THE PORTYGEE

CHAPTER I


Overhead the clouds cloaked the sky; a ragged cloak it was, and, here
and there, a star shone through a hole, to be obscured almost instantly
as more cloud tatters were hurled across the rent. The pines threshed on
the hill tops. The bare branches of the wild-cherry and silverleaf trees
scraped and rattled and tossed. And the wind, the raw, chilling December
wind, driven in, wet and salty, from the sea, tore over the dunes and
brown uplands and across the frozen salt-meadows, screamed through
the telegraph wires, and made the platform of the dismal South Harniss
railway station the lonesomest, coldest, darkest and most miserable spot
on the face of the earth.

At least that was the opinion of the seventeen-year-old boy whom the
down train--on time for once and a wonder--had just deposited upon that
platform. He would not have discounted the statement one iota. The South
Harniss station platform WAS the most miserable spot on earth and he was
the most miserable human being upon it. And this last was probably true,
for there were but three other humans upon that platform and, judging by
externals, they seemed happy enough. One was the station agent, who was
just entering the building preparatory to locking up for the night,
and the others were Jim Young, driver of the "depot wagon," and Doctor
Holliday, the South Harniss "homeopath," who had been up to a Boston
hospital with a patient and was returning home. Jim was whistling
"Silver Bells," a tune much in vogue the previous summer, and Doctor
Holliday was puffing at a cigar and knocking his feet together to keep
them warm while waiting to get into the depot wagon. These were the only
people in sight and they were paying no attention whatever to the lonely
figure at the other end of the platform.

The boy looked about him. The station, with its sickly yellow gleam
of kerosene lamp behind its dingy windowpane, was apparently the only
inhabited spot in a barren wilderness. At the edge of the platform
civilization seemed to end and beyond was nothing but a black earth
and a black sky, tossing trees and howling wind, and cold--raw, damp,
penetrating cold. Compared with this even the stuffy plush seats and
smelly warmth of the car he had just left appeared temptingly homelike
and luxurious. All the way down from the city he had sneered inwardly at
a one-horse railroad which ran no Pullmans on its Cape branch in winter
time. Now he forgot his longing for mahogany veneer and individual
chairs and would gladly have boarded a freight car, provided there were
in it a lamp and a stove.