“We are at Indianapolis,” said Halleck.
“I thought it was Tecumseh!” She shuddered. “We can go back; oh, yes, we can still go back!”
They alighted from the train in the chilly midnight air, and found their way through the crowd to the eating-room of the station. The little girl cried with broken sleep and the strangeness, and Olive tried to quiet her. Marcia clung to Halleck's arm, and shivered convulsively. Squire Gaylord stalked beside them with a demoniac vigor. “A few more hours, a few more hours, sir!” he said. He made a hearty supper, while the rest scalded their mouths with hot tea, which they forced with loathing to their lips.
Some women who were washing the floor of the ladies' waiting-room told them they must go into the men's room, and wait there for their train, which was due at one o'clock. They obeyed, and found the room full of emigrants, and the air thick with their tobacco smoke. There was no choice; Olive went in first and took the child on her lap, where it straightway fell asleep; the Squire found a seat beside them, and sat erect, looking round on the emigrants with the air of being amused at their outlandish speech, into which they burst clamorously from their silence at intervals. Marcia stopped Halleck at the threshold. “Stay out here with me,” she whispered. “I want to tell you something,” she added, as he turned mechanically and walked away with her up the vast lamp-shot darkness of the depot. “I am not going on! I am going back. We will take the train that goes to the East; father will never know till it is too late. We needn't speak to him about it—”
Halleck set himself against this delirious folly: he consented to her return; she could do what she would; but he would not consent to cheat her father. “We must go and tell him,” he said, for all answer to all her entreaties. He dragged her back to the waiting-room; but at the door she started at the figure of a man who was bending over a group of emigrant children asleep in the nearest corner,—poor, uncouth, stubbed little creatures, in old-mannish clothes, looking like children roughly blocked out of wood, and stiffly stretched on the floor, or resting woodenly against their mother.
“There!” said the man, pressing a mug of coffee on the woman. “You drink that! It'll do you good,—every drop of it! I've seen the time,” he said, turning round with the mug, when she had drained it, in his hand, and addressing Marcia and Halleck as the most accessible portion of the English-speaking public, “when I used to be down on coffee; I thought it was bad for the nerves; but I tell you, when you're travelling it's a brain-food, if ever there was a brain—” He dropped the mug, and stumbled back into the heap of sleeping children, fixing a ghastly stare on Marcia.
She ran toward him. “Mr. Kinney!”
“No, you don't!—no, you don't!”
“Why, don't you know me? Mrs. Hubbard?”
“He—he—told me you—was dead!” roared Kinney.