“I’m sure I hope that you will be comfortable,” said the brakeman, as he helped them to climb up the side into the car. “I remember taking a couple of men a night journey in a car of bedding five years ago, when I was braking down in Montana, and when we opened the car in the morning they was both as dead as door nails. Fact is, they was drunker than they should have been when we took them on board, and we found two empty whisky bottles lying beside them.”
And with this cheery reminiscence, he locked the doors on Mrs. Walford and Bertha.
CHAPTER XXVII
A Weird Night
Clickety clack, rick rack! Clickety clack, rick rack!
It seemed to Bertha that the horrible noise and rattle had been going on for hours, and days, and weeks. Her head ached from the constant noise and the lack of ventilation, her arms ached, her back ached, and she ached in every bone in her body. A small, badly trimmed lamp swung from a hook above her head and occasionally dropped kerosene upon her; but she could not move away, because there was no room to move two inches in any direction. She was wedged in on one side by a great roll of bedding, while on the other the stout figure of Mrs. Walford crowded against her.
But, horrid as was the smell of the lamp, it would have been ten times worse to be without it; for they had not been half an hour on their journey before she had seen the inquisitive nose of a big rat peering down at them from a great pile of bedding. A jerk of her head had scared it away then, but she had not dared to say anything about it; for Mrs. Walford had confided to her only a few minutes before how much she feared and disliked rats.
That rat would come back again, Bertha was sure of it, and the fear kept her awake long after her companion had sunk into peaceful slumber. Bertha had no book, and the light would not have been good enough to read by in any case, so there was nothing for her to do while the long hours dragged wearily away but to think; and naturally enough her thoughts clung with maddening persistence to the interview that she was going to face when that nightmare journey should be at an end.
She thought of Edgar Bradgate as she had seen him first, sitting in his boat on the Shark’s Teeth rocks at Mestlebury. The next time she had seen him was when the wheat fired, and he had come along with the Smiths to help put it out. She had not recognized him until afterwards, and even then she had not been sure who he was—indeed, it had seemed to be her fate not to know him when she encountered him. There was that other time, when the horses brought him unconscious and half-dead to Duck Flats. She had not known him then, otherwise this horrible journey need not have been undertaken, and she would have been safely at home in the humdrum isolation of the lonely prairie house, instead of riding through the black night cooped up in a box car of bedding on her way to railhead, a place where a girl very rarely ventured.
“Oh, I am stupid, I am sure of it!” she muttered to herself for about the hundredth time.
Clickety clack, rick rack! Clickety clack, rick rack!