“Well, if he’s gone, he’s thrown over the best chance he ever had in his life. He didn’t have a cent when we picked him up. I think he was a nut, that’s what I think he was, talking about starting a college when he didn’t have the price of a pair of shoes to his name. Why, our Company’d build him a half-dozen colleges if he’d come along with us. I just wanted a little more talk with him, and here he’s gone, no one knows where.”
“I gave him the name of a little school out in the town where I was born—don’t you know—Brandon College?”
“Well, Brandon, Ohio, don’t happen to be on the map of New York or the Cumberland Land and Mineral Company.” He was scowling, his red face puffy, unlovable.
“Good-by,” he concluded abruptly. “I’ve got to get downtown to a meeting—and I’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do. This Kentucky friend of yours has put me in strictly Dutch.”
Without further salutation he turned to the hall door. She rose, sighing, and passed out of the room.
At just about the moment that the foregoing conversation was taking place in Haddon’s home, another interview was advancing, in the smoking room of a west-bound passenger train heading from the city. Of the speakers one was a grizzled old passenger conductor who had spent his life on the line, who stood now regarding a tall raw-boned young man, whom he had been obliged to accost for a second time, so much absorbed did he seem in a certain book over which he was poring.
“Tick-ets, please!”
“Good mornin’,” said the young man, looking up. “I didn’t buy any ticket, sir, because I didn’t have no money. They let me through the gate in the crowd.”
“Well,” said the conductor, “you’ve no business here without one. Where do you want to go?”
“I’m a-goin’ to Brandon, Ohio,” replied the young man, his fingers now between the pages of his closed book. “I’ve got thirty-five cents to my name.”