THE HIRED MAN
I
THE tiny room, in which they sat, looked as much as anything like an undertaker's parlor. It was paneled in coffin woods, upholstered in black leather, with mirrors innumerable and shining nickle fittings. And in the ineffectual, sad light of the gas-lamp overhead, the three men were as silent as mourners, staring solemnly, with that expression of decent dejection which the Anglo-Saxon wears when he has to listen to music in silence, or smoke among strangers who do not force him to speak. Outside the windows a noisy blackness streamed by, in a torrent and a turmoil that rocked and roared unceasingly.
They were in the smoking-compartment of a Pullman car. There entered a middle-aged man in a peaked outing-cap that looked absurdly boyish above his big, sunburnt face. The others watched him blow into the stem of a briar pipe, his cheeks puffed out, his eyes shifting from one to the next. When the pipe whistled on a high clear note, he nodded his satisfaction to the whole party and sat down among them. "The frost plays the devil with the roadbeds in this country," he said, in a burly voice that filled the whole compartment.
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