“I don’t want to talk to the country fools,” she snapped.
“This way,” said the sheriff, guiding her. The train had stopped. She laughed as he politely handed her off the platform; the next moment the wheels were turning again and she was gone. He never saw her again.
The porter came out to stand by his side in the vestibule, watching the lights of the station race away and the darkling winter fields fly past. The sheriff was well known to him; he nodded an eager acquiescence to the officer’s request: “If those ladies in 8 and 9 ask you any questions, just tell them it was a crazy woman getting the wrong section, and I took care of her.”
Within the car a desolate mother wept the long night through, yet thanked God amid her tears for her son’s last good days, and did not dream of the blacker sorrow that had menaced her and had been hurled aside.