He did so now, and frowned
unconsciously.
At the station the crowd of loafers that always preceded the arrival or
departure of a train were congregated. In some way suggestions of the
unusual had passed about, and this day their number was greatly
augmented. Just what they anticipated they did not know; they did not
care. Restless, athirst for excitement, they had dumbly responded to the
influence in the air and come. In the foreground, where a solitary
Indian stood motionless, waiting, there was being repeated the same
puerile pantomime and horse-play of a former occasion. At intervals,
from the rear, sounded the war whoop travesty. It was all the same as
that afternoon eighteen days before, when the girl had left, similar
even to the cloud of black smoke in the distance lifting lazily into the
sky; only now the trail, instead of growing thinner and lighter, became
denser and blacker minute by minute. In sympathy, the humorists on the
platform redoubled their efforts. The instinct of anticipation, of
Anglo-Saxon love of excitement that had brought them there, urged them
on. Not one throat but many underwent simultaneous pantomimic bisection.
A half dozen voices caught up the war whoop, passed it on from throat to
throat. Almost before they realised what they were doing, the thing
became a contagion, an orgy. Many who had not taken part before, who had
come from mere curiosity, took part now.
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