A freight pulled in then, and Henry moved off sullenly. But in the afternoon he came shambling back, a votive offering in his pocket. Grinning diffidently he laid this gift on the window sill, soothing its protests with swift, stubby old fingers—a yellow kitten with rascally circles of black about its eyes, a comical clown of a kitten which until this hour had been the cherished member of Henry's huge feline family.
"This here one's yours," he yelled, as the girl came hurrying to the window. "If he gets the fits you lemme know and I'll fetch you some catnip."
And he turned and sped away, his shoulders hunched, without a backward look.
Began for old Henry Hornbone an amazing friendship.
Every morning he shambled down to the station at Elsie with some sort of a present in his pocket. Sometimes it was a speckled guinea egg, warm from the nest. Sometimes a brown twig softly threaded with new pussy willows, and as spring warmed and the frost went out of the land he brought little wild strawberry blooms like gold beaded stars, now a single violet, once a white snail shell scoured to brilliance. And at dusk, when the night trick came on, the girl operator, whose name was Mary Hill, came often to the old house beside the track. Sometimes she carried a paper bag warm and greasy with hot doughnuts. Sometimes her offering was a piece of kidney for the cats. Often she brought only her smile, which became the one bit of glow in old Henry's drab, baffled existence.
She mended his socks, she impelled him by her frowns to scour his floors, to shave every day in his eagerness to please, to keep the cats off the table and his boots off his bed. He even bought a black necktie and a new hat to replace the greasy old relic which had served him for twenty years. Mary Hill, with her red head and her dancing eyes, which penetrated the frozen barrier of the silence which had so long kept the old man in desolate isolation, became to him a little of the mother that he missed and something of the daughter he had never had. There were people in Elsie who laughed. There were young men at Mary Hill's boarding-house who teased her about old Henry Hornbone. But most people understood. And Henry, toiling to make a cherry tree bloom beside the fence, forgot in his present content, his vengeful war on the B. & A.
And then came the strike.
To Henry the strike meant little. He sensed a little of it, through the things that he read in the badly printed weekly paper at Elsie, he understood the guards who tramped up and down the right of way warning him back whenever he threw a leg over the fence. But as the trouble grew more tense, as bridges went up in horrific explosions, as trains were wrecked mysteriously and engineers intimidated, Henry saw the strain of it reflected in the harassed eyes of Mary Hill. There was a young marine in the station now, whenever he tramped down in the mornings—a cocky youth with dark eyes and a proud scowl.
A day or two after that, Henry bought a heavy calibered revolver from the black-smith. That night he nailed a tobacco can on his woodshed, and when Mary Hill came by, he haled her in and made her practise shooting at the can till she could hit it three times out of six—till the palm of her hand was blistered by the heavy stock.