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Inconceivable!... All American engine-drivers are alike; and I never slept a full hour in any American "sleeper," what with stops, starts, hootings, tollings, whizzings round sharp corners, listening to the passage of freight-trains, and listening to haughty conductor-admirals who quarreled at length with newly arrived voyagers at 2 or 3 A.M.! I do not criticize; I state. I also blame myself.
It was not until he was safe in his sleeper, and racketing through the night, that he remembered the meeting with the literary swans and the editor with the shell-rimmed glasses. A telegram would convey his regrets. He was sorry that he could not meet them, but he had on hand a more important matter.
He ate lunch at the hotel, borrowed a hundred dollars from the agent of Louis Sands, a lumberman of his acquaintance; and seated himself rigidly in the little waiting room, there to remain until the nine-twenty that night. When the cars were backed down from the siding, he boarded the sleeper. In the doorway stood a disapproving colored porter.
Only the three paralysed ones remained standing and rolling their eyes. The Sleeper beckoned to them with his thin finger, and they walked forward in step like soldiers. "Lift that man from the boat," he said, pointing to Bastin, "cut his bonds and those of the others." They obeyed with a wonderful alacrity. In a minute we stood at liberty and were pulling the grass gags from our mouths.
"Shore must be a sound sleeper," said Racey Dawson to himself, "if he really did just wake up." He buckled on his gunbelt, set his hat a-tilt on one ear, and went down to wash his face and hands in the common basin on the wash-bench outside the kitchen door. But Swing Tunstall was before him, and was disposed to make an issue of the dropped boots.
Some smuggler is going to risk it to-night. Well, I shall manage badly if I don't come in for a windfall though it be at the expense of my captain." Saying this, the sentinel with one bound rose erect upon his feet. "Here I am no more Pepe the Sleeper," continued he stretching himself to his full height.
A person standing without could easily take a purse from under the pillow, or even strangle a sleeper as he lay abed. M'Naughten and his comrade stared at each other like Balboa and his men, "with a wild surmise"; and then the latter, catching up the lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly raised the curtain.
The danger is to use life to feed the imagination, not to use imagination to feed life. In these sad weeks I have been like a sleeper awakened. The world of imagination, in which I have lived and moved, has crumbled into pieces over my head; the wind and rain beat through the flimsy dwelling, and I must arise and go.
It is, to be sure, sometimes difficult to put the windows where they will let in the sunlight, the registers where they will heat, and the wall space where it will permit the sleeper to have fresh air without a draught.
Assuredly Bob Slack must be the soundest sleeper in the known world. He who waited rang and rang and rerang. There was no response. Eventually conviction was forced upon Mr. Leary that he must awaken the caretaker who, he seemed dimly to recall as a remembrance of past visits to Bob Slack, was a woman; and this done he must induce the caretaker to admit him to the inside of the house.
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