I closed the door behind me and stood with my back against it for a minute. The car was dark save for the corridor lights at each end. There was no sound except the groaning of the couplers, the even click-a-click of the rails and someone’s loud sleeping breath farther down the car. I became aware after a moment that the figure of a man was standing by the water cooler just outside the men’s smoking room, his derby hat on his head, his coat collar turned up around his neck as if he were cold, his hands in his coat pockets. When I saw him, he turned and went into the smoking room, and I followed. He was sitting in the far corner of the long leather bench; I took the single armchair beside the door.
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. “You 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
