The Brass Bowl | Page 9

recall. And he could do naught to hinder such a
finale to the adventure.
Sulkily he resigned himself to the inevitable, waiting and watching,
while the boat slid and blundered clumsily, paddle-wheels churning the
filthy waters over side, to the floating bridge; while the winches rattled,
and the woman, sitting up briskly in the driver's seat of the motor-car,
bent forward and advanced the spark; while the chain fell clanking and
the car shot out, over the bridge, through the gates, and away, at a very
considerable, even if lawful, rate of speed.
Whereupon, writing Finis to the final chapter of Romance, voting the
world a dull place and life a treadmill, anathematizing in no uncertain
terms his lack of resource and address, Maitland paid off his cabby,
alighted, and to that worthy's boundless wonder, walked into the
waiting-room of the railway terminus without deviating a hair's-breadth
from the straight and circumscribed path of the sober in mind and body.
The ten-twenty had departed by a bare two minutes. The next and last
train for Greenfields was to leave at ten-fifty-nine. Maitland with
assumed nonchalance composed himself upon a bench in the
waiting-room to endure the thirty-seven minute interval. Five minutes
later an able-bodied washerwoman with six children in quarter sizes
descended upon the same bench; and the young man in desperation
allowed himself to be dispossessed. The news-stand next attracting him,
he garnered a fugitive amusement and two dozen copper cents by the
simple process of purchasing six "night extras," which he did not want,
and paying for each with a five-cent piece. Comprehending, at length,
that he had irritated the news-dealer, he meandered off, jingling his
copper-fortune in one hand, lugging his newspapers in the other, and
made a determined onslaught upon a slot machine. The latter having
reluctantly disgorged twenty-four assorted samples of chewing-gum
and stale sweetmeats, Maitland returned to the washerwoman, and
sowed dissension in her brood by presenting the treasure-horde to the

eldest girl with instructions to share it with her brothers and sisters.
It is difficult to imagine what folly might next have been recorded
against him had not, at that moment, a ferocious and inarticulate howl
from the train-starter announced the fact that the ten-fifty-nine was in
waiting.
Boarding the train in a thankful spirit, Maitland settled himself as
comfortably as he might in the smoker and endeavored to find surcease
of ennui in his collection of extras. In vain: even a two-column portrait
of Mr. Dan Anisty, cracksman, accompanied by a vivacious catalogue
of that notoriety's achievements in the field of polite burglary, hardly
stirred his interest. An elusive resemblance which he traced in the
features of Mr. Anisty, as presented by the Sketch-Artist-on-the-Spot,
to some one whom he, Maitland, had known in the dark backwards and
abysm of time, merely drew from him the comment: "Homely brute!"
And he laid the papers aside, cradling his chin in the palm of one hand
and staring for a weary while out of the car window at a reeling and
moonsmitten landscape. He yawned exhaustively, his thoughts astray
between a girl garbed all in grey, Bannerman's earnest and thoughtful
face, and the pernicious activities of Mr. Daniel Anisty, at whose door
Maitland laid the responsibility for this most fatiguing errand....
The brakeman's wolf-like yelp--"Greenfields!"--was ringing in his ears
when he awoke and stumbled down aisle and car-steps just in the nick
of time. The train, whisking round a curve cloaked by a belt of somber
pines, left him quite alone in the world, cast ruthlessly upon his own
resources.
An hour had elapsed; it was now midnight; the moon rode high, a cold
white disk against a background of sapphire velvet, its pellucid rays
revealing with disheartening distinctness the inanimate and lightless
roadside hamlet called Greenfields; its general store and postoffice, its
_soi-disant_ hotel, its straggling line of dilapidated habitations, all
wrapped in silence profound and impenetrable. Not even a dog howled;
not a belated villager was in sight; and it was a moral certainty that the
local livery service had closed down for the night.
Nevertheless, Maitland, with a desperation bred of the prospective
five-mile tramp, spent some ten valuable minutes hammering upon the
door of the house infested by the proprietor of the livery stable. He
succeeded only in waking the dog, and inasmuch as he was not on

friendly terms with that animal, presently withdrew at discretion and
set his face northwards upon the open road.
It stretched before him invitingly enough, a ribbon winding silver-white
between dark patches of pine and scrub-oak or fields lush with rustling
corn and wheat. And, having overcome his primary disgust, as the
blood began to circulate more briskly in his veins, Maitland became
aware that he was actually enjoying the enforced exercise. It could have
been