Other Main-Travelled Roads Part 21

"Oh, I forgot to say that the old lady's name is Welsh--Mrs. Robert Welsh. Say I sent yeh, and it'll be all right."

"Sure! I'll try her in the morning--that is, if I find out I'm going to stay."

Albert clutched his valise, and pulled his cap firmly down on his head.

"Here goes!" he muttered.

"Hold y'r breath!" shouted the brakeman. Albert swung himself to the platform before the station--a platform of planks along which the snow was streaming like water.

"Good-night!" shouted the brakeman.

"_Good_-night!"

"All-l abo-o-o-ard!" called the conductor somewhere in the storm. The brakeman swung his lantern, the train drew off into the blinding whirl, and its lights were soon lost in the clouds of snow.

No more desolate place could well be imagined. A level plain, apparently bare of houses, swept by a ferocious wind; a dingy little den called a station--no other shelter in sight; no sign of life save the dull glare of two windows to the left, alternately lost and found in the storm.

Albert's heart contracted with a sudden fear; the outlook was appalling.

"Where's the town?" he asked of a dimly seen figure with a lantern--a man evidently locking the station door, his only refuge.

"Over there," was the surly reply.

"How far?"

"'Bout a mile."

"A mile!"

"That's what I said--a mile."

"Well, I'll be blanked!"

"Well, y' better be doing something besides standing here, 'r y' 'll freeze t' death. I'd go over to the Arteeshun House an' go t' bed if I was in your fix."

"Well, where _is_ the Artesian House?"

"See them lights?"

"I see them lights."

"Well, they're it."

"Oh, wouldn't your grammar make Old Grammaticuss curl up, though!"

"What say?" queried the man bending his head toward Albert, his form being almost lost in the snow that streamed against them both.

"I said I guessed I'd try it," grinned the youth, invisibly.

"Well, I would if I was in your fix. Keep right close after me; they's some ditches here, and the foot-bridges are none too wide."

"The Artesian is owned by the railway, eh?"

"Yup."

"And you're the clerk?"

"Yup; nice little scheme, ain't it?"

"Well, it'll do," replied Albert.

The man laughed without looking around.

In the little bar-room, lighted by a vilely smelling kerosene lamp, the clerk, hitherto a shadow and a voice, came to light as a middle-aged man with a sullen face slightly belied by a sly twinkle in his eyes.

"This beats all the winters I ever _did_ see. It don't do nawthin' but blow, _blow_. Want to go to bed, I s'pose. Well, come along."

He took up one of the absurd little lamps and tried to get more light out of it.

"Dummed if a white bean wouldn't be better."

"Spit on it!" suggested Albert.

"I'd throw the whole business out o' the window for a cent!" growled the man.

"Here's y'r cent," said the boy.

"You're mighty frisky f'r a feller gitt'n' off'n a midnight train,"

replied the man, as he tramped along a narrow hallway. He spoke in a voice loud enough to awaken every sleeper in the house.

"Have t' be, or there'd be a pair of us."

"You'll laugh out o' the other side o' y'r mouth when you saw away on one o' the bell-collar steaks this house puts up," ended the clerk, as he put the lamp down.

"Sufficient unto the morn is the evil thereof,'" called Albert after him.

He was awakened the next morning by the cooks pounding steak down in the kitchen and wrangling over some division of duty. It was a vile place at any time, but on a morning like this it was appalling. The water was frozen, the floor like ice, the seven-by-nine gla.s.s frosted so that he couldn't see to comb his hair.

"All that got me out of bed," he remarked to the clerk, "was the thought of leaving."

The breakfast was incredibly bad--so much worse than he expected that Albert was forced to admit he had never seen its like. He fled from the place without a glance behind, and took pa.s.sage in an omnibus for the town, a mile away. It was terribly cold, the thermometer registering twenty below zero; but the sun was very brilliant, and the air still.

The driver pulled up before a very ambitious wooden hotel ent.i.tled "The Eldorado," and Albert dashed in at the door and up to the stove, with both hands covering his ears.

As he stood there, frantic with pain, kicking his toes and rubbing his hands, he heard a chuckle--a slow, sly, insulting chuckle--turned, and saw Hartley standing in the doorway, visibly exulting over his misery.

"h.e.l.lo, Bert! that you?"

"What's left of me. Say, you're a good one, you are? Why didn't you telegraph me at Marion? A deuce of a night I've had of it!"