“But isn’t the train gone?”
“No.”
The black-bearded man dozing near the stove had his ears open although his eyes were closed. He had heard fragments of the talk and saw the boy dig into his own pocket, as he would have expressed it, to start the woman home. After Bucks had given her the ticket and she was trying to thank him and to quiet again the tired child, the drowsy man rose, picked up the woman’s hand-bag and told her gruffly he would put her on the train. As he started with her out into the drizzling rain, he carried her little girl, and, stopping down the platform at a sheltered lunch-counter, he bought a bag of doughnuts big enough to sink a ship. He offered no money to the man at the counter, but his credit seemed unquestioned. In the train the seats appeared all to be taken, but the drowsy man again showed 23 his authority by rolling a tipsy fellow out of a seat and piling him up in a corner near the stove––which fortunately had no fire in it.
During all this time he had not said a word. But at the last, having placed the woman and the children in two seats and made them comfortable, he asked the mother one question––her husband’s name. She told him, and, without any comment or good-bys, he left the car and started through the rain uptown.
After the train pulled out, the wind shifted and the rain changed into a snow which, driven from the mountains, thickened on the wet window in front of the operator’s table. A message came for the night yardmaster, and the operator, seeing the head-light of the switch-engine which was working close by, put on his cap and stepped out to deliver the message. As he opened the waiting-room door, a man confronted him––the bearded man who had taken the woman and children to the train. Bucks saw under the visor of a cloth cap, a straight white nose, a dark eye piercingly keen, and a rather long, glossy, black beard. 24 It was the passenger conductor, David Hawk. Without speaking, Hawk held out his hand with a five-dollar bank note in it.
“What is this?” asked Bucks.
“The money you gave the woman.”
Bucks, taking the bill, regarded his visitor with surprise. “Where did you get this?”
“What’s that to you?”
“But–––”