“What do you want? Stand still or I’ll fire!”
The deaf man continued to advance; the farmer fired at random and shot him down. I knew better than to call out in the darkness. I did not even dare walk freely about, for I know of a man who in the darkness about a railroad station ran into a mowing-machine; another became entangled in a roll of barbed wire. These incidents stayed in my mind quite vividly, and I will confess that I got down on my hands and knees and crawled carefully in what I hoped was the direction of the station. Foot by foot I crept along, and at last I came up against what I took to be a picket fence. Then a dull light began to glow down the track. The midnight freight rumbled by, and its headlight showed the station behind me. I had crossed the road in my travels, and now I slowly recrossed it. With arms outstretched, I ran into the building. I carefully groped my way around it, much as a blind man would have felt his way along a wall. But he would travel with greater confidence, trusting to his ears to warn him of approaching danger. I passed one corner and proceeded to the other side, but suddenly there came to me a feeling that _someone was near me in the dark_! I cannot describe the uncanny, “crawly” sensation which envelops a deaf person when he senses an unseen presence. I suffered acutely until I actually ran into a man who also seemed to be feeling his way along the wall. He told me afterward that he had spoken to me several times, but, of course, I did not answer. Happily he had no pistol or he would have fired. As it was, each clutched the throat of the other, and we struggled like two wild animals. I had the stronger grip, and I think I know the vulnerable point in the throat. At any rate, his hand dropped, and I knew from the quiver inside his throat that he was gasping for breath.
Then I told him who I was and what was my trouble. After a little fumbling I got my hearing device into working order and held up the mouthpiece to his month. At first he thought it was a pistol, but I reassured him, and he told me his story. Like myself, he had come on the late train, expecting to find a town, and a good hotel near the station. And it happened that he was nearly blind; he retained only part of the sight in one eye. He told me that he had heard me walking about in the dark and had called loudly. There we were—a man nearly blind and a deaf man, stranded in this lonely place. If ever two human beings had need of each other, we were the men, yet a moment before both of us were ready to fight when co-operation was the only possible hope for us. This is not unlike the larger struggles that go on in the world.