PART II
CHAPTER XVII
It was afternoon on the last day of December when Stacey arrived at the little station of Pickens, North Carolina. His face had a sunken ravaged look, and grime from the repulsively dirty train made its underlying pallor ghastly. But Stacey was not really in any such abject condition as he appeared to be. He was worn out, beaten back at every point, but something in him still hung on; his eyes were tired but alive. In the train, which was crowded, as only a branch-line train of the Southern Railway can be crowded, with commercial travellers and with slovenly mothers publicly nursing crying children much too old to be nursed either publicly or privately, he had listened with even a little amusement to talk of how much better the service would be as soon as the government turned the road back to the company; and his will to get away by himself, out of touch with men and women, was strong and intense, sustaining him. He was not repelled by the sordid ugliness of the station and the glimpse of Main Street, but felt rather an unemotional sense of home-coming, which any native of Pickens would have attributed to the fact that Stacey’s mother’s people, though now all dead or widely scattered, had been the Pickens Barclays, but which more likely arose in Stacey because the end of his quest was in sight.
Anyway here came old Elijah, grinning broadly, hat in hand, his fringe of white hair blowing about his nearly bald black head. He shook Stacey’s hand vigorously.
“I shuah almos’ thought you wasn’t on that theah train, Mistuh Stacey,” he declared. “Theah didn’ seem nothin’ but babies.” And he carried Stacey’s bag across the platform to a buggy.
“Hello!” said Stacey, “you’re driving Duke! What will Mr. Carroll say to that, Elijah?”
“Well, Mistuh Stacey, suh, I jes’ had to get you home somehow. These heah Fohds at the garage, jes’ as like as not they get stuck on the Meldrun road. I wouldn’ have drove Duke ’cept foh that. It’s been rainin’ a powehful lot.”
“Haven’t they mended that road yet?” Stacey inquired, getting into the buggy.
“No, suh, not yet. You stop that, Duke, suh!” he called to the horse, who, impatient of the shafts, was curveting sideways down the street.
Two or three people came up to the buggy and shook Stacey’s hand, and he replied to their greetings as heartily as he could; but he was eager to be rid of them, and felt relief when presently the town was left behind and the buggy was ploughing through the waste of red mud known as the Meldrun road. He lit a cigarette and leaned back in the seat, drawing in deep breaths of the damp chilly air, and letting Elijah’s words run on unchecked and unheeded.