keeping the rooms inside the station at fever heat, summer and winter.
One of these rooms is the Men’s Waiting Room; another is for feminine patrons of the road; and between the two is the ticket office and dispatcher’s room, with telegraph instruments clattering on a table in the bay window at the front.

The station agent is a busy man, with three or four hard-worked assistants; for all the supplies for one of the big furnaces come in over this branch, and the furnace’s product goes out by the same route. The furnace itself towers above the very station, great ore piles spraddling over acres of ground waiting for the traveling crane that scoops them and carries the ore to the fires.

On the other side of the station, across the street, there are two buildings with ornate fronts--and locked doors. They proclaim themselves as buildings with a past--a bibulous past. County local option was their ruin, county local option locked their doors and stripped their shelves and spread dust upon their bars. They are ugly things, eyesores, specters of shame. Whatever may be said for the wares they dispense, there is nothing more hideous than a saloon.

Gergue and Hollow crossed the street at a diagonal, past these locked saloons, to the station platform. They found on the platform a familiar throng. Hardiston was the county seat, and served as market place for the southern half of the county. Many people came and went daily on the dirty, rattling, uncomfortable trains; and this, the afternoon train, always picked up a score or so of passengers southward bound.
In addition to these travelers, there were folk at the station to meet every incoming passenger; for Hardiston still meets people at the train. Guests, home-comers, even the commercial travelers find a welcome waiting. Every one in the neighborhood stops at the station at train time to pick up matters for gossip.

Gergue made it his custom to meet a train whenever no more important matter occupied his time; for by so doing he saw many men of the county whom he would not otherwise have seen, and renewed acquaintances that would otherwise have languished. He was, as it were, a professional meeter of trains, like the editors of the three weekly papers, and the bus men from the hotels. He left Hollow at one end of the platform, while he traversed its length, exchanging a word with everyone, observing, inquiring, cultivating.

On this business, he was fifty yards away from Hollow when the Caretall touring car whirled down the street and stopped beside the platform. Hollow 

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