Inside the house there was no sound save the ticking of the mantel clock in the...

Inside the house there was no sound save the ticking of the mantel clock in the front room. He went out and shut the door.
"Dark and cold and no wind and a thin gray reef beginning along the eastern
rim of the world. He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.
"As he turned to go he heard the train. He stopped and waited for it. He could
feel it under his feet. It came boring out of the east like some ribald satellite of the coming sun howling and bellowing in the distance and the long light of the headlamp running through the tangled mesquite brakes and creating out of the night the endless fenceline down the dead straight right of way and sucking it back again wire and post mile on mile into the darkness after where the boilersmoke disbanded slowly along the faint new horizon and the sound came lagging and he stood still holding his hat in his hands in the passing ground-shudder watching it till it was gone. Then he turned and went back to the house.