Underground there was the puffing and chugging of the trains. The joined murmur of voices in the station rose to the ceiling, was trapped and could not escape, echoed downward to meet another swell, again hopelessly rising. Under the mass-voice and above the incoming trains and the outgoing, he identified an odd muffled sibilance, and this was the shuffling of feet on the marble flooring, back and forth, around and around, sluff, sluff, sluff. Against the muted grays the black iron gates, entrances eventually to the trains, opened and now closed, like the gates to Hell. The loudspeaker boomed out over the coagulation of sound. The words came clearer this time.
“Track seventeen. Track seventeen. All aboard for the Dixie Special, going South, going South. Louisville, Memphis—.”
The other p
