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When you open your window-shutters the next morning, you see that the village is a disconsolate hamlet, scattered along the track as if it had been shaken by chance from an open freight-car; it consists of twenty houses, three shops, and a discouraged church perched upon a little hillock like a solitary mourner on the anxious seat.
From the vague southwest he came, now skirting the chimneyed towns and elm-bordered village streets, now exchanging the road for the bright rails and perhaps the interior of a droning freight-car, now switching anew through the edge of odorous pine woods, yet leaving behind him always a wary, broken trail.
Lorenzo Coffin, of Iowa, a distant cousin of Carleton's, whom so many railway men always salute as "father," had been for years trying to throttle the two twin enemies of the railway man, alcohol, and the freight-car equipment of link-and-pin coupler and hand-brake. It was he who agitated unceasingly for national protection to railway men, and to the brakeman especially.
He had had his boyish scraps with his fellows off and on ever since he could remember; but his first real fight came when he was twelve. He had had an altercation with an erstwhile pal over the division of the returns from some freight-car booty.
The pump engineer has been scouring, but he's scared to bunk there yet himself." "Too bad you couldn't try my plan of a freight-car!" said I. "An empty?" she cried. "Is there a clean one?" "You've sure never done that?" Lin burst out. "So you're scandalized," said she, punishing him instantly. "I reckon it does take a decent girl to shock you."
It was at one such gathering that a ghost appeared a lank, saffron ghost, ragged as a scarecrow wearing a foolish smile and the cape of a cavalryman's overcoat with no coat beneath it. The apparition was a youth of about twenty, with a downy beard all over his face, and countenance well mellowed with coal-soot, as though he had ridden several days on top of a freight-car that was near the engine.
"Come yere," Julius Cæsar repeated, and made a dive for him. The turkey spread his tail. Oh, didn't he run! "Now I've got yer!" the wicked Jericho Bob cried, and thought he had captured the fowl; when with a shriek from Jericho Bob, as the turkey knocked him over, the Thanksgiving dinner spread his wings, rose in the air, and alighted on the roof of the freight-car.
In this humor he was not prepared to have anything of the kind happen, and he stood aghast, in looking absently into a freight-car standing on the track, to read, "Miss Phyllis Desmond, Lower Merritt, N. H.," on the slope of the now familiar case just within the open doorway. It was as if the poor girl were personally there pleading for his help with the eyes whose tenderness he remembered.
Then we had to come back and pay thirty cents to Peter and thirty to Letta; and afterward had to ride in a freight-car because of your dog." "If you don't want Pixy with us, I will go back home to-morrow and take him," said Fritz with tears in his eyes. "It has been enough trouble to me that I brought him without first asking papa and mamma.
I don't suppose I really thought; I followed instinct like an animal. I hid in a freight-car going East " A definite difficulty here stopped Aurora. While she felt for words in which to clothe what followed, the images in her mind made her eyes, which were not seeing the things actually before them, more descriptive of the anguish of remembered scenes than her words were likely to be.
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