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Fool! I thought. My fellow-passenger had been right. I would panic at the boredom I already sensed in this place. All right, I thought, fool, yes, but run, no!
I walked my suitcase down the platform, not looking at the old man. As I passed, I heard his thin bulk shift again, this time so I could hear it. His feet were coming down to touch and tap the mushy boards.
I kept walking.
‘Afternoon,’ a voice said, faintly.
I knew he did not look at me but only at that great cloudless spread of shimmering sky.
‘Afternoon,’ I said.
I started up the dirt road towards the town. One hundred yards away, I glanced back.
The old man, still seated there, stared at the sun, as if posing a question.
I hurried on.
I moved through the dreaming late-afternoon town, utterly anonymous and alone, a trout going upstream, not touching the banks of a clear-running river of life that drifted all about me.
My suspicions were confirmed: it was a town where nothing happened, where occurred only the following events:
At four o’clock sharp, the Honneger Hardware door slammed as a dog came out to dust himself in the road. Four-thirty, a straw sucked emptily at the bottom of a soda-glass, making a sound like a great cataract in the drug-store silence. Five o’clock, boys and pebbles plunged in the town river. Five-fifteen, ants paraded in the slanting light under some elm-trees.
And yet – I turned in a slow circle – somewhere in this town there must be something worth seeing. I knew it was there. I knew I had to keep walking and looking. I knew I would find it.
I walked. I looked.
All through the afternoon there was only one constant and unchanging factor: the old man in the bleached blue pants and shirt was never far away. When I sat in the drug store he was out front spitting tobacco that rolled itself into tumble-bugs in the dust. When I stood by the river he was crouched downstream making a great thing of washing his hands.
Along about seven-thirty in the evening, I was walking for the seventh or eight time through the quiet streets when I heard footsteps beside me.
I looked over and the old man was pacing me, looking straight ahead, a piece of dried grass in his stained teeth.
‘It’s been a long time,’ he said, quietly.
We walked along in the twilight.
‘A long time,’ he said, ‘waitin’ on that station platform.’
‘You?’ I said.
‘Me.’ He nodded in the tree shadows.
‘Were you waiting for someone at the station?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You.’
‘Me?’ The surprise must have shown in my voice. ‘But why …? You never saw me before in your life.’
‘Did I say I did? I just said I was waitin’.’
We were on the edge of town now. He had turned and I had turned with him along the darkening river-bank towards the trestle where the night trains ran over going east, going west, but stopping rare few times.
‘You want to know anything about me?’ I asked, suddenly. ‘You the sheriff?’
‘No, not the sheriff. And no, I don’t want to know nothin’ about you.’ He put his hands in his pockets. The sun was set now. The air was suddenly cool. ‘I’m just surprised you’re here at last, is all.’
‘Surprised?’
