His conversation became incoherent, and from it Beekman gathered only snatches.
"I don't know how to go about it," he continued, as though talking to himself. "It's the taxes chiefly. If I can get rid of the tax sales, that farm is just the thing for me. Old farm," he explained, looking up at Beekman, "somewhere in Erie County. Thought I'd take a look at it. Been in the family for years, but neglected it; now I want to live on it, bury myself, get away from New York, from the Inferno back to Eden, don't you know."
He laughed a quick, nervous laugh, and jerked himself away once more, his face twitching while he mumbled.
"A man labouring under some strange and unusual excitement," thought Beekman, "and yet...."
The stranger was on his feet now, and going down the aisle paused before a chair that was occupied by a tired mother and her two-and-a-half-year-old child. Weary, mortified, her temper gone, the woman was trying to appease the crying babe.
Taking up the child in his arms, the stranger sat it on his knee, let it play with his watch, rattled his keys, adopted a hundred lively pranks for the benefit of the child; and the infant, soothed and cheered by this new and agreeable personality, sank at last into a peaceful sleep.
"Nothing like a child," he said to Beekman, "to make the future seem worth while. Talk about Eden—there's no Eden, no happiness, without them. I love children, this one, all of them."
Beekman once more lapsed into drowsiness, his thoughts, in a confused way, resting on the eccentric character beside him. When he awoke the train was pulling into Buffalo. Touching the stranger by the arm, as he was preparing to alight, he quoted: "'And the rest by the names underneath.'" And added, as he raised his hat: "Thanks. I'll not forget that."
Nor did he soon forget it. For indeed through many months to come he carried with him the memory of that nervous, haunted, tired face with the restless, hopeless eyes, the memory of this unknown man with the scar deep and long and wide upon his forehead—the scar from Heidelberg.