which was perfectly true. Anyhow the Kid could not have taken the wad, nor Little Irish. It must have been Bill Smith.
“It was Bill,” he decided.
He did not make any special comments. Some thing or other happens to a man every day. He went down-stairs, through a dim narrow hallway.
“Hope there don't any one want something of me. I don't believe they 'll get it.”
There were sounds in the basement, but no one met him. In the street the Ninth Avenue car rolled by, a block away. He saw a restaurant sign which said fearlessly that a stew cost ten cents, went in and breakfasted for fifteen, waited on by a thin, weary woman, who looked at his blue coat and braided hat with half-roused interest.
The cobble-stones on Sixth Avenue were shining and wet. Here and there some one in the crowd turned to look after him. It might have been the uniform, the loafer's slouch of the hat, taken with the face being young and too white.
The hands of the station clock stood at ten. He took a ticket to the limit of eighty-five cents, heard dimly the name of a familiar junction; and then the rumble of the train was under him for an hour. Bill Smith had left him his pipe and tobacco. Bill had good points. Sandy was inclined to think kindly of Bill's thoughtfulness, and envy him his enterprise. The roar of the car-wheels sounded like Kid Sadler's voice, hoarse and choky, “A-alas, a-alas!”
It was eleven o'clock at the junction. The mist of the earlier morning had become a slow drizzle. Trains jangled to and fro in the freight yards. He took a road which led away from the brick warehouses, streets of shady trees and lawns, and curved to the north, along the bank of a cold, sleepy river.
There was an unpainted, three-room house somewhere, where a fat woman said “Good land!” and gave him a plate full of different things, on a table covered with oil-cloth. He could not remember afterward what he ate, or what the woman said further. He remembered the oil-cloth, which had a yellow-feverish design of curved lines, that twisted snakily, and came out of the cloth and ran across the plate. Then out in the gray drizzle again.
All the morning his brain had seemed to grow duller and duller, heavy and sodden; but in the afternoon red lights began dancing in the mist. It might have been five miles or twenty he had gone by dusk; the distinction between miles and rods was not clear—they both consisted of brown mud and gray mist. Sometimes it was a mile across the road. The dusk, and then the dark, heaved, and pulsed through blood-red veins, and peeled, and broke apart in brilliant cracks, as they used to do nights in the field hospital. There seemed to be no hope or desire in him, except in his feet, which moved on. The lights that travelled with him got mixed with lights on each side of a village street, and his feet walked in through a gate. They had no reason for it, except that the gate stood open and was painted white. He pushed back the door of a little garden tool-house beside the path, and lay down on the floor. He could not make out which of a number of things were happening. The Fourteenth Infantry appeared to be bucking a steep hill, with the smoke rolling down over it; but on the other hand Kid Sadler was singing hoarsely, but distinctly, “A-alas, a-alas!” and moreover, a dim light shone through a white-curtained window somewhere between a rod and a mile away, and glimmered down the wet path by the tool-house. Some one said, “Some of it's jag and some of it's the yellow. About half and half.” He might have been making the remark himself, except that he appeared to be elsewhere. The rain kept up a thin whisper on the roof of the tool-house. Gasps, shouts, thumping of feet, clash of rifle and canteen. The hill was as steep as a wall. Little Irish said, “His legs was too short to shtep on the back av his neck wid the shteepness av the hill.”