“How long shall we be here?” Walton inquired.
“Till three o'clock, sir,” the conductor said, as they walked along toward the locomotive.
“I wonder if I'd have time to walk to town and look around,” Fred said. “I don't feel like turning in right now.”
“Plenty, plenty,” the conductor answered. “It is only a mile or so to the square.”
“Then I'll go,” Walton said, and he walked away, thankful that the night was cloudy. On he went down the railway, in the streaming glare of the locomotive's headlight, till he reached the first street leading into Stafford. Ahead, in the light of many lanterns, a throng of trackmen were at work on the wreck.
How changed was the landscape he had once known so well! Spots which had been old barren fields, dismantled brick-yards, and stretches of forest, were now, thanks to the enterprise of Kenneth Galt, filled with cottages, cotton factories, iron-foundries, and other industries. To the right, on a common, which used to be the ball-ground where the team, of which Fred had been the popular captain, had played in his schooldays, the round-house and machine-shops of the S. R. & M. had risen. New thoroughfares had been opened, natural elevations graded away, and uncouth gullies filled.
Taking the darker and quieter streets by choice, Walton strode onward, headed toward the old part of town, his heart wrung with a pain more poignant than any he had ever felt. Once, as he was passing through a cluster of small houses which seemed inhabited by negroes, he saw a few dusky faces he had known, and recognized some familiar voices coming from the unlighted porches and open windows. On trudged the wayfarer, his step slow, his feet heavy. Presently he came to a stone and iron bridge which spanned a small arm of the river, and, crossing to the other side, he ascended a slight elevation from which he had a view of the entire town. It was a lonely, unimproved spot, where a few scrubby pines grew and some gray primitive bowlders lay half embedded in the ground. Farther along the brow of the narrow hill stood the old brick school, which, as a boy, he had attended. A thousand memories flogged his quickened brain--memories of those lost days, when his gentle mother had dressed him and sent him off with a kiss and the admonition to be a good boy. She was dead, she was gone forever, and her prayers in his behalf had fallen on the deaf ear of Infinite Providence. He had not been a good boy, and she had prayed in vain. Her grave was there beyond the town's lights on another hill, and he who had been the sole hope of her motherhood was an alien. He stifled a cry of sheer agony. In his active life in the West he had, in a measure, dulled his senses to much of the past, but here, in view of all he had lost, it was upon him like a monster as long and broad as the universe, with a million sinister claws sunken into his being. There below was the home which might have been his; there, veiled from his sight by the kindly pall of night, lived the men and women who might still have been his friends; there, too, lived the girl, the one girl in all the earth, who--He groaned, and, throwing himself on the ground, he folded his arms and sobbed. How long he remained there he hardly knew, but it was late, for the lights in the houses below were blinking and going out one by one. He was tempted to steal down the hillside, now that deeper darkness offered shelter, and wander through the streets he had loved so well--to wander on till he could see his father's house. Perhaps he might even pass Margaret's home without detection. It would be a risk, an awful risk, he told himself, for he might be recognized, pursued, and even arrested. His hungry heart told him to take the chance, his inbred caution warned him strongly to return to the car without delay, and yet he lingered. He fancied he could see, as his blurred eyes strove to probe the curtain of darkness, the very spot his old home stood upon. Yes, he would risk it. He had been away for years, and he might never return to the old town again. Providence itself had caused the accident to which he owed the opportunity.