"I'll be—" gurgled Hazen, blinking stupidly.
"I guess you will be," conceded his wife. "If that's the 'thorough' way you do your jobs at the factory—"
"Say," he mumbled in a sort of wondering appeal, "is there any HUMAN that would like to trust a feller so much as to risk another ribcracking kick, just for the sake of being where he is? I almost wish—"
But the wish was unspoken. Hazen was a true American husband. He feared his wife more than he loved fairness. And his wife's glare was full upon him. With a grunt he picked Lass up by the neck, tucked her under his arm and made off through the dark.
He did not take the road toward the canal, however. Instead he made for the railroad tracks. He remembered how, as a lad, he had once gotten rid of a mangy cat, and he resolved to repeat the exploit. It was far more merciful to the puppy—or at least, to Hazen's conscience,—than to pitch Lass into the slimy canal with a stone tied to her neck.
A line of freight cars—"empties"—was on a siding, a short distance above the station. Hazen walked along the track, trying the door of each car he passed. The fourth he came to was unlocked. He slid back the newly greased side door, thrust Lass into the chilly and black interior and quickly slid shut the door behind her. Then with the silly feeling of having committed a crime, he stumbled away through the darkness at top speed.
A freight car has a myriad uses, beyond the carrying of legitimate freight. From time immemorial, it has been a favorite repository for all manner of illicit flotsam and jetsam human or otherwise.
Its popularity with tramps and similar derelicts has long been a theme for comic paper and vaudeville jest. Though, heaven knows, the inside of a moving box-car has few jocose features, except in the imagination of humorous artist or vaudevillian!
But a far more frequent use for such cars has escaped the notice of the public at large. As any old railroader can testify, trainhands are forever finding in box-cars every genus and species of stray.
These finds range all the way from cats and dogs and discarded white rabbits and canaries, to goats. Dozens of babies have been discovered, wailing and deserted, in box-car recesses; perhaps a hundred miles from the siding where, furtively, the tiny human bundle was thrust inside some conveniently unlatched side door.