It was distressing then, after these meetings had extended over a period of two weeks, to be confronted one afternoon by a new station agent who called Blair and Lane bums and ordered them out of the place.

Blair raised his crutch to knock the man down.  But Lane intercepted it, and got his friend out of the station.  It was late afternoon with the sun going down over the hill across the railroad yards.  Blair stood a moment bare-headed, with the light on his handsome haggard face.  How frail he seemed—­too frail of body for the magnificent spirit so flashing in his eyes, so scathing on his bitter lips.  Lane bade him good-bye and turned away, with a strange intimation that this was the last time he would ever see Blair alive.

Wretched and desperate, Lane bought drink and took it to his room with him.  On that dark winter night he sat by the window of his room.  Insensible now to the cold, to the wind moaning outside, to the snow whirling against the pane, he lived with phantoms.  To and fro, to and fro glided the wraith-forms, vanishing and appearing.  The soft rustling sound of the snow was the rustle of their movements.  Across the gleam of light, streaking coldly through the pane, flickering fitfully on the wall, floated shadows and faces.

He did not know when he succumbed to drowsy weakness.  But he awoke at daylight, lying on the floor, stiff with cold.  Drink helped him to drag through that day.  Then something happened to him, and time meant nothing.  Night and day were the same.  He did not eat.  When he lay back upon his bed he became irrational, yet seemed to be conscious of it.  When he sat up his senses slowly righted.  But he preferred the spells of aberration.  Sometimes he was possessed by hideous nightmares, out of which he awoke with the terror of a child.  Then he would have to sit up in the dark, in a cold sweat, and wait, and wait, until he dared to lie back again.

In the daytime delusions grew upon him.  One was that he was always hearing the strange voices of the river, and another that he was being pursued by an old woman clad in a flowing black mantle, with a hood on her head and a crooked staff in her hand.  The voices and apparition came to him, now in his waking hours; they came suddenly without any prelude or warning.  He explained them as odd fancies resulting from strong drink; they grew on him until his harsh laugh could not shake them off.  He managed occasionally to drag himself out of the house.  In the streets he felt this old black hag following him; but later she came to him in the lonely silence of his room.  He never noticed her unless he glanced behind him, and he was powerless to resist that impulse.  At length the dreary old woman, who seemed to grow more gaunt and ghostly every day, took the form in Lane’s disordered fancy of the misfortune that war had put upon him.