MY SUNDAY AT HOME
He looked at me curiously.
"We 'll get another before sundown, if that 's your only trouble. Say, porter, when 's the next train down?"
"Seven forty-five," said the one porter, and passed out through the wicket-gate into the landscape. It was then three-twenty of a hot and sleepy afternoon. The station was absolutely deserted. The navvy had closed his eyes, and now nodded.
"That 's bad," said the doctor. "The man, I mean, not the train. We must make him walk somehow—walk up and down."
Swiftly as might be, I explained the delicacy of the situation, and the doctor from New York turned a full bronze-green. Then he swore comprehensively at the entire fabric of our glorious Constitution, cursing the English language, root, branch, and paradigm, through its most obscure derivatives. His coat and bag lay on the bench next to the sleeper. Thither he edged cautiously, and I saw treachery in his eye.
What devil of delay possessed him to slip on his spring overcoat, I cannot tell. They say a slight noise rouses a sleeper more surely than a heavy one, and scarcely had the doctor settled himself in his sleeves than the giant waked and seized that silk-faced collar in a hot right hand. There was rage in his face—rage and the realisation of new emotions.
"I 'm—I 'm not so comfortable as I were," he said from the deeps of his interior. "You 'll wait along o' me, you will." He breathed heavily through shut lips.
[368]
