The Black Dog

 Having pocketed his fare the freckled rustic took himself and his antediluvian cab back to the village limbo from which they had briefly emerged. Loughlin checked his luggage into the care of the porter, an angular man with one eye who was apparently the only other living being in this remote minute station, and sat down in the platform shade. July noon had a stark eye-tiring brightness, and a silence so very deep—when that porter ceased his intolerable clatter—that Loughlin could hear footsteps crunching in the road half a mile away.