The station was quiet, some few dozen people waiting on the benches with their luggage at their feet. A boy with a wooden tray on a strap around his neck for hawking cigarettes and sweets was curled sleeping in the hard shoulder of one bench, his cap pulled low to cover his eyes. Jamie set the bags on a bench empty but for an old countrywoman in black, her chin dipped into the wattles of her neck. He scanned over the small group. Joey was not among them. He stood and read the board and figured there were fifteen minutes to the next train running to Montpelier. And from there east. He went to the grillwork window and stood waiting for the clerk to finish reading the evening paper.

“I’m looking for a girl. Dark hair, wearing a yellow dress. Would’ve come in here the last half hour or so. Would’ve bought a pair of tickets to Maine.”

The clerk studied him. “That right?”

“It wasn’t me that knocked her around like that. I’m just trying to help her get to her aunt over there in Maine.”

“I bet.”

“You think what you like. She did come in here and buy a set of tickets. And that other ticket wasn’t for her little sister to join her.”

The clerk looked hard up at him. Put his visor back on and took up his paper and from behind it said, “She’s on the platform.”

He went back to the bench and took up her bags and headed toward the doors onto the platform. Beside the doors was an old man with a bald dome and long hair growing behind his ears down onto his shoulders. His legs were gone at the knees and he sat on a wood plank with wheels at the four corners, his trousers pinned neat and tight under him. Even in the summer night over his shirt he wore an old greatcoat with epaulets and the vee stripes of a sergeant on the arms. Wedged firm between his knees was a tin cup with seed coins in it. He held a stout short stick in his hand to propel him over floors or cobbles or dirt, the one end capped with an iron spike, the other with a sewn leather pad. When Jamie paused the man spoke out, his voice near song. “Help a man, stranger. I fought the war and luckier was the man what died.”

“Where’d you lose your legs?”

“In the Wilderness, son.”

“That was a bad one, what I heard.”

“No man can imagine it, no man can repeat with words how it was.”

Without taking it from his inner pocket Jamie opened the neck of the drawstring velvet bag and drew out a ten-dollar gold piece and leaned and dropped it in the cup. The old soldier heard the sound, different from the thin chink of coin and his hand scrubbed inside the cup to lift the piece up where he turned it in his fingers, then ran it between his lips for his teeth to try. Then the hand with the gold disappeared into the folds of the coat and Jamie stepped on toward the platform. The man called out a thanks as Jamie went through the doors without looking back.