You'll like those people. They've got get-up to them. The place you'll work
at there is far out of town. It's away out about a mile at a little kind of
outside-like place called Pickleville. There used to be a saloon there and
a factory for putting up cucumber pickles, but they've both gone now. You
won't be tempted to slip in that place. You'll have a chance to get on your
feet. I'm glad I thought of sending you there."

* * * * *

The Wheeling and Lake Erie ran along a little wooded depression that cut
across the wide expanse of open farm lands north of the town of Bidwell. It
brought coal from the hill country of West Virginia and southeastern Ohio
to ports on Lake Erie, and did not pay much attention to the carrying of
passengers. In the morning a train consisting of a combined express and
baggage car and two passenger coaches went north and west toward the lake,
and in the evening the same train returned, bound southeast into the Hills,
The Bidwell station of the road was, in an odd way, detached from the
town's life. The invisible roof under which the life of the town and the
surrounding country was lived did not cover it. As the Indiana railroad
man had told Hugh, the station itself stood on a spot known locally as
Pickleville. Back of the station there was a small building for the storage
of freight and near at hand four or five houses facing Turner's Pike. The
pickle factory, now deserted and with its windows gone, stood across the
tracks from the station and beside a small stream that ran under a bridge
and across country through a grove of trees to the river. On hot summer
days a sour, pungent smell arose from the old factory, and at night its
presence lent a ghostly flavor to the tiny corner of the world in which
lived perhaps a dozen people.

All day and at night an intense persistent silence lay over Pickleville,