“Joe Cardridge! Where is he?” asked Walter looking at the boat–room door, the outer door, the door leading upstairs to the crew’s room. “Where is he? I’ll get him and bring him here and face the charges here.”
He was starting off, trying to go in several directions at once, when the keeper said, “Hold on, Walter. It is Joe’s day off. He is not within a mile of this place now, but he will be back I s’pose in time to go on his beat. This thing shall be looked into.”
“I insist upon it that it shall,” said Walter.
The weather outside was not at all attractive to the patrolmen that day, and when the twilight drew its dusky curtains about the station, the outlook was still bad. A north–west wind was blowing very strong and cutting. Snow was still falling in light, dry flakes. What was already on the ground served as a plaything to the wind that seemed to be intelligently and maliciously gathering it up and then hurling it into the faces of all travelers, flinging it over their heads in blinding, cutting sheets, withdrawing these until its victim walked in an easy, careless confidence, then sending the snow again in sheets more closely folding and stifling and cutting.
“You’d better wrap up specially warm,” was Tom Walker’s reminder to Walter, who went on to his beat at night.
“I will, thank you. I will put on that new blue flannel blouse for one thing.”
“I would, Walter. I find that mine comes in awful handy. You see it is padded thick and warm. Six of us, I believe, bought them.”
These six new flannel blouses were bought from a traveling clothing–peddler who came to the station and with a glib tongue so skillfully paraded the advantages of a purchase, that almost all the men accepted this rare opportunity.
“Well, Walter, you might have done wuss,” said Aunt Lydia, one day when Walter chanced to call upon her, and laying it on her sewing basket asked her to examine the blouse.