“You haven’t told me why you cried,” he reminded her.
She waved her hand toward the wayside village, the lamps of which shone sorrowfully through the snow.
“Upper Asquewan Falls,” she said, “isn’t it reason enough?”
Billy Magee looked; saw a row of gloomy buildings that seemed to list as the wind blew, a blurred sign “Liquors and Cigars,” a street that staggered away into the dark like a man who had lingered too long at the emporium back of the sign.
“Are you doomed to stay here long?” he asked.
“Come on, Mary,” cried a deep voice from the cab. “Get in and shut the door. I’m freezing.”
“It all depends,” said the girl. “Thank you for being so kind and — good night.”
The door closed with a muffled bang, the cab creaked wearily away, and Mr. Magee turned back to the dim waiting-room.
“Well, what was she crying for?” inquired the ticket agent, when Mr. Magee stood again at his cell window.
“She didn’t think much of your town,” responded Magee; “she intimated that it made her heavy of heart.”
“H’m — it ain’t much of a place,” admitted the man, “though it ain’t the general rule with visitors to burst into tears at sight of it. Yes, Upper Asquewan is slow, and no mistake. It gets on my nerves sometimes. Nothing to do but work, work, work, and then lay down and wait for to-morrow. I used to think maybe some day they’d transfer me down to Hooperstown — there’s moving pictures and such goings-on down there. But the railroad never notices you — unless you go wrong. Yes, sir, sometimes I want to clear out of this town myself.”
“A natural wanderlust,” sympathized Mr. Magee. “You said something just now about Baldpate Inn—”
“Yes, it’s a little more lively in summer, when that’s open,” answered the agent; “we get a lot of complaints about trunks not coming, from pretty swell people, too. It sort of cheers things.” His eye roamed with interest over Mr. Magee’s New York attire. “But Baldpate Inn is shut up tight now. This is nothing but an annex to a graveyard in winter. You wasn’t thinking of stopping off here, was you?”
“Well— I want to see a man named Elijah Quimby,” Mr. Magee replied. “Do you know him?”
“Of course,” said the yearner for pastures new, “he’s caretaker of the inn. His house is about a mile out, on the old Miller Road that leads up Baldpate. Come outside and I’ll tell you how to get there.”
The two men went out into the whirling snow, and the agent waved a hand indefinitely up at the night.
“If it was clear,” he said, “you could see Baldpate Mountain, over yonder, looking down on the Falls, sort of keeping an eye on us to make sure we don’t get reckless. And half-way up you’d see Baldpate Inn, black and peaceful and winter-y. Just follow this street to the third corner, and turn to your left. Elijah lives in a little house back among the trees a mile out — there’s a gate you’ll sure hear creaking on a night like this.”
Billy Magee thanked him, and gathering up his two bags, walked up “Main Street.” A dreary forbidding building at the first corner bore the sign “Commercial House”. Under the white gaslight in the office window three born pessimists slouched low in hotel chairs, gazing sourly out at the storm.
hummed Mr. Magee cynically under his breath, and glanced up at the solitary up-stairs window that gleamed yellow in the night.
At a corner on which stood a little shop that advertised “Groceries and Provisions” he paused.
“Let me see,” he pondered. “The lights will be turned off, of course. Candles. And a little something for the inner man, in case it’s the closed season for cooks.”
He went inside, where a weary old woman served him.
“What sort of candles?” she inquired, with the air of one who had an infinite variety in stock. Mr. Magee remembered that Christmas was near.
“For a Christmas tree,” he explained. He asked for two hundred.
“I’ve only got forty,” the woman said. “What’s this tree for — the Orphans’ Home?”
With the added burden of a package containing his purchases in the tiny store, Mr. Magee emerged and continued his journey through the stinging snow. Upper Asquewan Falls on its way home for supper flitted past him in the silvery darkness. He saw in the lighted windows of many of the houses the green wreath of Christmas cheer. Finally the houses became infrequent, and he struck out on an uneven road that wound upward. Once he heard a dog’s faint bark. Then a carriage lurched by him, and a strong voice cursed the roughness of the road. Mr. Magee half smiled to himself as he strode on.
“Don Quixote, my boy,” he muttered, “I know how you felt when you moved on the windmills.”
It was not the whir of windmills but the creak of a gate in the storm that brought Mr. Magee at last to a stop. He walked gladly up the path to Elijah Quimby’s door.
In answer to Billy Magee’s gay knock, a man of about sixty years appeared. Evidently he had just finished supper; at the moment he was engaged in lighting his pipe. He admitted Mr. Magee into the intimacy of the kitchen, and took a number of calm judicious puffs on the pipe before speaking to his visitor. In that interval the visitor cheerily seized his hand, oblivious of the warm burnt match that was in it. The match fell to the floor, whereupon the older man cast an anxious glance at a gray-haired woman who stood beside the kitchen stove.
“My name’s Magee,” blithely explained that gentleman, dragging in his bags. “And you’re Elijah Quimby, of course. How are you? Glad to see you.” His air was that of one who had known this Quimby intimately, in many odd corners of the world.
The older man did not reply, but regarded Mr. Magee wonderingly through white puffs of smoke. His face was kindly, gentle, ineffectual; he seemed to lack the final “punch” that send men over the line to success; this was evident in the way his necktie hung, the way his thin hands fluttered.
“Yes,” he admitted at last. “Yes, I’m Quimby.”
Mr. Magee threw back his coat, and sprayed with snow Mrs. Quimby’s immaculate floor.
“I’m Magee,” he elucidated again, “William Hallowell Magee, the man Hal Bentley wrote to you about. You got his letter, didn’t you?”
Mr. Quimby removed his pipe and forgot to close the aperture as he stared in amazement.
“Good lord!” he cried, “you don’t mean — you’ve really come.”
“What better proof could you ask,” said Mr. Magee flippantly, “than my presence here?”
“Why,” stammered Mr. Quimby, “we — we thought it was all a joke.”
“Hal Bentley has his humorous moments,” agreed Mr. Magee, “but it isn’t his habit to fling his jests into Upper Asquewan Falls.”
“And — and you’re really going to—” Mr. Quimby could get no further.
“Yes,” said Mr. Magee brightly, slipping into a rocking-chair. “Yes, I’m going to spend the next few months at Baldpate Inn.”
Mrs. Quimby, who seemed to have settled into a stout little mound of a woman through standing too long in the warm presence of her stove, came forward and inspected Mr. Magee.
“Of all things,” she murmured.
“It’s closed,” expostulated Mr. Quimby; “the inn is closed, young fellow.”