On the Carlisle station platform, as the two Troopers debarked, some hundred persons were gathered in pursuance of various and centrifugal designs. But one impulse they appeared unanimously to share—the impulse to give as wide a berth as possible to a peculiarly horrible tramp.
Why should a being like that intrude himself upon a passenger platform in a respectable country town? Not to board a coach, surely, for such as he pay no fares. To spy out the land? To steal luggage? Or simply to make himself hateful to decent folk?
He carried his head with a hangdog lurch—his heavy jaw was rough with stubble beard. His coat and trousers fluttered rags and his toes stuck out of his boots. Women snatched back their skirts as he slouched near, and men muttered and scowled at him for a contaminating beast.
Merryfield and Smith, drifting near this scum of the earth, caught the words "Four-thirty train" and the name of a station.
"Right," murmured Merryfield.
Then he went and bought tickets.
In the shelter of an ancient, grimy day-coach, the scum muttered again, as Smith brushed past him in the aisle.
"Charlie Stover's farm," said he.
"M'm," said Smith.
At a scrap of a station, in the foothills of ascending heights the tramp and the Troopers separately detrained. In the early evening all three strayed together once more in the shadow of the lilacs by Charlie Stover's gate.