Quimby shook his head. He looked to be half asleep.
"It don't seem possible," he said. "No—it's all been buried so long—all the hope—all the plans—it don't seem possible it could ever come to life again."
"But it can, and it will," cried Kendrick. "I'm going to lay a stretch of track in Reuton with your joints. That's all you need—they'll have to use 'em then. We'll force the Civic into it. We can do it, Quimby—we surely can."
Quimby rubbed his hand across his eyes.
"You'll lay a stretch of track—" he repeated. "That's great news to me, Mr. Kendrick. I—I can't thank you now." His voice was husky. "I'll come back and take care of—him," he said, jerking his head toward the room up-stairs. "I got to go now—this minute—I got to go and tell my wife. I got to tell her what you've said."
CHAPTER XIX
EXEUNT OMNES, AS SHAKESPEARE HAS IT
At four in the morning Baldpate Inn, wrapped in the arms of winter, had all the rare gaiety and charm of a baseball bleechers on Christmas Eve. Looking gloomily out the window, Mr. Magee heard behind him the steps on the stairs and the low cautions of Quimby, and two men he had brought from the village, who were carrying something down to the dark carriage that waited outside. He did not look round. It was a picture he wished to avoid.
So this was the end—the end of his two and a half days of solitude—the end of his light-hearted exile on Baldpate Mountain. He thought of Bland, lean and white of face, gay of garb, fleeing through the night, his Arabella fiction disowned in the real tragedy that had followed. He thought of Cargan and Max, also fleeing, wrathful, sneering, by Bland's side. He thought of Hayden, jolting down the mountain in that black wagon. So it ended.