THE 3.20 train from Boston slowed up as it drew into a way station, and Malcolm Mc Cann, grim and sullen from his weary ride in the dirt and cinders, the coal-smoke and the fœtid air, the fretting babies and hot, worrying men, that characterise a railway journey in August, hurried out with a grunt of relief.It was not a pretty station where he found himself, and he glared ill-naturedly around with restless, aggressive eyes. The brick walls, the cheaply grained doors bearing their tarnished legends, ’Gents, ’ ’Ladies, ’ ’Refreshment Saloon, ’ the rough raftered roof over the tracks, —everything was black and grimy with years of smoke, belching even now from the big locomotive, and gathering like an ill-conditioned thunder-cloud over the mob of scurrying, pushing men and women, a mob that swelled and scattered constantly in fretful confusion. A hustling business-man with a fat, pink face and long sandy whiskers, his silk hat cocked on one side in grotesque assumption of jauntiness, tripped over the clay-covered pick of a surly labourer, red of face and sweaty, blue of overalls and mud-coloured of shirt, and as he stumbled over the annoying implement scowled coarsely, and swore, with his cigar between his teeth.
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