approached the country. At last the city was behind him, and he was
walking down a leafy lane beside the railroad track. He did not walk like
a man. He did not look like a man. He was a travesty of the human. It
was a twisted and stunted and nameless piece of life that shambled like a
sickly ape, arms loose-hanging, stoop-shouldered, narrow-chested, grotesque
and terrible.

He passed by a small railroad station and lay down in the grass under a
tree. All afternoon he lay there. Sometimes he dozed, with muscles that
twitched in his sleep. When awake, he lay without movement, watching the
birds or looking up at the sky through the branches of the tree above him.
Once or twice he laughed aloud, but without relevance to anything he had
seen or felt.

After twilight had gone, in the first darkness of the night, a freight
train rumbled into the station. When the engine was switching cars on to
the side-track, Johnny crept along the side of the train. He pulled open
the side-door of an empty box-car and awkwardly and laboriously climbed in.
He closed the door. The engine whistled. Johnny was lying down, and in
the darkness he smiled.



A WICKED WOMAN

It was because she had broken with Billy that Loretta had come visiting to
Santa Clara. Billy could not understand. His sister had reported that he
had walked the floor and cried all night. Loretta had not slept all night
either, while she had wept most of the night. Daisy knew this, because it
was in her arms that the weeping had been done. And Daisy's husband,