The Winston Affair by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

employee, aided by a dozen white-clad native travelers, was pushing a white cow from the tracks, and the native railroad constables, wielding their four-foot-long sticks, were attempting to clear the tracks of hundreds of native men and women, who appeared to feel that the only way of assuring their passage was to remain on the tracks as the train came in. Other constables were struggling to hold back a crowd of at least a thousand more local inhabitants—the crowd already swaying back and forth in a desperate rhythm of urgency to reach the train.
    Directly into this crowd plunged a government mail truck, the mail officer in pith helmet and white shorts leaning from the running board and roaring, “Make way for is Majesty’s mail! You bloody ’eathens, make way! ’Ere’s the mail going through! Look lively there!”
    Miraculously, the crowd parted without anyone’s being ground under the wheels, and Corporal Baxter, quick to see his advantage, drove his jeep into the wake of the mail truck. The jeep drew up to the station platform just as the train, hissing and clanging, rolled in.
    Never had Barney Adams seen such a train. The little locomotive with its tall, skinny stack was dwarfed by two tenders piled high with wood. Behind the tenders, there was a mail car and two first-class carriages that might have come off a back lot in Hollywood. And behind those, the rest of the train—six open passenger cars, like the summer streetcars on the interurban runs that Adams remembered vaguely from when he was a small child. The first two of these cars bore at least a full brigade of Ghurka troops; they sat and lay thick upon the roofs of the cars; they were piled into the seats; they hung shoulder to shoulder from the side posts; and in squatting position, they filled the running boards, braced by the legs of those who hung from the side posts. The next four cars were, if anything, even more concentratedly loaded with native men, women and children; and the moment the train stopped, the entire passenger contingent erupted.
    Even as they flooded off the train, Ghurkas and peasants and children and naked hill people, the waiting crowd surged forward, sweeping the constables aside, and the entire station platform became a hopeless, senseless swirling mass of shouting, pushing, wailing people.
    Adams looked anxiously at Corporal Baxter, but he was undisturbed, lighting a cigarette as he said, “God damn crazy waugs—it’s always this way.”
    Two boys of about eleven years scrambled onto the hood of the jeep.
    â€œNow you get to hell down off there!” Baxter yelled.
    Their father located them, threw a series of poorly-aimed blows at them and a stream of recrimination. They leaped into the jeep and out of it. The father, a thin, careworn peasant, tried to apologize, shouting to make himself heard.
    â€œYou’ll miss the train, Captain,” Baxter yelled.
    Barney Adams awoke from his dream, slung his musette bag over his shoulder and followed Baxter, who, cursing, shouting and flailing with his arms, beat a path across the platform to the first-class cars. As he got into his compartment, Adams told Baxter, “The train is due back down at four o’clock. Meet me here, Corporal!”
    â€œI’ll do that, Captain.”
    The train whistle screamed and shrilled. The bell clanged.
    â€œTake it easy, Captain—” the note of warmth in Baxter’s voice was new. He closed the compartment door as Adams sat down. It was the first time Adams had ever traveled in this type of compartment: a long, upholstered bench the width of the car, a door on either side; approachable only along the running boards. Two men were already in the compartment, both of them British officers, one older man a colonel in plaid and kilt, asleep and snoring softly, and the other a bright-cheeked subaltern of twenty-one or so in shorts and short-sleeved shirt.
    Coughing and jolting, the train