Then, there was a change and a terrible wait of several hours at a junction.
Finally, as dark came, he was being borne again toward the hills.
Within his berth he lay with hot sleepless eyes, staring out at the black mass of the earth, the bulk of the hills.
Finally, in the hours after midnight, he dropped into a nervous doze.
He was wakened by the clatter of the trucks as they began to enter the Altamont yards.
Dazed, half-dressed, he was roused by the grinding halt, and a moment later was looking out through the curtains into the grave faces of Luke and Hugh Barton.
“Ben’s very sick,” said Hugh Barton.
Eugene pulled on his shoes and dropped to the floor, stuffing his collar and tie into a coat pocket.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“I’m ready.”
They went softly down the aisle, amid the long dark snores of the sleepers.
As they walked through the empty station toward Hugh Barton’s car, Eugene said to the sailor:
“When did you get home, Luke?”
“I came in last night,” he said.
“I’ve been here only a few hours.”
It was half-past three in the morning.
The ugly station settlement lay fixed and horrible, like something in a dream.
His strange and sudden return to it heightened his feeling of unreality.
In one of the cars lined at the station curbing, the driver lay huddled below his blanket.
In the Greek’s lunchroom a man sat sprawled faced downward on the counter.
The lights were dull and weary: a few burned with slow lust in the cheap station-hotels.
Hugh Barton, who had always been a cautious driver, shot away with a savage grinding of gears.
They roared townward through the rickety slums at fifty miles an hour.
“I’m afraid B-B-B-Ben is one sick boy,” Luke began.
“How did it happen?” Eugene asked.
“Tell me.”
He had taken influenza, they told Eugene, from one of Daisy’s children.
He had moped about, ill and feverish, for a day or two, without going to bed.
“In that G-g-g-god dam cold barn,” Luke burst out.
“If that boy dies it’s because he c-c-c-couldn’t keep warm.”
“Never mind about that now,” Eugene cried irritably, “go on.”
Finally he had gone to bed, and Mrs. Pert had nursed him for a day or two.
“She was the only one who d-d-d-did a damn thing for him,” said the sailor.
Eliza, at length, had called in Cardiac.
“The d-d-damned old quack,” Luke stuttered.
“Never mind! Never mind!” Eugene yelled.
“Why dig it up now?
Get on with it!”
After a day or two, he had grown apparently convalescent, and Cardiac told him he might get up if he liked.
He got up and moped about the house for a day, in a cursing rage, but the next day he lay a-bed, with a high fever.
Coker at length had been called in, two days before —
“That’s what they should have done at the start,” growled Hugh Barton over his wheel.
“Never mind!” screamed Eugene.
“Get on with it.”
And Ben had been desperately ill, with pneumonia in both lungs, for over a day.
The sad prophetic story, a brief and terrible summary of the waste, the tardiness, and the ruin of their lives, silenced them for a moment with its inexorable sense of tragedy.
They had nothing to say.
The powerful car roared up into the chill dead Square.
The feeling of unreality grew upon the boy.
He sought for his life, for the bright lost years, in this mean cramped huddle of brick and stone.