A tremendous excitement surged up in them, working its instant magic upon all these travellers, with their grey hats, their grey, worn city faces, and their dull tired eyes, which just the moment before had been fastened wearily on the pages of a newspaper, as if, having been hurled along this way beneath the lonely skies so many times, the desolate face of the earth had long since grown too familiar to them, and they never looked out of windows any more.
But now the faces that had been so grey and dead were flushed with colour, the dull and lustreless eyes had begun to burn with joy and interest. The passengers of both trains crowded to the windows, grinning like children for delight and jubilation.
Eugene’s train, which for a space had been holding its rival even, now began to fall behind. The other train began to slide past the windows with increasing speed, and when this happened the joy and triumph of its passengers were almost unbelievable. Meanwhile their own faces had turned black and bitter with defeat. They cursed, they muttered, they scowled malevolently, they turned away with an appearance of indifference, as if they had no further interest in the thing, only to come back again with a fascinated and bitter look as their accursed windows slid by them with the inevitability of death and destiny.
Throughout, the crews of the two trains had shown as keen and passionate an interest, as intense a rivalry, as had the passengers. The guards and porters were clustered at the windows or against the door in the car-ends, and they grinned and jeered just as the rest of them had done; but their interest was more professional, their knowledge more intimate and exact. The guard on the train would say to the porter—“Whose train is that? Did you see John McIntyre aboard?” And the negro would answer positively, “No, sah! Dat ain’t Cap’n McIntyre. Ole man Rigsby’s got her. Dere he is now!” he cried, as another coach moved past and the grizzled and grinning face of an old guard came in sight.
Then the guard would go away, shaking his head, and the negro would mutter and chuckle to himself by turns. He was a fat enormous darkey, with an ink-black skin, a huge broad bottom, teeth of solid grinning white, and with a big fatty growth on the back of his thick neck. He shook like jelly when he laughed. Eugene had known him for years, because he came from his native town, and the Pullman car in which he rode, which was known as K 19, was the car that always made the journey
