He wore a suit like that which Joe had learned to hate because Frank
Layson wore it.

This youth started running down the track, bright-eyed, expectant, and a
dozen others ran to follow him, leaving blue-prints, their surveyors'
instruments and other tokens of their mysterious might of education,
lying unheeded on the ground behind them. There was much excitement.
Even the rough laborers stopped delving at their tasks for a few
minutes, to straighten from their work and stand, with curious eyes
agaze down-track.

In the distance Joe saw smoke arise above the tops of the invaded
forest-trees. Then he heard the growing clangor of a locomotive's bell,
then other whistling and the approaching rumble of steel wheels upon
steel rails, the groan of brake shoes gripping, the rattle of contracted
couplings, the impact of car-bumpers.

The excitement grew among the working gangs. Even the laborers left
their tasks and started down the rough surface of the new embankment
toward the place, a quarter-of-a-mile away, where the train would stop
at the end of the crude ballasting.

Lorey sat there on his stump, apparently impassive, watching all this
flurry with resentful, discontented eyes. He himself was infinitely
curious about the coming train; but he could not bring himself to go to
see it. He had never seen a railway train, but it somehow seemed to him
that if he hurried with the rest to meet this one it would mean a
certain sacrifice of dignity in the face of the invading conqueror. He
sat there, grimly wondering what it might be like, what the people whom
it brought were like, until, suddenly, he discovered that he was alone.