“Inefficiency be damned,” broke in Andrews, jumping up and stretching himself. He opened the window. “The heating's too damned efficient.... I think we're near Paris.”
The cold air, with a flavor of mist in it, poured into the stuffy compartment. Every breath was joy. Andrews felt a crazy buoyancy bubbling up in him. The rumbling clatter of the train wheels sang in his ears. He threw himself on his back on the dusty blue seat and kicked his heels in the air like a colt.
“Liven up, for God's sake, man,” he shouted. “We're getting near Paris.”
“We are lucky bastards,” said Walters, grinning, with the cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth. “I'm going to see if I can find the rest of the gang.”
Andrews, alone in the compartment, found himself singing at the top of his lungs.
As the day brightened the mist lifted off the flat linden-green fields intersected by rows of leafless poplars. Salmon-colored houses with blue roofs wore already a faintly citified air. They passed brick-kilns and clay-quarries, with reddish puddles of water in the bottom of them; crossed a jade-green river where a long file of canal boats with bright paint on their prows moved slowly. The engine whistled shrilly. They clattered through a small freight yard, and rows of suburban houses began to form, at first chaotically in broad patches of garden-land, and then in orderly ranks with streets between and shops at the corners. A dark-grey dripping wall rose up suddenly and blotted out the view. The train slowed down and went through several stations crowded with people on their way to work,—ordinary people in varied clothes with only here and there a blue or khaki uniform. Then there was more dark-grey wall, and the obscurity of wide bridges under which dusty oil lamps burned orange and red, making a gleam on the wet wall above them, and where the wheels clanged loudly. More freight yards and the train pulled slowly past other trains full of faces and silhouettes of people, to stop with a jerk in a station. And Andrews was standing on the grey cement platform, sniffing smells of lumber and merchandise and steam. His ungainly pack and blanket-roll he carried on his shoulder like a cross. He had left his rifle and cartridge belt carefully tucked out of sight under the seat.
Walters and five other men straggled along the platform towards him, carrying or dragging their packs.
There was a look of apprehension on Walters's face.
“Well, what do we do now?” he said.
“Do!” cried Andrews, and he burst out laughing.