Page:The New Negro.pdf/112

86 Now at six o'clock the fog no longer distorted; it blotted out, annihilated. One by one the street lights came on, giving an uncertain glare in spots, enabling peeved citizens to tread their way homeward without recognizing their neighbor ten feet ahead, whether he might be Jew or Gentile, Negro or Pole, Slav, Croatian, Italian or one hundred per cent American.

An impatient crowd of tired workers peered vainly through the gloom to see if the headlights of the interurban car were visible through the thickening haze. The car was due at Sixth and Market at six-ten and was scheduled to leave at six-fifteen for many little towns on the West Virginia side.

At the same time as these uneasy toilers were waiting, on the opposite side of the river the car had stopped to permit some passengers to descend and disappear in the fog. The motor-man, fagged and jaded by the monotony of many stoppings and startings, waited mechanically for the conductor's bell to signal, “Go ahead.”

The fog was thicker, more impenetrable. It smothered the headlight. Inside the car in the smoker, that part of the seats nearest the motorman's box, partitioned from the rest, the lights were struggling bravely against a fog of tobacco smoke, almost as opaque as the dull gray blanket of mist outside.

A group of red, rough men, sprawled along the two opposite bench-formed seats, parallel to the sides of the car, were talking to one another in the thin, flat colorless English of their mountain state, embellished with the homely idioms of the coal mine, the oil field, the gas well.

“When does this here meetin' start, Bill?”

“That 'air notice read half after seven.”

“What's time now?"

“Damned 'f I know. Hey, Lee, what time's that pocket clock of yourn's got?”

“Two past six.”

There was the sound of a match scratching against the sole of a rough shoe.

“Gimme a light, Lafe.”

In attempting to reach for the burning match before its flame was extinguished, the man stepped forward and stumbled