the proverb about the slow boiling of the "watched pot" was coined, it seems certain that its author had never waited somewhere in darkness and solitude for a laggard railway train.
Tom thought about it between-times, when the mosquitos permitted him to think of anything, and fancied he could construct a stronger figure of speech out of the experience of the dragging moments.
While it was light enough to distinguish the figures on its dial, he looked at his watch every two minutes. After dark each observation cost a match, and he began to wait for five minutes.
At the end of half an hour he came to his last match. As he was about to strike it he had a sudden attack of the castaway's economy, and put it away carefully against a time of greater need. Then he began to realize how very dark it was, and how solemn the silence of a swamp could be, despite the croaking of the frogs, the shriller din of the tree-toads, and the fine treble of uncounted insects.
Under such conditions inaction can hardly be borne, and he tried the "movement cure," getting up to stumble back and forth along the tracks until he missed his footing on the cross-ties and fell into a culvert. That was discouraging, and he crept back to the crossing and sat down again to fight it out with the mosquitos, and to wonder if in all the great books of the past there had ever been recorded another hour of such infinite length.
The wonder presently prompted a desire which soon grew into an overmastering temptation to use his last match in finding out how much shorter the hour had become. He withstood the suggestion till there was no more resistance in him, and then he said that he would count a hundred before yielding. Half-way through this brief delay he suddenly remembered that benighted travelers in stories are always able to tell the time by the sense of touch, and he stopped counting to try it.
The experiment was not a success. Try as he might to concentrate the acuteness of the other senses into that of touch, he could not tell whether it was twenty minutes to nine or a quarter to eight. The hands were nearly together, and, so far as his untrained fingers could determine, the two were of exactly the same length.
"It's no use; it's just made up, like everything else in stories," he said dismally. "I've got to light that last match, and when it's gone I'm done. I wish it were a mile long, so it would burn awhile. Wonder if I couldn't piece it—" He stopped suddenly and thumped his head with his fist. "Tom Jarnagan, you haven't sense enough to last overnight! Here you sit on a tie and kick about its being dark, when there's a whole worldful of fire-wood in reach and you have a match to light it with!"
After which criticism upon himself, he felt his way down the embankment to the driest spot he could find, and made a fire—though not without many qualms when it came to the point of striking the priceless match. But the tiny point of flame survived; the dry leaves caught and passed the blaze to the twigs; and the black darkness—and with it much of the loneliness of the swamp—retreated a few paces in every direction.
"What an everlasting booby I've been, all around!" he mused, when the fire was burning briskly and the pungent smoke from a hatful of pine-cones had begun to discourage the mosquitos. "I haven't done much but blunder from one thing to the next ever since that day when I let Harry get the mail! To think of being chased away off here into the woods by a bogus letter just because I wasn't sharp enough to look at the postmark! It's disgusting!"
Whereupon he kicked the fire by way of emphasis, and climbed the embankment to lay his ear to the ground to listen if haply the train might be coming. It was not; and for another half-hour he divided the time equally between keeping up his fire and listening with his head near the rail.
At eight-thirty poor Tom's long vigil ended. First there was a fine song in the metal of the rails; then came a distant muttering as of sustained thunder—an alien note that set the air a-trembling; and then a great yellow eye flashed into view, and the engineer of the approaching train woke the echoes with the crossing signal: rhaow! rhaow! rha-rhaow!
Tom kicked the fire into the nearest pool, and held himself in readiness for prompt action. He knew—what every one knows who has ever attempted to board a train at a crossing—that there is no telling just where the engineer will stop. So he stood poised for a quick dash, measuring the lessening speed of the oncoming eye, and fighting a grim battle with an unnerving fear that the train would stop before it came near to him.