Re: The Stowaway/The Terror
Stood to reason a seating car was the best place to wait out the train's locomotion. The ticket inspectors weren't walking the train, because half the people meant to be on board weren't, and half the people that were had come to see what the problem was. People traipsed to the ends of the train, maybe out of a hankering for fresh air or a desire to see what they didn't see when the train was rollicking forward eating up line. Either way, Charlie had real strong familiarity with the baggage car and the caboose but the last of the swells come down to smoke and look on back wasn't done, sure as the train was stood still.
He was sprawled across the length of the seat with his head comfortably pillowed on an abandoned jacket that had been left hastily on one of the luggage racks overhead. Didn't see why anyone would mind, his head was clean, mostly. Nobody could see it, either, bunched up under his head and Charlie's heels, in threadbare socks were all the way over the other end of the bench seat and dangling in plain air. Nobody had bothered him for a whole twenty minutes and he'd thrown the newspaper over his face as dissuasion for anyone to bother him. He'd seen a man snooze under a newspaper in a ritzy carriage, to keep the ladies from finding it all distasteful.
Thought he was home clear to have a surreptitious snooze when there was a loud clatter on entry, the rolling door to the compartment rattled on its tracks and Charlie could feel the difference in air gust gently onto the bottoms of his soles through cheap cotton. He nudged the newspaper from the underside, casually with one hand until the newsprint twitched down over one eye.