At half past five Emma shut the telegraph room door, hung the Closed sign in the ticket window, and made supper in the little kitchen behind the office, and the two women ate at the office table with the day's paperwork pushed aside. It was the first meal Martha had eaten sitting down since the dining car the night before the night before, and she understood suddenly that it had been two days since she had been hungry in the ordinary way, and that she was hungry now, and that this was a good sign, like a pulse coming back. Emma watched her eat with the satisfaction of a woman who has solved a problem correctly and said, "You will not be fed properly on that train tonight if you leave it to them, not with everything upside down, so you will take food from my kitchen," and went back to the stove.
The packed lunch was a serious piece of work. Emma built it the way she did everything, as if it were a schedule that had to hold. Fried chicken wrapped in waxed paper, still faintly warm. Two hard-boiled eggs with salt folded into a twist of paper. Bread and butter sandwiches cut in triangles. An apple pie, small and perfect, wrapped whole. A thermos of coffee, black, with the cup for a lid. A cloth napkin, because Emma said a woman traveling in the drawing room ought to have a cloth napkin. Martha watched the basket fill and felt her throat close, and said the only honest thing she could think of, which was that nobody had packed her a lunch since she was a girl, and Emma said, "Then you are overdue," and tied the basket shut with string.
The headlight came down the valley at twenty minutes past seven, exactly when Emma said it would, and the two women walked out onto the platform together into the cold mountain evening, Martha carrying her suitcase and her handbag and the basket, Emma carrying nothing, because Emma had decided her job was to stand beside the thing the railroad had done and watch it undone. The Limited came in the way a big train comes into a small station, too much noise and light for the size of the place, and slowed, and the porters were on the steps before it had quite stopped, and Car Seven slid past them and stopped with its vestibule even with the platform lamp, as if the whole train had been measured for this.
The conductor was a new man. Martha saw it in his face before he spoke — the careful way he came down the steps, the paper in his hand, the glance at her and then at the paper and then at her again, checking. He was younger than Mr. Pruett by ten years and carried himself like a man who had been given instructions he intended to follow to the letter because the letter was all he had been given. "Mrs. Ellison," he said, and took her suitcase as if it weighed nothing, and said, "Mr. Hale, ma'am. The road's wire came through Denver. Everything is as ordered." He did not say what the wire had said about why. He did not need to. It was in his eyes, the particular respect of a man who has been told a mistake was made and has decided, on his own account, to be the correction.
He walked her to Car Seven himself and up the steps, and the porter — a young man, not Thomas — took her bag, and Mr. Hale led her down the corridor past the roomettes, past the sections with their curtains drawn for the night, to the drawing room at the end of the car, and opened the door for her, and stood back.
Martha had never been inside a drawing room on a train. She had seen the doors, closed, with the little brass numbers on them, and had understood them to belong to another kind of traveler. It was absurd, and it was kind, and both things were true at once, the way both things had been true about Emma's blanket and the stove and the tea. The room was two rooms, really: a sitting room by day with a wide sofa and a real armchair and a window that took in half the mountains, and by night a bedroom, with a bed that would come down out of the wall. There was a washroom with a door that locked, and a little closet, and a lamp with a shade. Her suitcase looked small and apologetic on the carpet. Her handbag sat on the armchair like a guest who had been shown to the wrong house.