He closed his eyes and gave himself up to the
feeling of rapid motion and to swift,
terrifying thoughts. He was sitting so, his face
shaded by his hand, when the Boston lawyer
saw him from the siding at White River Junction.
When at last Alexander roused himself,
the afternoon had waned to sunset. The train
was passing through a gray country and the
sky overhead was flushed with a wide flood of
clear color. There was a rose-colored light
over the gray rocks and hills and meadows.
Off to the left, under the approach of a
weather-stained wooden bridge, a group of
boys were sitting around a little fire.
The smell of the wood smoke blew in at the window.
Except for an old farmer, jogging along the highroad
in his box-wagon, there was not another living
creature to be seen. Alexander looked back wistfully
at the boys, camped on the edge of a little marsh,
crouching under their shelter and looking gravely
at their fire. They took his mind back a long way,
to a campfire on a sandbar in a Western river,
and he wished he could go back and sit down with them.
He could remember exactly how the world had looked then.
It was quite dark and Alexander was still
thinking of the boys, when it occurred to him
that the train must be nearing Allway.
In going to his new bridge at Moorlock he had
always to pass through Allway. The train
stopped at Allway Mills, then wound two
miles up the river, and then the hollow sound
under his feet told Bartley that he was on his
first bridge again.
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