“Do they often come here?”
“Almost every night, and others, too. They are respectable girls for all I know, but the Union station has a fascination for them somehow. They flirt with the brakemen and the Pullman car conductors, and sometimes make a mash on a young swell from the country as he comes off the train. They are mighty sharp and shrewd, I tell you.”
“Hullo,” said I, looking behind me, “is that a coffin?”
“Yes,” said the baggageman carelessly,
“THAT’S A COFFIN
with a stiff in it. Come down from Winnipeg this afternoon and no one has come around to claim it yet. There’s lots of ’em nowadays. They’re coming an’ going all the time. We shipped one chap to San Francisco last night. They are a horrible bother. Wonder what they want to do it for. This stiff is bound for Milwaukee. If they had buried him here he would have heard Gabriel blow his trumpet as plain in Toronto as he would in the Western States. They’re a most mighty bother.”
“I should say so,” said a train hand standing near. “I’ll never forget the experience I had with one.”
Seeing the look of interest on my face, he blew the ashes off his cigar and continued:
“I was runnin’ on No. 4, from Hamilton through to Detroit and one dark night they put a stiff aboard at Harrisburg. That was all right, but when they put another aboard at Paris I felt they were givin’ it to me too much. I was alone in the car, and tho’ I ain’t scared of ghosts and that, yet I didn’t feel just to home. There’s no fun in ridin’ along in the dark with a couple of stiffs, now I tell you. There I sot, and for the life of me I couldn’t keep my eyes off them coffins. There lay two dead men with their wooden overcoats on, and there I sot smokin’ my pipe and feelin’ ornery. Something got loose under the car, and the knockin’ underneath sounded to me as if one of them had come to life and was tappin’ on the lid of his coffin fur me to let him out. You needn’t laugh, it was no joke. It was a ride I’m not going to forgit in a hurry, either. Well, I pulled through all right, an’ run into Detroit in the mornin’. A hearse was drawed up, but when we got the coffins out we found that the label cards had been knocked off, and we didn’t know which was which. We couldn’t ask the stiffs themselves, you know. One old man came up, and with tears in his eyes said he wouldn’t like to plant anybody in his lot but his own blood relations. Well, we opened the coffin, and I hope I may die if it wasn’t plugged plum full of smuggled silks and laces.”
“No stiff in it at all?”