"You bet! How many ye got?"
"Two."
"Ten cents, Boss. Thank ye," and he shouldered the bundle and went out into the night, where a wagon was standing to receive it.
"Level-headed boy," I said to myself. "Be a millionaire if he lives. No back talk, no unnecessary remarks regarding an inexcusable violation of the law—petty larceny if anything. Just a plain business statement, followed by an immediate cash settlement. A most estimable boy."
A road employee now came in, looked at the dull-faced clock on the wall, went out through a door and into a room where a telegraph instrument was clicking away, returned with a piece of chalk and wrote on a black-board:
"No. 31—52 minutes late."
This handwriting on the wall had a Belshazzar-feast effect on me. If I lost the connection at Adrian, what would become of the lecture in Cleveland?
Another man now entered carrying a black carpet-bag—a sleepy man with his hair tousled and who looked as if he had gone to bed in his clothes. He fumbled in his pocket for a key, went straight to the slot machine, unlocked it, disclosing a reduced stock of chewing-gum and chocolate caramels, opened his carpet-bag and filled the machine to the top. This sort of a man works at night, I thought, when few people are about. To uncover the mysteries of a slot machine before a gaping crowd would be as foolish and unprofitable as for a conjurer to show his patrons how he performed his tricks.
I became conscious now, even as I turned the sheets of the journal, that while my flask of P. S. and the contents of my collar-box were admirable in their place, they were not capable of sustaining life, even had both receptacles been full, which they were not. There was evidently nothing to eat in the station, and from what I saw of the outside, no one had yet started a fire; no one had even struck a light.