As he walked, the boards shrieked under his feet and the sharp air nipped at his face and caught his lungs.

Beyond the fence-rail protection to the side of the platform he thought he saw the suggestion of a broad reach of snow, a distant lurking forest, a few shadowy buildings looming mysterious in the night.

The air was twinkling with frost and the brilliant stars of the north country.
Directly across the track from the railway station, a single building was picked from the dark by a solitary lamp in a lower-story room.
The four who had descended before Thorpe made over toward this light, stumbling and laughing uncertainly, so he knew it was probably in the boarding-house, and prepared to follow them.

Shearer and the station agent,--an individual much muffled,--turned to the disposition of some light freight that had been dropped from the baggage car.
The five were met at the steps by the proprietor of the boarding-house.
This man was short and stout, with a harelip and cleft palate, which at once gave him the well-known slurring speech of persons so afflicted, and imparted also to the timbre of his voice a peculiarly hollow, resonant, trumpet-like note.

He stumped about energetically on a wooden leg of home manufacture.