owned and worked a small farm. He was a slender, alert, silent man with a
long drooping mustache. Both he and his wife worked as Hugh had never seen
a man and woman work before. Their arrangement of the division of labor
was not based on sex but on convenience. Sometimes Mrs. Pike came to the
station to sell tickets, load express boxes and trunks on the passenger
trains and deliver heavy boxes of freight to draymen and farmers, while her
husband worked in the fields back of his house or prepared the evening
meal, and sometimes the matter was reversed and Hugh did not see Mrs. Pike
for several days at a time.

During the day there was little for the station agent or his wife to do
at the station and they disappeared. George Pike had made an arrangement
of wires and pulleys connecting the station with a large bell hung on top
of his house, and when some one came to the station to receive or deliver
freight Hugh pulled at the wire and the bell began to ring. In a few
minutes either George Pike or his wife came running from the house or
fields, dispatched the business and went quickly away again.

Day after day Hugh sat in a chair by a desk in the station or went outside
and walked up and down the station platform. Engines pulling long caravans
of coal cars ground past. The brakemen waved their hands to him and then
the train disappeared into the grove of trees that grew beside the creek
along which the tracks of the road were laid. In Turner's Pike a creaking
farm wagon appeared and then disappeared along the tree-lined road that led
to Bidwell. The farmer turned on his wagon seat to stare at Hugh but unlike
the railroad men did not wave his hand. Adventurous boys came out along the
road from town and climbed, shouting and laughing, over the rafters in the
deserted pickle factory across the tracks or went to fish in the creek in
the shade of the factory walls. Their shrill voices added to the loneliness
of the spot. It became almost unbearable to Hugh. In desperation he turned