Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III KATHERINE COMES HOME NEXT morning when the Limited slowed down beside the old frame station — a new one of brick was rising across the tracks — a young woman descended from a Pullman at the front of the train. She was lithe and graceful, rather tall and slender, and was dressed with effective simplicity in a blue tailored suit and a tan straw hat with a single blue quill. Her face was flushed, and there glowed an expectant brightness in her brown eyes, as though happiness and affection were upon the point of bubbling over. Standing beside her suit-case, she eagerly scanned the figures about the station. Three or four swagger young drummers had scrambled off the smoker, and these ambassadors of fashion as many hotel bus drivers were inviting with importunate hospitality to honour their respective board and bed. There was the shirt-sleeved figure of Jim Ludlow, ticket agent and tenor of the Presbyterian choir. And leaning cross- legged beneath the station eaves, giving theeffect of supporting the low roof, were half a dozen slowly masticating, soberly contemplative gentlemen — loose-jointed caryatides, whose lank sculpture forms the sole and invariable ornamentation of the fa9ades of all Western stations. But nowhere did the young woman's expectant eyes alight upon the person whom they sought. The joyous response to welcome, which had plainly trembled at the tips of her being, subsided, and in disappointment she picked up her bag and was starting for a street car, when up the long, broad platform there came hurrying a short-legged little man, with a bloodshot, watery eye. He paused hesitant at a couple of yards, smiled tentatively, and the remnant of an old glove fumbled the brim of a rumpled, semi-bald object that in its distant youth had probably been a sil...