ce Jerry was not even aware until she heard his voice. It was a
thin, high, unused voice, and its pitch wabbled up and down.

"Be you goin' on the Sage Bresh train, lady?"

The questioner had turned back after the country girl and the fat man
had passed out.

Jerry looked at him without taking his question to herself. His shoes,
draped with wrinkled-down hose, were very much worn. His overalls
flapping around his legs, his shirt and neck and face and hair and hat,
were all of one complexion, a fuzzy, yellow brown.

"Be you goin' on this train, too?"

It was a humble, kindly voice, and the scaly old hand holding the door
open against the high prairie wind was only a fisherman's hand. The
deep-set eyes in the yellow-brown old face were trained to read the
river; the patient mouth set to wait for the catch of lines and nets.

Jerry had never in her life spoken to such a creature. So far as she was
concerned, he did not exist.

"This is the only train on the Sage Bresh to-day, lady. The reg'lar
train's busted through a culbert out yander," the high, quavering voice
persisted.

A sharp tooting from the engine down the line emphasized the statement,
and Jerry saw the grinning red-faced tick-tick man hastily wheeling
mail-sacks and sundry other parcels by the door. In a bewildered way she
rose and passed out, giving no recognition to the shabby old man who had
been thoughtful of her ignorance.

"We gotta go to the last car down yander, lady," the old man squeaked
out, as he started down the cinder-paved way with a bearlike, shuffling,
sidewise sort of gait.

Jerry followed him slowly to "the last car down yander."

A plain day coach, the sixtieth and last vertebra in this long
mechanical spine, was already crowded with a bunch of grubs, none of
whom could belong to Jerry Swaim's sphere. Moreover, they were all
tightly packed in and wedged down so that it was impossible to detect
the leaving off of the full-fare passenger and the beginning of
suit-cases, old-style telescopes, baskets, bundles, boxes, half-fare
children, bags of fruit, lunch-crates, pieces of farming tools, babes in
arms, groceries--everything to cabbages and kings. Jerry wondered where
all these _things_ came from. Every object in that car, human being or
salt pork, crying baby or kingbolt, was a _thing_ to Jerry Swaim. And
all of them were very warm and nervously tense, as if the hot June wind
had blown them all inside, that the hot June sun, thro