I was the only one who left the train at Farewell.
A man came through the rain from the passenger shed. He was a small man. His face was dark and flat. He wore a gray waterproof cap and a gray coat cut in military style.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at the valise and gladstone bag in my hands. He came forward quickly, walking with short, choppy steps.
He didn’t say anything when he took the bags from me. I asked:
“Kavalov’s?”
He had already turned his back to me and was carrying my bags towards a tan Stutz coach that stood in the roadway beside the gravel station platform. In answer to my question he bowed twice at the Stutz without looking around or checking his jerky half-trot.
I followed him to the car.
Three minutes of riding carried us through the village. We took a road that climbed westward into the hills. The road looked like a seal’s back in the rain.
The flat-faced man was in a hurry. We purred over the road at a speed that soon carried us past the last of the cottages sprinkled up the hillside.
Presently we left the shiny black road for a paler one curving south to run along a hill’s wooded crest. Now and then this road, for a hundred feet or more at a stretch, was turned into a tunnel by tall trees’ heavily leafed boughs interlocking overhead.