-house with the other man and said to himself as he crossed the
door-sill--

"Little cousin! you don't know what 'serious' money this is!"

CHAPTER II

A girl who he judged by her frowzled hair and her heavy eyes had just
been aroused from sleep, stood behind the counter pouring hot and
steaming coffee into thick china cups. The smell to the hungry man was
divine. Fairfax's mouth watered. From the one pot the coffee came out
with milk added, and from another the liquid poured clear. Fairfax asked
for coffee with milk and a sandwich, and as the girl pushed the plate
with hunks of bread and ham towards him, he asked, "How much, please?"
The girl raised her heavy lids. Her gray eyes could have sparkled if she
had been less sleepy. She glanced at him and responded in a soft
brogue--

"Two cints a cup. Sandwiches two cints apiece."

He took his breakfast over to the table where a customer was already
seated before a huge breakfast. After watching Fairfax for a few
moments, this man said to him--

"Got a rattling good appetite, Mister."

"I have, indeed," Fairfax returned, "and I'm going to begin over again."

The man wore a red shirt under his coat, his battered bowler was a-cock
on his head. Antony often recalled Sanders as he looked that morning.
His face from his neck up was clean. He exuded water and brown soap; he
had a bright healthy colour; he was a good-looking workman, but his
hands! Fairfax thought them appalling--grimed with coal. They could
never be washed clean, Fairfax reflected, and one finger on the left
hand was missing.

"Stranger?" the man asked him. "Just going through?"

And as Fairfax replied, he thought to himself, "He doesn't dream _how_
strange I am and that I don't even know the name of the town."

He asked the man, "Much going on here?"

"Yards. Up here in West Albany it's nothing but yards and railroading."

"Ah," nodded Fairfax, and to himself: "This is the capital of New York
State--_Albany_--that's where I am."

And it was not far enough away to please him.

The man's breakfast, which had been fed into him by his knife, was
disposed of, and he went on--

"Good steady employment; they're decent to you. Have to be, good men are
scarce."

A tall, well-set-up engineer came to the coffee counter, and Fairfax's
companion called out to him--

"Got your new fireman yet, Joe?"

And the other, with a cheerful string of oaths, responded that he had
not got him, and that he