The train coming to a sudden stop brought me out of my oblivion, and, looking idly out of the window to see what place it might be, I was seized by one of those fits of petty annoyance incident to such interruptions, for the train had run so far past the platform that I found it impossible to see the name of the station. I got myself out of my comfortable position, and tried, by turning completely about, to see back to the station. But we had gone too far. And then—I haven’t an idea why, for it was of absolutely no importance to me—I looked about for some one to ask. And nearest me, sitting rather uncomfortably upright in his big leather chair, the little rack at his elbow guiltless of any glass, and holding listlessly in his hand the latest popular magazine, sat a gray-haired, gray-suited old gentleman, looking lonesomely out of his window.
“I beg pardon,” I said. “Can you tell me what place this is?”
He turned gratefully at the sound of my voice. “It’s ——,” he told me. I’ve never been able to recall what name he said, because, I suppose, of what came after.
It was certainly not surprising that he should think, from my manner, that I had some interest in the place, and he went on, after a moment’s hesitating silence, to say, in his unobtrusive but unmistakable Middle-West voice, that the town was a milling center—flour and meal, and that kind of thing.
I saw that I had committed myself to something more in the way of conversation than my laconic word of thanks for his information and a lapse into silence. I wondered what I could say. He was such a nice, kindly old gentleman, and he would never in the world have addressed any one first. I hit upon the most obvious sequence, and asked if, then, he was familiar with that part of the country. He said, oh yes, he was “a native of Iowa.”
“Indeed?” I said, for lack of anything else to say, and his statement not having been a particularly provocative one.
“Yes,” he said. “My home is Dubuque.”
Dubuque! Dubuque! What was it I knew about Dubuque? The name struck me instantly with a sense of importance, as if it had rung the bell of a target concealed out of sight. I sought about in my mind for a full minute before I recalled, with a kind of start—Corey.
So many things had come in between—bigger things than any one man—and overlaid all the pictures that had gone before. Overlaid them with pigment so crude, so roughly applied, that one neither saw nor remembered anything else. All the nations of Europe loosed in the Great War, and America straining hard at her worn leash of neutrality. Small wonder that Corey, of Dubuque, along with countless other memories of that pale time, had faded into a dim, far perspective.
And yet, the sound of that name had brought him—as clearly as I had seen him that night in Paris—before me. I heard his voice, felt the vigor of his personality, saw him throw back his head and laugh. And here, in the chair next my own, and ready to talk, sat a man who, by every rule of probability and chance, would be able to tell me about him.