“It’s a right smart walk, yes, sir, but the rent’s mighty cheap!” And June chuckled as he led the way down the embankment, through a fence and into a boggy meadow. Further away a sort of road wound in the direction of the stamping works, and toward this June proceeded. The road scarcely deserved the name, but it was drier than the meadow. It appeared to have been constructed of a mixture of broken bricks, ashes, and tin cuttings and the latter glowed in the afternoon sunlight like bits of gold. They left the road at the stamping works, through whose open windows came the hum and clash of machinery, skirted a huge pile of waste tin, and went on across the field, choosing their way cautiously since every low spot held water. By now the abandoned horse car stood before them in all its glory of weather-faded yellow paint, broken windows, rusted roof, and sagging platforms. At one end some two feet of stovepipe protruded at a rakish angle from the roof. Wayne looked, saw, and was dubious. But when June asked proudly, “What you think of her, Mas’ Wayne?” he only said, “Fine, June!”
[CHAPTER VI]
THE NEW HOME
And when, having slid back the crazy door at the nearer end of the car, they entered it and seated themselves on the benches, it didn’t look nearly so unpromising. There was a good, stout floor underfoot and a reasonably tight roof overhead. Wayne began to see possibilities.
The car was only about twelve feet long and of the usual width. At some time a matched-board partition had divided it into two compartments, but this had nearly all disappeared. Every pane of glass, and there had been eighteen in all, counting those in the doors, were either smashed or totally missing. Over one window at each end and over three of the six windows at each side boards had been nailed. The remains of a flimsy curtain hung over the glass of the forward door. From the roof two lamp fixtures still depended, but the lamps were gone. The floor was littered with trash, including newspaper and tin cans and cracker boxes and scraps of dried bread, indicating that the place had been used for picnic purposes. In a corner at the farther end a small “air-tight” stove was set on a board placed on the seat. It was badly rusted, the upper door hung by one hinge, the mica was broken out, and the interior was filled with ashes and charred embers. Between stove and ceiling there was no pipe. Wayne tried the door at that end, but it was jammed so tightly that he couldn’t budge it.
An inspection of the outside followed. The trucks had been discarded and the body of the car rested on four six-inch sills, two running lengthwise and two across. An attempt had apparently been made to set fire to the car, for at one side the woodwork was scorched and the end of a sill burned away for nearly a foot. The inscription, “Medfield Street Railway Co.,” in faded brown letters against the faded yellow body, was still legible, as was the figure 6, preceding and following it.
“I’d like to know what number 1 looks like,” said Wayne, “if this is number 6!”
Everything of value in the way of metal had been removed, even to the brass hand rails and sill plates. The only glass that had escaped destruction consisted of a number of long and narrow panes in the roof, of which less than half remained intact. As Wayne discovered later, these were set in hinged frames that could be opened for ventilating purposes. On the front platform—they designated it the front merely because it seemed natural to call one front and one back, and that was the one outside the jammed door—a dozen sticks of wood suggested the location of the fuel pile at some time. Ashes had been disposed of by merely emptying them over the front dash. June discovered the missing stovepipe lying a few yards away, but it was so rusted that it came to pieces when he tried to lift it from the ground. Other untidy evidences of former occupation and more recent vandalism lay around: an iron skillet with the handle broken off, a bent and twisted toaster, many empty cans, a worn and sodden rope doormat, a length of rotted clothes line of which one end was tied to a ten-foot pole set some six yards away.
“I wonder,” mused Wayne, “who lived here. And why they went away. And I wonder most of all, June, how they got this thing out here in the middle of this marsh.”