Marley wished the passengers would wake up and end the indecencies they had tried to hide earlier in the night. Glancing up and down the long car he could recognize none of them as having been there when he had boarded the car at Macochee; those who had got on with him had gone short distances, and then got off, breaking the last tie that bound him to his home. He found it impossible now to conceive of the car as having been in Macochee so short a time before.
Presently he saw an old lady sitting up in the remote end of the car; she was winding her thin wisp of gray hair in a little knob at the back of her head. Then, feeling that he might bestir himself, Marley got up and went forward; he washed his face, and tried to escape the discomfort of clothes he had worn all the night by readjusting them. The train was evidently approaching the city; now and then he saw a building, lonely and out of place: on the hideous sand-dunes, as if it waited for the city, in the growth it boasted, to catch up with it.
The train ran on; it had reached an ever-widening web of tracks; it passed long lines of freight-cars, stock-cars from the west, empty gondolas that had come with coal from the Hocking Valley; a switch tower swept by, its bell jangling peevishly in alarm; long processions of working-men trooped with their dinner-pails between the tracks. The train stopped, finally, still far from its destination. The air in the car was foul from the feculence of all those bodies that had lain in it through the night, and Marley went out on the platform. He could hear the engine wheezing--the only sound to break the silence of the dawn. The cool morning air was grateful to Marley, though it was not the air of the spring they were already having in Macochee. He risked getting down off the platform and looked ahead. Beyond the long train, coated with its black cinders, he saw Chicago, dim through the morning light, lying dark, mysterious and grim under its pall of smoke. He shuddered and went back into the car. After a while the train creaked and strained and pulled on again.
The passengers had begun to stir, and now were hastening to rehabilitate themselves in the eyes of the world; the woman with the baby fastened her dress, the drummer put on his collar and coat, the men drew on their boots, but it was long before they felt themselves presentable again. The women could achieve but half a toilet, and though they were all concerned about their hair, they could not make themselves tidy.