“SHE PAUSED BEFORE MRS. SMITH’S SECTION”
“SHE PAUSED BEFORE MRS. SMITH’S SECTION”
She walked down the aisle and paused before Mrs. Smith’s section, Ruth holding her breath. She looked at the big shoes on the floor, her lip curling. Then she took the curtains of Mrs. Smith’s section in both hands and put her head in.
“I must stop her!” thought Ruth. But she did not spring out. The sheriff, fully dressed, was beside the woman, and an arm of iron deliberately turned her round.
“The game’s up, Mamie,” said Wickliff.
She made no noise, only looked at him.
“What are you going to do?” said she, with perfect composure.
“Arrest you if you make a racket, talk to you if you don’t. Go into that seat.” He indicated a seat in the rear, and she took it without a word. He sat near the aisle; she was by the window.
“I suppose you mean to sit here all night,” she remarked, scornfully.
“Not at all,” said he; “just to the next place. Then you’ll get out.”
“Oh, will I?”
“You will. Either you will get out and go about your business, or you will get out and be taken to jail.”
“We’re smart. What for?”
“For inciting prisoners to escape.”
“Ned’s dead,” with a sneer.
“Yes, he’s dead, and”—he watched her narrowly, although he seemed absorbed in buttoning his coat—“they say he haunts his old cell, as if he’d lost something. Maybe it’s the letter you folded up small enough to go in the seam of a coat. I’ve got that.” He saw that she was watching him in turn, and that she was nervous. “Ned’s dead, poor fellow, true enough; but—the girl at Barber & Glasson’s ain’t dead.”
She began to fumble with her gloves, peeling them off and rolling them into balls. He thought to himself that the chances were that she was superstitious.
“Look here,” he said, sharply, “have an end of this nonsense; you get off at the next place, and never bother that old lady again, or—I will have you arrested, and you can try for yourself whether Ned’s cell is haunted.”
For a brief space they eyed each other, she in an access of impotent rage, he stolid as thecarving of the seat. The car shivered; the great wheels moved more slowly. “Decide,” said he; not imperatively—dryly, without emotion of any sort. He kept his mild eyes on her.
“It wasn’t his mother I meant to tell; it was that girl—thatnicegirl he wanted to marry—”
“You make me tired,” said the sheriff. “Are you going, or am I to make a scene and take you? I don’t care much.”
She slipped her hand behind her into her pocket.
The sheriff laughed, and grasped one wrist.
“Idon’t want to talk to the country fools,” she snapped.
“This way,” said the sheriff, guiding her. The train had stopped. She laughed as he politely handed her off the platform; the next moment the wheels were turning again and she was gone. He never saw her again.
The porter came out to stand by his side in the vestibule, watching the lights of the station race away and the darkling winter fields fly past. The sheriff was well known to him; he nodded an eager acquiescence to the officer’s request: “If those ladies in 8 and 9 ask you any questions, just tell them it was a crazy woman getting the wrong section, and I took care of her.”
Within the car a desolate mother wept the long night through, yet thanked God amid her tears for her son’s last good days, and did not dream of the blacker sorrow that had menaced her and had been hurled aside.