Without quite knowing how he got there, he found himself, soaked and shivering, inside the baggage-room at the railway station. Everything else was closed, but in the shadows among the gaudy, battered trunks of some theatrical company, the baggageman dozed quietly. He was shaken into consciousness to find a madman standing before him, white and trembling, and dripping with water.
“Tell me,” Philip asked, “did any one leave the Town on the one o’clock?”
The man looked at him sleepily, and growled something about being wakened so roughly.
“Tell me. I’ve got to know!”
He scratched his head. “Why, yes. I do mind somebody gettin’ on the one o’clock. Come to think of it, it was what’s-his-name, the preacher.”
“Yes ... that’s the one ... the big fellow.”
“Was he alone?”
“I dunno.... He was alone for all I know. I didn’t see no one else.”
Philip left him, and, outside, stood for a moment in the shelter of the platform shed, peering into the distance where the gleaming wet rails disappeared into the dimness of fog and jewel-like signal lights. And all at once he hated the Flats, the Mills, the whole Town, and then he laughed savagely: even his beloved locomotives had betrayed him by carrying Naomi off into the darkness.