Free The Early Ayn Rand by Ayn Rand Page A

on it. The night was black as ink. The train stopped at a miserable little station that had only one dim, dirty light and two sleepy, dirty employees on its deserted platform.
    I asked Stokes for permission to go out and buy some cigarettes. I went and, having made sure that everything was as I had prepared, returned into the car.
    “I thought you might like to know, sir,” I said, “that Mr. Harvey Clayton is traveling with this train, too, in the next car.”
    Harvey Clayton was a good friend of his and was, probably, by this time, sleeping peacefully in his New York apartment.
    “Harvey Clayton? On this train?” asked Winton Stokes, surprised.
    “Yes, sir. I just saw him in the next car, as I was going out.”
    Winton Stokes got up and walked towards the next car. I cast a quick glance at Mickey Finnegan in his corner. I drew a breath of relief. That fat fool was sound asleep.
    Unseen behind the door, I watched what happened then on the car’s little platform. As Winton Stokes stepped out he found himself between Pete Crump and “Snout” Timkins and felt two guns pressed against his ribs.
    “Now you follow and not a squeal outta you, or we’ll pump you full o’holes like a lace curtain!” whispered Pete Crump.
    There was no one around to witness the little scene. Pete and “Snout” put their arms under Stokes’, one on each side, and stepped down from the train. Stokes followed calmly. They walked away across the dark station platform. They looked like three good friends. No one could notice the two guns that were pressed against Stokes’ body, under his arms. The sleepy station employees couldn’t see anything suspicious.
    I rushed back to the place where Winton Stokes had been sitting and took his coat, hat and suitcase. Then I followed my boys.
    They had taken Stokes to a car parked on a dark street-corner, behind the station. Before joining them I tied a handkerchief around my face and put on a big, long coat they had prepared for me, so that Stokes wouldn’t recognize me by my clothes.
    I jumped into the car and we drove away into the darkness.
    The whole little town had about two streets, one grocery store and a dozen houses. In a moment we were out in the country, flying along a deserted, muddy road. We saw in the distance the train going away to San Francisco, without its most valuable passenger this time. The long line of lighted car windows rolled faster and faster under a rain of red sparks from the puffing engine. It whistled away into the night and disappeared with a moaning of trembling rails. We were alone in the dark country, going at full speed, with all lights turned off. Nothing but desolated plains, lonely bushes and an immense black sky around us.
    We all were tense and silent. But Winton Stokes was perfectly calm and seemed to be curious about it all.
    We came to a stop before a shabby little hot-dog stand on the road, a couple of miles from the town. I can’t imagine what kind of a business it was doing in that God-forsaken spot, but it fitted our purpose perfectly. It was locked for the night. We forced the lock easily and took our prisoner in.
    The old shack was full of dirty pans, onion-peels, bread crumbs, rusty cans and an odor of cheap grease. We lighted a kerosene lamp and awakened a cloud of flies and night-bugs that came buzzing around and beating against the dusty, smoked lamp-chimney.
    “Mr. Stokes,” I said gracefully, “you are a sensible man and so are we. You realize that you are entirely in our power, and you can save yourself a lot of trouble by giving to us peacefully and of a free will the Night King, which is as good as ours already.”
    “It never pays,” answered Winton Stokes, “to jump to conclusions.”
    “Yeh?” I said, less gracefully. “If you don’t obey, that stone’ll be in my hand here within the next ten minutes!”
    “That,” answered Winton Stokes, “remains to be seen.”
    “All right!” I sneered. “Look!”
    At a sign from me,