liminaries, making the cut shorter to the boarding-car and a drink of water. After a little he could see nothing but himself before the water pail, the dipper in his hand, pouring the delightful draught down his burning throat. He could hear the click of his palate as the big cool swigs went down, feel the blissful satisfaction of a torment assuaged. There the scheme began, do what he might to make it begin where it should; there it ended; at the bucket in the boarding-car.
A train came in, a passenger train, Bill knew by the way the bell was ringing, something gallant and dashing about it that did not sound in a freight engine bell. The brazen clangor of it, the palpitating, imperious, impatient clamor, seemed to come to him in rings of sound; spreading, expanding, wide-circling rings of hard, bright sound. There was a clanking of metal spout, chains and weights at the water-tank, then a gushing burst of downpouring water, a cool plashing overflow of water, a liquid, gurgling, rushing of cool water, that tried the strength of a man to hear.
Dunham started up, urged by desire to tempt destruction if he might die with water on his tongue. He was in the door, his blood-veined hot eyes on the wavering water-tank; his foot was feeling for the edge of the door, his eyes on that gushing, wasteful, white-rushing torrent down into the black tank of the panting engine. A shot splintered the timber not a foot from his head; he dropped back behind the bales of hay.
He heard the clank of the pipe as the fireman shut off the water and released it for the weights to lift, and the last dribbling of that wasted stream. He could not go;
