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The train rumbled on and left him blinking into a lantern held up to his face, but he did not look promising as a hotel guest and the darky porter turned abruptly; and the boy yawned long and deeply, with his arms stretched above his head, dropped on the frosty bars of a baggage-truck and rose again shivering.
At the critical moment, when the train was fairly in motion, Lidgerwood saw Hallock it was unmistakably Hallock this time spring from the shadow of a baggage-truck and whip up to the step of the smoker, and a scant half-second later he saw Judson race across the wide platform and throw himself like a self-propelled projectile against and through the closing doors of the vestibule at the forward end of the sleeper.
And then the train sped away again, with that passionless indifference to human sympathies or curiosity peculiar to express-trains; the one baggage-truck was wheeled into the station again; the station-door was locked; and the station-master went home.
He came swinging on until he was opposite the baggage-truck. Then he stopped and looked searchingly at the bulky form of the man seated upon it. He stepped closer and looked again. Then, with a twinkle in his quiet gray eye, he did a most amazing thing he began to sing. To sing not loudly, of course, but rather under his breath.
He was still squeaking and gesticulating about the knot of newspaper men and staff-officers, but Kenyon, climbing on a baggage-truck, was calmly looking over the sea of upturned and often leeringly impudent faces beyond the grating. Then he called Major Cross to his side, and together they looked it over. The crowd began to wax facetious.
There were several tracks to be crossed, and more than once a watchman snatched him out of the way of a baggage-truck, or a train backing into the depot. He at length reached the door, beyond which, and as near as the regulations would permit, stood a number of hackmen, vociferously soliciting patronage. One of them, a colored man, soon secured several passengers.
Not a few on the outskirts did begin subordinately to move away, and a dozen or more were already going up the steps, when the crowd gave tongue. "Come back, there. Stay where you are. We've got as much right here as they have," were the cries. And then the luckless Elmendorf was seized with an inspiration. Bounding upon a baggage-truck, he waved his hat and shouted, "Hear me, fellow-citizens.
A baggage-truck rumbled past and they heard some one shout, "Get out o' that!" In the dim light they saw a figure crawl from beneath the baggage-car and dash across the station platform to be swallowed up in the shadowy gloom of a side street. "I only had seven drinks," said Shoop, gazing after the disappearing figure. "But if Sundown ain't a pair of twins, that was him." "Hold on, Bud!"
Phelan Harrihan, as, with a soul wholly in tune with the finite, he half sat and half reclined on a baggage-truck at Lebanon Junction. He wag relieving the tedium of his waiting moments by entertaining a critical if not fastidious audience of three.
"I don't know what you say, but I'll report that feller ter th' authorities!" Then a long whistle broke in upon the discussion, and the three rushed for the station platform. From the vantage-point of a baggage-truck they watched the Robinson players and the accompanying contingent descend from the train.
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