This crossing right-angled a deep railroad cut half a mile long. On the
level above, looking down upon its sloping sides, staggered a row of
half-drunken shanties with blear-eyed windows, and ragged roofs patched
and broken; some hung over on crutches caught under their floor timbers.
Sanders lived in one of these cabins,--the one nearest the edge of the
granite retaining-wall flanking the street crossing.

Up the slopes of this railroad cut lay the refuse of the
shanties,--bottomless buckets, bits of broken chairs, tomato cans, rusty
hoops, fragments of straw matting, and other debris of the open lots. In
the summer-time a few brave tufts of grass, coaxed into life by the warm
sun, clung desperately to an accidental level, and now and then a gay
dandelion flamed for a day or two and then disappeared, cut off by some
bedouin goat. In the winter there were only patches of blackened snow,
fouled by the endless smoke of passing trains, and seamed with the
short-cut footpaths of the yard men.

There were only two in Sanders's shanty,--Sanders and his crippled
daughter, a girl of twelve, with a broken back. She barely reached the
sill when she stood at the low window to watch her father waving his flag.
Bent, hollow-eyed, shrunken; her red hair cropped short in her neck; her
poor little white fingers clutching the window-frame. "The express is late
this morning," or "No. 14 is on time," she would say, her restless, eager
blue eyes glancing at the clock, or "What a lot of ashes they do be
haulin' to-day!" Nothing else was to be seen from her window.

When the whistle blew she took down the dinner-pail, filled it with
potatoes and the piece of pork hot from the boiling pot, poured the coffee
in the tin cup, put on the cover, and, limping to the edge of the
retaining-wall, lowered it over by a string to her father. Sanders looked