Next morning the sky was heavy with clouds but there was no rain, only a cold dampness in the air, mud underfoot and water dripping from the bare trees, and he was able to go on.

Signposts were few and crude but he could not read them anyway. He clung to his paper and the belief that as long as he kept going west he would not go far out of his way. He never knew where he was; his memories, afterward, were of country roads and little towns in a land settling down for the winter. The harvests were in and the shorn fields were empty of activity; there was little to see but the still earth, the sky, and sometimes a tiny figure away off in a field.

One week to the day after leaving New York, toward midafter-noon, Kracha entered a small mountain village noisy with sawmills. There were few people in the street; he chose one who looked least like an American and exhibited his paper. The man, tall, bearded, lightly clothed for the weather — it was raw and windy — pushed back his cap and read with his lips moving. Then he looked at Kracha and said something while his hand moved in a gesture that took in the whole street.

Kracha blinked. "Do you mean to say this is White Haven?"

"White Haven, ja, ja!'* He kept waving his hand.

Kracha gave it a second look and began to laugh. The other — he turned out to be a Swedish lumberjack — laughed too, his teeth gleaming in his beard, as if it was the best joke in the world that Kracha should find himself in White Haven without knowing it.

Now he was walking the railroad tracks half a mile north of the village. The tracks ran beside a little river for a while and then turned away from it up a wider valley of their own. Once a coal train passed him, going south. The ties were infernally spaced, too close together for his normal step and too far apart to be managed two at a time. The ditch alongside was worse; there he had to contend with broken stone, culverts, weeds and cattle guards.

The muscles of his legs were beginning to hurt and the afternoon had grown appreciably darker when the tracks went around a curve and he saw some shanties set on a patch of flat ground between the tracks and the hills. Two empty coal cars stood on a siding near by. Smoke, light-colored against the dark hills, was rising from one of the shanties, and a man was sitting on the doorstep of another, his white-bandaged foot conspicuous even at this distance. Someone was chopping wood, the slow, deliberate blows echoing off the hillside.

Kracha went forward, his heart beating a little faster at the thought that this was perhaps his long journey's end. The injured man watched him approach and when he was within speaking distance he said, "You look as though you h.id come a long way, my friend."

Kracha halted. The man had spoken with the hard accent, the solid vowels and corrugated r's, of a Rusnak, but the language he used was understandably Slovak. "God be thanked!" Kracha exclaimed. "It seems like a year since I heard my own language spoken."

"Are you just over from the old country?"

"A week ago today I was still on the ship. Tell me, is this where the railroad workers live?"

"Some of them. Did the company send you?"

"No. I am looking for a man named Andrej Sedlar."

"You will find him back of the cook shack. That's him you hear chopping wood." He stared at Kracha interestedly. His name, Kracha learned later, was Joe Dubik, a Rusnak, a Greek Catholic Slovak, from Tvarosc in Sarisa. "Is it possible you're his brother-in-law?"

Kracha nodded. "I am."

"Djuro — Djuro — what was the name — Kracha?"

"Yes."

Dubik reached for his crutch. "I am going to enjoy this. Come with me."

They went down the line to the cook shack. "They had you drowned in the ocean and lying dead in a ditch," Dubik said.

"It was nothing as bad as that, as you can see."

"What happened?"

"My money was stolen in New York and I had to get here on foot."

"Devil take me, that's no Sunday stroll! Here, in this door."

The cook shack was dark inside; what Hght there was came from the adjoining kitchen.