the interior, cool, and pleasantly smelling of pine, and hemp, and
flour, and dried fruit, and coffee, and tar, and leather, and fish.
There it would abide, indefinitely again, till in the same large
impersonal way it was pulled and pushed out on the platform beside the
track, where a freight-car marked for the Hill Country division of the
road, with devices intelligible to the train-men, had been shunted down
by a pony engine in obedience to mystical semaphoric gesticulations,
from the brakeman risking his life for the purpose among the rails,
addressed to the engineer keeping his hand on the pulse of the
locomotive, and his head out of the cab window to see how near he could
come to killing the brakeman without doing it.

Gaites witnessed the whole drama with an interest that held him
suspended between the gulps and morsels of his breakfast, and at times
quite arrested the processes of mastication and deglutition. That pretty
girl's name on the slope of the piano-case continued to look at him from
the end of the truck; it smiled at him from the outer platform of the
freight-house; it entreated him with a charming trepidation from the dim
interior; again it smiled on the inner platform; and then, from the
safety of the car, where the case found itself ensconced among freight
of a neat and agreeable character, the name had the effect of intrepidly
blowing him a kiss as the train-man slid the car doors together and
fastened them. He drew a long breath when the train had backed and
bumped down to the car, and the couplers had clashed together, and the
maniac, who had not been mashed in dropping the coupling-pin into its
socket, scrambled out from the wheels, and frantically worked his arms
to the potential homicide in the locomotive cab, and the train had
jolted forward on the beginning of its run.

That was the last of the piano, and Gaites threw it off his mind, and