The six-thirty train came slowly into the Glen station, for it was both long and heavy with freight cars, a single combination passenger and baggage car being at the very end. This same halted far below the station, where the water-tank made a barrier between the railroad ground and the open fields.
Slowly four clumsy, heavy-laden figures in petticoats crawled down the high steps, assisting a little boy in curious trousers, while a good-natured brakeman helped to steady and replace the various bundles that were fastened to head and shoulders. As they huddled together, straightening their garments and belongings, the whistle blew three times shrilly, and the train creaked and moved heavily on.
Is there any stillness more intense than that which closes around the countryside after the bustle of a train has ceased? The evensong of the birds and the peeping frogs only serve to deepen silence from the purely human standpoint.
The heads of the three elder women were covered by kerchiefs, the little girl was bareheaded, and the boy wore an odd cap, but all alike had an expression of fatigue and resigned anxiety. The elder woman must have been pretty once, but her face was lined and thin with toil and poor feeding, while the other woman, of twenty perhaps, was round-eyed and plump.
“Where is he, Maria? Where is Ivan my brother? He leaves us here alone in a strange place at nightfall?” she asked in her foreign tongue. “I can see no houses, it is like a green desert.”
“Perhaps it is Siberia, then!” said the girl of twelve, with a shiver.
“Hush,” said Maria, “thy father has not forgotten us in all these years, he will not now,” but nevertheless dread was creeping over her, and she raised her hands nervously to loose the band that bound the bundle to her forehead.
“I’m hungry and I want to go to sleep,” piped the little boy, and crouching toward him on the bare ground his mother strove to comfort him.
Ivan slept like one dead, until a shrill whistling sound waked him with a start, and reading the time by the shadows that had not only lengthened, but were vanishing, he rolled to his feet, and half slid, half stumbled down to the road, across the head of which the evening train was moving.