Page:Poor White.djvu/80

 half the night walking about and thinking of the won- derful thing that had happened to him. The ticket, express, and freight agent for the Wheel- ing and Lake Erie at Bidwell, a man named George Pike, lived in one of the houses near the station, and besides attending to his duties for the railroad com- pany, owned and worked a small farm. He was a slender, alert, silent man with a long drooping mus- tache. Both he and his wife worked as Hugh had never seen a man and woman work before. Their ar- rangement of the division of labor was not based on sex but on convenience. Sometimes Mrs. Pike came to the station to sell tickets, load express boxes and trunks on the passenger trains and deliver heavy boxes of freight to draymen and farmers, while her husband worked in the fields back of his house or prepared the evening meal, and sometimes the matter was reversed and Hugh did not see Mrs. Pike for several days at a time. During the day there was little for the station agent or his wife to do at the station and they disappeared. George Pike had made an arrangement of wires and pulleys connecting the station with a large bell hung on top of his house, and when some one came to the sta- tion to receive or deliver freight Hugh pulled at the wire and the bell began to ring. In a few minutes either George Pike or his wife came running from the house or fields, dispatched the business and went quickly away again. Day after day Hugh sat in a chair by a desk in the station or went outside and walked up and down the sta- tion platform. Engines pulling long caravans of coal cars ground past. The brakemen waved their hands