Instead of that, all she did was continually to get up and go out of the car. Every station we stopped at—and the accommodation acts like it was made for the stations and not the stations for it—she was up and out, as if the town was something swimming up to the car-door to speak to her. She'd leave the baby asleep in the seat, and I wondered what would happen if he woke up while she was gone, and started to roll. She stayed every time up till after the train started—I didn't wonder it made her cold, and that after a bit she put on her coat before she went. And once or twice she carried out her valise with her, as if she might have expected somebody to be there to get it. "Mebbe she's got somebody's laundry," thinks I, "and mebbe a stranger has asked her to bring it out on the train and she can't remember what station it's to be put off at." They send things to stations along the way a lot on the accommodation—everybody being neighbors, so.
Well, when we got to the Junction, out she went again, cloak and valise and all. But I didn't think much about her then, because at the Junction it's always all excitement, being that's where they switch the parlor car off the train, and whoever is in it for Friendship Village has to come back in the day coach for the rest of the way, and be just folks. And among those that came back that night was the Brother-man.
I dunno if you'll know what I mean by that name for him. Some men are just men, like they thought God made them just for the pleasure of making them. And some men are flying around like they wanted to prove that the Almighty didn't make a mistake when He created them. But there are some men that just live like God hadn't made them so much as that they're a piece of Him, and they haven't forgotten it and they feel kindly toward all the other pieces. Well, this man was one of the Brother-men. I knew it the minute I saw him.
By the time he came in the car, moving leisurely and like getting a seat wasn't so interesting as most other things, there wasn't a seat left, excepting only the turned one in front of the little chap asleep. The man looked around idle for a minute and see that they wasn't cloak or valise keeping that seat, and he sat down and opened the book he'd had his finger in the place all the time, and allowed to read.
There's consid'rable switching to do at the Junction, time we get started; and the jolts and bounces did just exactly what I thought they would do—woke the little chap up. From before the train started he begun stirring and whimpering—that way a baby does when it wants nothing in the world but a hand to be laid on it. Isn't it as if its mother's hand was a kind of healing that big folks forget about needing? By the time the train was out on the road in earnest, the little chap, he was in earnest, too. And he just what-you-might-say yelled. But no mother came. They wasn't a mother's hand with big red and blue rings on three fingers to lay on the little boy's back. And there wasn't a mother of him anywhere's in sight.
In a minute or two the Brother-man looked up. He hadn't seemed to see the baby before or to sense that he was a baby. And he looked at him crying and he laid his book down and he looked all around him, perplexish, and then he looked over to me that was looking at him perplexish, too. And being he was a man and I wasn't, I got right up and went round there and picked the little chap up in my arms and sat down with him.
"His ma went out of the car somewheres," I explained it.
He had lifted his hat and jumped up, polite as if he was the one I'd picked up. And he stood looking down at me.
"I wonder if I couldn't fetch her," he says—and his voice was one of the voices that most says an idea all alone. I mean you'd most have known what he meant if he'd just spoke along without using any words—oh, well, I dunno if that sounds like anything, but I guess you know the kind I mean. The Novel-and-Poem Man's stories are the same kind, being they say so much that never does get set up in type.