As I went in I nodded to him and he acknowledged my presence with one of those terrible soundless laughs of his. But this time it was prolonged, it seemed to go on forever, and mostly to cut it short, I asked: “Where are you from?” in a voice I tried to make casual.
He stopped laughing and looked at me narrowly, wondering what my game was. When he decided to answer, his voice was muffled as though he were speaking through a silk scarf, and it seemed to come from a long way off.
“I’m from St. Paul, Jack.”
“Been making a trip home?”
He nodded. Then he took a long breath and spoke in a hard, menacing voice:
“You better get off at Fort Wayne, Jack.”
He was dead. He was dead as hell—he had been dead all along, but what force had flowed through him, like blood in his veins, out to St. Paul and back, was leaving him now. A new outline—the outline of him dead—was coming through the palpable figure that had knocked down Joe Jelke.
He spoke again, with a sort of jerking effort:
“You get off at Fort Wayne, Jack, or I’m going to wipe you out.” He moved his hand in his coat pocket and showed me the outline of a revolver.
I shook my head. “You can’t touch me,” I answered. “You see, I know.” His terrible eyes shifted over me quickly, trying to determine whether or not I did know. Then he gave a snarl and made as though he were going to jump to his feet.
“You climb off here or else I’m going to get you, Jack!” he cried hoarsely. The train was slowing up for Fort Wayne and his voice rang loud in the comparative quiet, but he didn’t move from his chair—he was too weak, I think—and we sat staring at each other while workmen passed up and down outside the window banging the brakes and wheels, and the engine gave out loud mournful pants up ahead. No one got into our car. After a while the porter closed the vestibule door and passed back along the corridor, and we slid out of the murky yellow station light and into the long darkness.
What I remember next must have extended over a space of five or six hours, though it comes back to me as something without any existence in time—something that might have taken five minutes or a year. There began a slow, calculated assault on me, wordless and terrible, I felt what I can only call a strangeness stealing over me—akin to the strangeness I had felt all afternoon, but deeper and more intensified. It was like nothing so much as the sensation of drifting away, and I gripped the arms of the chair convulsively, as if to hang onto a piece in the living world. Sometimes I felt myself going out with a rush. There would be almost a warm relief about it, a sense of not caring; then, with a violent wrench of the will, I’d pull myself back into the room.
Suddenly I realized that from a while back I had stopped hating him, stopped feeling violently alien to him, and with the realization, I went cold and sweat broke out all over my head. He was getting around my abhorrence, as he had got around Ellen coming West on the train; and it was just that strength he drew from preying on people that had brought him up to the point of concrete violence in St. Paul, and that, fading and flickering out, still kept him fighting now.
He must have seen that faltering in my heart, for he spoke at once, in a low, even, almost gentle voice: “You better go now.”
“Oh, I’m not going,” I forced myself to say.
“Suit yourself, Jack.”
He was my friend, he implied. He knew how it was with me and he wanted to help. He pitied me. I’d better go away before it was too late. The rhythm of his attack was soothing as a song: I’d better go away—and let him get at Ellen. With a little cry I sat bolt upright.
“What do you want of this girl?” I said, my voice shaking. “To make a sort of walking hell of her.”
His glance held a quality of dumb surprise, as if I were punishing an animal for a fault of which he was not conscious. For an instant I faltered; then I went on blindly:
“You’ve lost her; she’s put her trust in me.”
His countenance went suddenly black with evil, and he cried: “You’re a liar!” in a voice that was like cold hands.
“She trusts me,” I said. “Yon can’t touch her. She’s safe!”
He controlled himself. His face grew bland, and I felt that curious weakness and indifference begin again inside me. What was the use of all this? What was the use?
“You haven’t got much time left,” I forced myself to say, and then, in a flash of intuition, I jumped at the truth. “You died, or you were killed, not far from here!”—Then I saw what I had not seen before—that his forehead was drilled with a small round hole like a larger picture nail leaves when it’s pulled from a plaster wall. “And now you’re sinking. You’ve only got a few hours. The trip home is over!”
His face contorted, lost all semblance of humanity, living or dead. Simultaneously the room was full of cold air and with a noise that was something between a paroxysm of coughing and a burst of horrible laughter, he was on his feet, reeking of shame and blasphemy.
“Come and look!” he cried. “I’ll show you——”
He took a step toward me, then another and it was exactly as if a door stood open behind him, a door yawning out to an inconceivable abyss of darkness and corruption. There was a scream of mortal agony, from him or from somewhere behind, and abruptly the strength went out of him in a long husky sigh and he wilted to the floor…
How long I sat there, dazed with terror and exhaustion, I don’t know. The next thing I rememer is the sleepy porter shining shoes across the room from me, and outside the window the steel fires of Pittsburgh breaking the flat perspective also something too faint for a man, too heavy for a shadow. of the night. There was something extended on the bench Even as I perceived it it faded off and away.
Some minutes later I opened the door of Ellen’s compartment. She was asleep where I had left her. Her lovely cheeks were white and wan, but she lay naturally—her hands relaxed and her breathing regular and clear. What had possessed her had gone out of her, leaving her exhausted but her own dear self again.
I made her a little more comfortable, tucked a blanket around her, extinguished the light and went out.
III
When I came home for Easter vacation, almost my first act was to go down to the billiard parlor near Seven Corners. The man at the cash register quite naturally didn’t remember my hurried visit of three months before.
“I’m trying to locate a certain party who, I think, came here a lot some time ago.”
I described the man rather accurately, and when I had finished, the cashier called to a little jockeylike fellow who was sitting near with an air of having something very important to do that he couldn’t quite remember.
“Hey, Shorty, talk to this guy, will you? I think he’s looking for Joe Varland.”
The little man gave me a tribal look of suspicion. I went and sat near him.
“Joe Varland’s dead, fella,” he said grudgingly. “He died last winter.”
I described him again—his overcoat, his laugh, the habitual expression of his eyes.
“That’s Joe Varland you’re looking for all right, but he’s dead.”
“I want to find out something about him.”
“What you want to find out?”
“What did he do, for instance?”
“How should I know?”
“Look here! I’m not a policeman. I just want some kind of information about his habits. He’s dead now and it can’t hurt him. And it won’t go beyond me.”
“Well”—he hesitated, looking me over—“he was a great one for travelling. He got in a row in the station in Pittsburgh and a dick got him.”
I nodded. Broken pieces of the puzzle began to assemble in my head.
“Why was he a lot on trains?”
“How should I know, fella?”
“If you can use ten dollars, I’d like to know anything you may have heard on the subject.”
“Well,” said Shorty reluctantly, “all I know is they used to say he worked the trains.”
“Worked the trains?”
“He had some racket of his own he’d never loosen up about. He used to work the girls travelling alone on the trains. Nobody ever knew much about it—he was a pretty smooth guy—but sometimes he’d turn up here with a lot of dough and he let ’em know it was the janes he got it off of.”
I thanked him and gave him the ten dollars and went out, very thoughtful, without mentioning that part of Joe Varland had made a last trip home.
Ellen wasn’t West for Easter, and even if she had been I wouldn’t have gone to her with the information, either—at—at least I’ve seen her almost every day this summer and we’ve managed to talk about everything else. Sometimes, though, she gets silent
