He was asleep.
He was not only slumbering, but he was putting the earnestness and passionate devotion of his whole being into it. His shiny, oilcloth grip, with the roguish tip of a discarded collar just peeping out at the side, was up in the iron wall-pocket of the car. He also had, in the seat with him, a market basket full of misfit lunch and a two-bushel bag containing extra apparel. On the floor he had a crock of butter with a copy of the Punkville Palladium and Stock Grower's Guardian over the top.
He slumbered on in a rambling sort of way, snoring all the time in monosyllables, except when he erroneously swallowed his tonsils, and then he would struggle awhile and get black in the face, while the passengers vainly hoped that he had strangled.
While he was thus slumbering, with all the eloquence and enthusiasm of a man in the full meridian of life, the train stopped with a lurch, and the brakeman touched his shoulder.
"Here's your town," he said. "We only stop a minute. You'll have to hustle."
The man, who had been far away, wrestling with Morpheus, had removed his hat, coat, and boots, and when he awoke his feet absolutely refused to go back into the same quarters.
At first he looked around reproachfully at the people in the car. Then he reached up and got his oilcloth grip from the bracket. The bag was tied together with a string, and as he took it down the string untied. Then we all discovered that this man had been on the road for a long time, with no object, apparently, except to evade laundries. All kinds of articles fell out in the aisle. I remember seeing a chest-protector and a linen coat, a slab of seal-brown gingerbread and a pair of stoga boots, a hairbrush and a bologna sausage, a plug of tobacco and a porous plaster.
He gathered up what he could in both arms, made two trips to the door and threw out all he could, tried again to put his number eleven feet into his number nine boots, gave it up, and socked himself out of the car as it began to move, while the brakeman bombarded him through the window for two miles with personal property, groceries, dry-goods, boots and shoes, gents' furnishing goods, hardward, notions, bric-a-brac, red herrings, clothing, doughnuts, vinegar bitters, and facetious remarks.
Then he picked up the retired snorer's railroad check from the seat, and I heard him say: "Why, dog on it, that wasn't his town after all."