The oncoming tap of her footfalls took on a metallic ring as her feet clicked against the steel rims guarding the steps. In a moment her head came into view above the midway break in the stair line.
A turnstile rumbled around after him, and he turned there on the other side of it, at bay, took up a defensive position.
She cleared the steps and came on, as matter-of-factly, as equably, as though he wasn’t to be seen there at all in the gap fronting her. She already held the coin pinched between her fingers. She came on until there was just the width of the turnstile arm between them.
He backed his arm at her, swinging it up all the way past its opposite shoulder, ready to fling it loose. It would have sent her spinning about the enclosure. His lip lifted in a canine snarl. “Get outa here, now. Gawan down below where ye came from!” He reached down and quickly plugged the coin slot with the ball of his thumb just ahead of her own move toward it.
She desisted, shifted over to the adjoining one. Instantly he was there before her again. She shifted back to the original one. He reversed himself once more, again blocked it. The superstructure began to vibrate with the approach of one of the infrequent night trains.
This time he finally flung his arm out in the back sweep he had been threatening at each confrontation. The blow would have been enough to fell her if it had caught her. She turned her head aside with the fastidious little quirk of someone detecting an unpleasant odor. It fanned her face.
Instantly there was a peremptory rapping on glass somewhere close at hand. The station agent thrust head and shoulder out of the sideward door of his dingy little booth. “Cut that out, you. Whaddye trying to do, keep people from using this station? I’ll run you in!”
He turned to defend himself, the taboo partially lifted since this intercession wasn’t of his own seeking. “This girl’s nuts or something, she ought to be sent to Bellevue. She’s been follying me along the street, I can’t get rid of her.”
She said in that same dispassionate voice, “Are you the only one that can ride the Third Avenue El?”
He appealed to the agent once more, who continued to hang slant-wise out of the doorway as a sort of self-appointed arbiter. “Ask her where she’s going. She don’t know herself!”
Her answer was addressed to the agent, but with an emphasis that could not have been meant for him, that must have had some purpose of its own. “I’m going down to Twenty-Seventh Street, Twenty-Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues. I have a right to use this station, haven’t I?”
The face of the man blocking her way had suddenly grown white, as though the locality she had mentioned conveyed a shock of hidden meaning to him. It should have. It was his own.
She knew ahead of time where he was going. It was useless therefore to attempt to shake her off, outdistance her in any way.
The agent rendered his decision, with a majestic sweep of his hand. “Come on through, miss.”
Her coin suddenly swelled up in the reflector and she had come through the next one over, without waiting for him to clear the way for her. A thing which he seemed incapable of doing at the moment, no longer through obstinacy so much as through a temporary paralysis of movement with which his discovery of her knowledge of his eventual destination seemed to have afflicted him.
The train had arrived, meanwhile, but it was on the opposite side, not theirs. It ebbed away again, and the station breastworks dimmed once more behind it.
She sauntered to the outer lip of the platform and stood there waiting, and presently he had come out in turn, but digressing so that he emerged two pillar lengths to the rearward of her. Since both were looking the same way, in quest of a train, he had her in view but she did not have him.
Presently, without noticing what she was doing, she be-began to amble further rearward along the platform, relieving the monotony of the wait by aimless movement as most people are inclined to do at such a time. This had soon taken her beyond the agent’s limited range of vision, and out to where the station roof ended and the platform itself narrowed to a single-file strip of runway. Here she came to a halt again, and would have eventually turned and retraced her steps back toward where she had come from. But while standing there, peering trainward and with her back still to him, an unaccountable tension, a sense of impending danger of some sort, began slowly to come over her.
It must have been something about the way his tread sounded to her on the planks. He too was straying now in turn, and toward her. He was moving sluggishly, just as she had. It wasn’t that; it was that his tread, while distinct enough in the unnatural stillness that reigned over the station, had some sort of a furtive undertone to it. It was in the rhythm, rather than in any actual attempt to muffle it. It was somehow a leashed tread, a tread of calculated approach trying to disguise itself as a meaningless ramble. She could not know how she knew; she only knew, before she had even turned, that something had entered his mind in the few moments since her back had been turned. Something that had not been there before.
She turned, and rather sharply.
He was still little better than his original two stanchion lengths away from her. It was not that that confirmed her impression. She caught him in the act of glancing down into the track bed beside him, where the third rail lay, as he drifted along parallel to it. It was that.
She understood immediately. A jostle of the elbow, a deft, tripping sideswipe of the foot, as they made to pass one another. She took in at a glance the desperate position she had unwittingly strayed into. She was penned against the far end of the station. Without realizing it she had cut herself off from the agent’s protective radius of vision altogether. His booth was set back inside to command the turnstiles, could not command the sweep of the platform.
The two of them were alone on the platform. She looked across the way, and the opposite side was altogether barren, had just been cleared by the northbound train. There was no downtown train in sight yet, either, offering that dubious deterrent.
To retreat still further would be suicidal; the platform ended completely only a few yards behind her back, she would only wedge herself into a cul-de-sac, be more at his mercy than ever. To get back to the midsection where the agent offered safety, she would have to go toward him, pass him, which was the very act he was seeking to achieve.
If she screamed now, without waiting for the overt act, in hopes of bringing the agent out on to the platform in time, she ran a very real risk of bringing on all the faster the very thing she was trying to prevent. He was in a keyed-up state, she could tell by the look on his face, on which a scream, more likely than not, would produce the opposite effect from that intended. This temporary aberration was due to sheer fright on his part more than rage, and a scream might frighten him still further.
She had frightened him badly, she had done her work only too well.
She edged warily inward, back as far as possible from the tracks, until she had come up close against the row of advertisements lining the guard rail. She pressed her hips flat against them, began to sidle along them, turned watchfully outward toward him. Her dress rustled as it swept their surfaces one by one, so close did she cling.
As she drew within his orbit he began to veer in toward her on a diagonal, obviously to cut off her further advance. There was a slowness about both their movements that was horrible; they were like lazy fish swimming in a tank, on that deserted platform three stories above the street, with its tawny widely spaced lights strung along overhead.
He still came on, and so did she, and they were bound to meet in another two or three paces.
The turnstile drummed unexpectedly, around out of sight from them, and a colored girl of dubious pursuits came out on the platform just a few short yards away from the two of them, bent almost lopsided as she moved to scratch herself far down the side of her leg.