nd white-coated, black-faded genii of the bowl and
weal; an occasional vague figure peering through cupped hands out from
an electric-lighted berth; a plate-glass observation-car with figures
lounging in shallow leather chairs like oil-kings and merchant princes
and only sons in a Fifth Avenue club, and a great trailing plume of
smoke that lingered for a moment and died in the still tingling air.

For a full half-hour, even an hour, after the Imperial flyer had gouged
through the village the yellow lights of Slateville burned on behind its
unwashed windows, which were half opaque with train-dust and the grimy
finger-prints of children. Then they began to flick out, here,
there--here, there. In a slate-roofed shanty beside the quarry, in an
out-of-balance bookkeeper's office in the Slateville Varnish Factory, in
the Red Trunk general store and post-office, the parson's study, a
maiden's bedroom, in the dirt-colored frame house, another slate-roofed
shanty beside the quarry, another, and yet another. Here, there--here,
there.

The clerk in the signal-tower slumped in his chair, the doctor's
tin-tired buggy rattled up a hilly street that was shaped like a crooked
finger, and away beyond the melancholy stretches of close-bitten
grazing-land and runty corn-fields the flyer shrieked upward, and the
miles scuttled the echoes back to Slateville.

On an alternate night that was as singingly still as the inside of a cup
the flyer tore through the village with the cinders tattooing against
its panes and the white eye searching like a near-sighted cylcopean
monster.

But from the red fireman's cab the green lantern with the black
bull's-eye painted on the outward side dangled unlit, and in the
dirt-colored house, behind drawn shades, the Hebe-like figure was
crouched in another woman's arms, and, in the room adjoining, John
Blaney lay dead with a dent in his head.

Who-o-o-p! Who-o-o-p!

"Listen, Cottie, listen!"

"'Sh-h-h-h, darlin'."

The crouching women crouched closer together, a dove-note in the
crooning voice of one like the coo of a mate. "'Sh-h-h, darlin'."

"There it goes, Cottie. Gawd, just like nothing had happened."

"'Sh-h-h, dearie; lay still!"

"Listen. The engine's playin' a different tune on the tracks; it's
lighter and smoother."

"Yes--yes--'sh-h-h."

"Just hear, Cottie; they got the old diner on. I know her screech."

"I hear, dearie."

"And the Cleveland sleeper wasn't touched, neither. Hear