's been workin' on de railroad
Jus' to pass de time away._"

The men on the front seat leaned back and shook the water off their
knees and hummed the song.

The accordion had stopped. Tom Randolph was lying on his back on the
floor of the car with his arm over his eyes. The rain fell endlessly,
rattling on the roof of the car, dancing silver in the coffee-coloured
puddles of the road. Their boredom fell into the rhythm of crooning
self-pity of the old coon song:

"_I's been workin' on de railroad
All de livelong day;
I's been workin' on de railroad
Jus' to pass de time away._"

"Oh, God, something's got to happen soon."

Lost in rubber boots, and a huge gleaming slicker and hood, the section
leader splashed across the road.

"All cars must be ready to leave at six to-night."

"Yay. Where we goin'?"

"Orders haven't come yet. We're to be in readiness to leave at six
to-night...."

"I tell you, fellers, there's goin' to be an attack. This concentration
of sanitary sections means something. You can't tell me ..."

* * * * *

"They say they have beer," said the aspirant behind Martin in the long
line of men who waited in the hot sun for the cope to open, while the
dust the staff cars and camions raised as they whirred by on the road
settled in a blanket over the village.

"Cold beer?"

"Of course not," said the aspirant, laughing so that all the brilliant
ivory teeth showed behind his red lips. "It'll be detestable. I'm
getting it because it's rare, for sentimental reasons."

Martin laughed, looking in the man's brown face, a face in which all
past expressions seemed to linger in the fine lines about the mouth and
eyes and in the modelling of the cheeks and temples.

"You don't understand that," said the aspirant again.

"Indeed I do."

Later they sat on the edge of the stone wellhead in the courtyard behind
the store, drinking warm beer out of tin cups blackened by wine, and
staring at a tall barn that had crumpled at one end so that it looked,
with its two frightened little square windows, like a cow kneeling down.

"Is it true that the ninety-second's going up to the lines to-night?"

"Yes, we're going up to make a little attack. Probably I'll come back in
your little omnibus."

"I hope you won't."

"I'd be very glad to. A lucky wound! But I'll probably be killed. This
is the first time I've gone up to the front that I didn't expect