny Jim Curtis and Ed Petrie and Bob Pegram and Carl Hartshorn and Monk Paul — and the rest of those boys —

— You damn fool! Chestnut Street! I don’t know what you’re talking about!

— Yes, you do! — You and me and Bob and Carl and Irwin and Jim Homes and some other boys —‘Member what y’ said, yuh son-of-a-bitch? Old man English was in his yard there burning up some leaves and it was October and we were comin’ along there after school and you could smell the leaves and it was after school and you said, “Here’s Mr. Gant, the tombstone-cutter’s son.”

— You damn fool! I don’t know what you’re talking about! —

— Yes, you do, you cheap Deke son-of-a-bitch — Too good to talk to us on the street when you were sucking around after Bruce Martin or Steve Patton or Jack Marriott — but a lifelong brother — oh! couldn’t see enough of us, could you, when you were alone?

— The damn fool’s crazy!

— Crazy, am I? — Well, we never had any old gummy grannies tied down and hidden in the attic — which is more than some people that I know can say! — you son-of-a-bitch — who do you think you are with your big airs and big Deke pin! — My people were better people than your crowd ever hoped to be-we’ve been here longer and we’re better people — and as for the tombstone-cutter’s son, my father was the best damned stone-cutter that ever lived — he’s dying of cancer and all the doctors in the world can’t kill him — he’s a better man than any little expolice court magistrate who calls himself a judge will ever be-and that goes for you too — you —

Why, you crazy fool! I never said anything about your father —

To hell with you, you damn little bootlicking —

Come on Gene come on you’ve had enough you’re drunk now come on.

Why God-damn you to hell, I hate your guts you —

All right, all right — He’s drunk! He’s crazy — Come on, Bill! Leave him alone! — He don’t know what he’s doing —

All right. Good night, Gene. . . . Be careful now — See you in the morning, boy.

All right, Robert, I mean nothing against you — you —

All right! — All right! — Come on, Bill. Let him alone! Good night, Gene — Come on — let’s go to bed! —

To bed to bed to bed to bed to bed! So, so, so, so, so! Make no noise, make no noise, draw the curtains; so, so, so. We’ll go to supper i’ the morning: so, so, so.

And Ile goe to bedde at noone.

Alone, alone now, down the dark, the green, the jungle aisle between the dark drugged snorings of the sleepers. The pause, the stir, the sigh, the sudden shift, the train that now rumbles on through the dark forests of the dream-charged moon-enchanted mind its monotone of silence and for ever: Out of these prison bands of clothes, now, rip, tear, toss, and haul while the green-curtained sleepers move from jungle depths and the even-pounding silence of eternity — into the stiff white sheets, the close, hot air, his long body crookedly athwart, lights out, to see it shining faintly in the coffined under-surface of the berth above — and sleepless, Virginia floating, dreamlike, in the still white haunting of the moon —

— At night, great trains will pass us in the timeless spell of an unsleeping hypnosis, an endless and unfathomable stupefaction. Then suddenly in the unwaking never-sleeping century of the night, the sensual limbs of carnal whited nakedness that stir with drowsy silken warmth in the green secrecies of Lower Seven, the slow-swelling and lonely and swarm-haunted land — and suddenly, suddenly, silence and thick hardening lust of dark exultant joy, the dreamlike passage of Virginia! — Then in the watches of the night a pause, the sudden silence of up-welling night, and unseen faces, voices, laughter, and farewells upon a lonely little night-time station — the lost and lonely voices of Americans:—“Good-bye! Good-bye, now! Write us when you get there, Helen! Tell Bob he’s got to write! — Give my love to Emily! — Good-bye, good-bye now — write us, soon!”— And then the secret, silken and subdued rustling past the thick green curtains and the sleepers, the low respectful negroid tones of the black porter — and then the whistle cry, the tolling bell, the great train mounting to its classic monotone again, and presently the last lights of a little town, the floating void and loneliness of moon-haunted earth — Virginia!

Also, in the dream — thickets of eternal night — there will be huge steamings on the rail, the sudden smash, the wall of light, the sudden flarings of wild, roaring light upon the moon-haunted and dream-tortured faces of the sleepers!

— And finally, in that dark jungle of the night, through all the visions, memories, and enchanted weavings of the timeless and eternal spell of time, the moment of for ever — there are two horsemen, riding, riding, riding in the night.

Who are they? Oh, we know them with our life and they will ride across the land, the moon-haunted passage of our lives for ever. Their names are Death and Pity, and we know their face: our brother and our father ride ever beside us in the dream-enchanted spell and vista of the night; the hooves keep level time beside the rhythms of the train.

Horsed on the black and moon-maned steeds of fury, cloaked in the dark of night, the spell of time, dream-pale, eternal, they are rushing on across the haunted land, the moon-enchanted wilderness, and their hooves make level thunder with the train.

Pale Pity and Lean Death their names are, and they will ride for evermore the moon-plantations of Virginia keeping time time time to the level thunder of the train pounding time time time as with four-hooved thunder of phantasmal hooves they pound for ever level with the train across the moon-plantations of Virginia.

Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum as with storm-phantasmal hooves Lean Death and Pale Pity with quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum . . . campum . . . quadrupedante . . . putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem putrem putrem as with sonitu quatit ungula campum quadrupedante putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem putrem putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem putrem putrem quadrupedante quadrupedante quadrupedante putrem putrem as with sonitu quatit ungula campum quadrupedante putrem . . . putrem . . . putrem putrem putrem . . . as with sonitu quatit ungula campum quadrupedante putrem . . . ungula campum . . . campum . . . ungula . . . ungula campum . . .