Then the room started talking, which is what rooms do once one person has gone first. A farmer from Burwell said he had been in the dayc car in August and there had been a woman put back out of the front car with two children and everybody had known it and nobody had said anything. A man with a sample case said the seats behind the stove had been empty the whole way up. He had had his coat on one of them. An elderly woman in a good bonnet said quietly and without looking at anyone that she had been moved out of seat 4 in September.
She had not made trouble about it. She was 71. She traveled alone and she did not care to be the sort of person who makes trouble. That one landed. You could feel the room take it.
And at the back, Marvin Riley put his satchel on the bench and stood up straight. Jane saw him do it and knew exactly what was coming and could not stop it without making it worse. Mr. Hopkins. Marvin said, "I carried that August complaint to the agent myself and I wrote the date on it.
It was the 9th and the September one was the 26th." I know because I copied them both into the daybook before I gave them over. Dwight Hopkins looked at him the way a man looks at a dog that has bitten him. "Sit down, Riley." "No, sir. You are 19 years old and you are a clerk at a flag stop," Dwight said. And you might want to give some thought to how long you intend to be either of those things.
Marvin Riley stayed on his feet. His hands were shaking. Everybody could see them shaking. He stayed on his feet anyway, and that is the moment half the people in that waiting room quietly changed sides. Pauline Fields had stood in the doorway with her gloves in one hand through the whole of it.
Now she came two steps into the room. She had finally worked out that the thing happening in here was about her and she did not intend to be talked about in the third person. "I know who you are, Mrs. Newman," she said. Mr.
Wade said your name loud enough for the county. She put her gloves down on the ticket shelf next to the diagram. I also know who pays for this road, and it is not you. It is,00 head before the 15th, and it will be 900 more in the spring. And if I take them south to the Burlington, the men standing in this room lose their places inside of a year.