John Shepard had been traveling for twelve hours. After hitchhiking from Greencastle to Indianapolis, he had boarded an eastbound train. For most of the eight hours since, John had sat up straight in his cane seat while the train made stops in Anderson and Muncie and Union City and—rather to John’s amazement—sped through big towns like McCordsville and Versailles without a halt.
“Another piece of pie, hon?”
“Thanks, but I’d better not,” John told the waitress. Here in the Hotel Cleveland it was a quarter to three in the morning, and his stomach was too excited to hold anything more. His first sight of Cleveland’s Public Square had so astonished him that for a moment he thought he might somehow already be at his final destination, New York City. The almost-finished Terminal Tower, still sheathed in scaffolding, was the tallest building John had ever seen. He had stood there at 2:30 A.M., counting its fifty-two stories. Through the window of the hotel’s all-night coffee shop, he could see vast new excavations and steel skeletons all over the square, some of them flooded with electric light, although right now the world seemed to be inhabited by no one besides himself and the waitress putting away the apple pie.
Five hours remained until the first Limited left for New York. John looked across the coffee shop’s big tiled floor and spotted the door to the men’s washroom, no doubt a much cleaner jake than the one he’d visited on the train out of Indy. He imagined he must be needing a shave about now, though a manly stroking of his chin revealed, to his disappointment, no great growth since he’d last used a razor, so many hours ago in an entirely different state of the Union. Maybe he’d let any new whiskers go until he reached New York.
The train he’d be taking there was no Twentieth Century—it carried no barber, let alone a stock ticker—but there would be a valet to take care of his coat, and there would be stationery. The brochure he’d picked up along with his ticket promised all that, and John had hours ago decided that once he got hold of this writing paper he would use it to compose an explanation of his sudden flight. The Cleveland Limited letterhead would impress his mother, but be less brutal than the one-two punch of “New York, N.Y.,” which by tomorrow—no, this—evening would be heading all John Shepard’s communications to the world he had left behind.
He bet the seats on the Cleveland—New York run would be upholstered, and that his traveling companions would be a better class of person than the Hoosier salesmen he’d had to hear all night telling those awful stories about the unimaginable things they’d lately gotten girls from Fort Wayne and Gary to do. Recalling those men, John guessed they thought they were pretty smooth. But you wouldn’t find Stuart Newman, who had ten times their experience with girls ten times as pretty, offering such loud confidences in what John’s mother would call “language.” He imagined Newman as he must be right now, asleep in some New York tower even taller than the one being built for the terminal here. The columnist’s silk robe would be draped over a leather armchair, while he lay under the blankets in patterned pajamas covering a torso newly toned by an hour of boxing at the New York Athletic Club, probably with some fellow writer or young company president.
After a moment, with his eyes loosely focused on some crumbs of pie crust toward the edge of his plate, John realized that, inside his revery, it was now he, John Shepard, sleeping high atop New York, dreaming of a girl across town who could not sleep, so busy was she, looking at his picture in a silver frame beside her bed.
Worried that the waitress might close up if he appeared idle, John took a sip of his cooling coffee and opened up his magazine. Seeing the ad for Interwoven Socks, he curled his own toes with satisfaction. He had in his suitcase one pair of that very product, purchased this afternoon in Indianapolis. What he’d really wanted from the window of Lazarus’s Department Store was a Kuppenheimer trench coat, but he could hardly afford one of those and had settled on the socks as a bon voyage present to himself. An excellent choice! he now decided, noticing the ad copy at the bottom of the page. Stepping forth in his ribbed Interwoven argyles, our “Bandbox” man is ready for any place his feet may carry him to.…