The tower house stood quite high upon a rotting trestle. Its roof was almost entirely bereft of shingles. There was no sign of glass in either of its windows which commanded views north and south along the track. How long it may have been since any solitary watcher stayed in that aerial shack, one could not guess. For a shack that held itself so high it was very shabby. Through one of the windows the boys could see a tall lever standing at an angle; whether it was a switch lever or the gate lever they could not say. It was red with rust.
A few small houses clustered about the spot but they seemed all to be forsaken and falling to pieces, save one. This one was surrounded by a picturesque fence ingeniously devised of laths, old bed springs, chicken wire, grocery boxes and barrel staves.
In front of the house was a very small and shabby porch and upon this sat an Italian woman of enormous dimensions. It was impossible to determine what she was sitting on for no part of this was visible, but undoubtedly she was sitting on something, for she was in a sitting posture.
The only other living thing on this romantic hamlet was a billy goat within the enclosure, who, upon seeing the Ford stop close by the tracks, dropped a rusty tin can which he had been chewing on, and sauntered toward the edge of his domains surveying the visitors through an old woven wire bed spring.
“You don’t suppose he wants to eat the flivver, do you?” Townsend asked.
“Bah—h—h—h,” said the billy goat.
“Quite well, thank you,” said Townsend. “How are you?” Then to Pee-wee he said, “Let’s see how much gas we’ve got, I mean how little.”
They both climbed out and Townsend lifted the front seat cushion, revealing a veritable feast of torn burlap and disordered straw at which the goat seemed to cast a yearning eye.
“Jumping Christopher, we’ve only got about half a pint,” said Townsend. “If we get across the tracks we’re lucky.”
“We should have kept on going,” said Pee-wee.