The younger man gazed at him in dreamy wonder, trying to grope through the veil of unreality that seemed falling and draping about him. He was marvelling, inwardly, how jolting and unlooked for came the sudden ups and downs of life, when once the traveller is caught up out of the ordinary grooves of existence,—how sudden and moving the drama, when once the feral process is under way.
Then he listened, with alert and quickly changing eyes, as the stranger—to make sure of his man, the discharged prisoner surmised—tapped with his knife on the edge of his chinaware plate.
Durkin read the Morse easily—“Don’t talk so loud!” it warned him. And he nodded and wagged his now swimming head, almost childishly, over the little message. Yet all the time he felt, vaguely, that he was under the keen eyes of the stranger across the table from him.
“Where’d you work, before you went to the Postal-Union?”
“Up in the woods,” laughed the other carelessly, yet still clear-headed enough to feel inwardly ashamed of his laughter.
“What woods?”
“Up in Ontario. I was despatcher, and station-agent, and ticket-seller, and snow-shoveller, and lamp-cleaner, and everything else, for the Grand Trunk at Komoka, where the Tunnel trains cut off from the main line west for Chicago,—and where they still keep their heel on the Union, and work their men like dogs. They paid me forty-two dollars a month—which was small enough!—but out of that salary they deducted any bad money taken in through the ticket-window, when my returns were made up. I was two weeks behind in my board bill when a Port Huron drummer bought a ticket through to Hamilton with a twenty-dollar counterfeit. It came back to me, with my next month’s twenty-two dollars, with ‘Counterfeit’ stencilled out in big letters across the face of it. The loss of that money kind of got on my nerves. I fumed and worried over it until I spoilt my ‘send,’ and couldn’t sleep, and in some way or other threw an Oddfellows’ excursion train into a string of gravel empties! My God, what I went through that night! I knew it, I foresaw it, twenty minutes before they touched. I pounded the brass between the Junction and Sarnia until they thought I was crazy, but we had no way of getting at them, any more than we could get at two comets rushing together. I wired in my resign. I didn’t even wait to get my clothes. I struck out and walked across country to St. Thomas, and boarded a Michigan Central for the Bridge!”
The older man watched the nervous hands go up to the moist forehead and wipe away the sweat, but the gesture left him unmoved.
“Then how’d you come to leave the Postal-Union?” he asked.
A look of momentary resentment leaped into Durkin’s eyes.