"Cigars. Do stay here till I come back. I have so much to say to you."
Miss Gattle shook her head in despair. She could understand a dozen heathen dialects better than the speech of so utter a foreigner as her fellow-countrywoman. Mrs. Jimmie hastened away, rather pleased at the shocks she had administered. She enjoyed her own electricity.
In the corridor she administered another thrill—this time to a tall young man—a stranger, as alert for flirtation as a weasel for mischief. He huddled himself and his suitcases into as flat a space as possible, murmuring:
"These corridors are so narrow, aren't they?"
"Aren't they?" said Mrs. Jimmie. "So sorry to trouble you."
"Don't mention it."
She passed on, their glances fencing like playful foils. Then she paused:
"Excuse me. Could you lend me a match? They never have matches in the Women's Room."
He succeeded in producing a box after much shifting of burdens, and he was rewarded with a look and a phrase:
"You have saved my life."
He started to repeat his "Don't mention it," but it seemed inappropriate, so he said nothing, and she vanished behind a door. He turned away, saying to himself that it promised to be a pleasant journey. He was halted by another voice—another woman's voice:
"Pardon me, but is this the car for Reno?"
He turned to smile, "I believe so!" Then his eyes widened as he recognized the speaker.
"Mrs. Sammy Whitcomb!"
It promised to be a curious journey.
The tall man emptied one hand of its suitcase to clasp the hand the newcomer granted him. He held it fast as he exclaimed: "Don't tell me that you are bound for Reno!" She whimpered: "I'm afraid so, Mr. Ashton."
He put down everything to take her other hand, and tuned his voice to condolence: "Why, I thought you and Sam Whitcomb were—"
"Oh, we were until that shameless Mrs. Wellington——"
"Mrs. Wellington? Don't believe I know her."
"I thought everybody had heard of Mrs. Jimmie Wellington."
"Mrs. Jimmie—oh, yes, I've heard of her!" Everybody seemed to have heard of Mrs. Jimmie Wellington.
"What a dance she has led her poor husband!" Mrs. Whitcomb said. "And my poor Sammy fell into her trap, too."
Ashton, zealous comforter, took a wrathful tone: "I always thought your husband was the most unmitigated——" But Mrs. Whitcomb bridled atonce. "How dare you criticize Sammy! He's the nicest boy in the world."
Ashton recovered quickly. "That's what I started to say. Will he contest the—divorce?"
"Of course not," she beamed. "The dear fellow would never deny me anything. Sammy offered to get it himself, but I told him he'd better stay in Chicago and stick to business. I shall need such a lot of alimony."
"Too bad he couldn't have come along," Ashton insinuated.
But the irony was wasted, for she sighed: "Yes, I shall miss him terribly. But we feared that if he were with me it might hamper me in getting a divorce on the ground of desertion."
She was trying to look earnest and thoughtful and heartbroken, but the result was hardly plausible, for Mrs. Sammy Whitcomb could not possibly have been really earnest or really thoughtful; and her heart was quite too elastic to break. She proved it instantly, for when she heard behind her the voice of a young man asking her to let him pass, she turned to protest, but seeing that he was a handsome young man, her starch was instantly changed to sugar. And she rewarded his good looks with a smile, as he rewarded hers with another.
Then Ashton intervened like a dog in the manger and dragged her off to her seat, leaving the young man to exclaim:
"Some tamarind, that!"
Another young man behind him growled: "Cut out the tamarinds and get to business. Mallory will be here any minute."
"I hate to think what he'll do to us when he sees what we've done to him."
"Oh, he won't dare to fight in the presence of his little bridey-widey. Do you see the porter in there?"
"Yes, suppose he objects."
"Well, we have the tickets. We'll claim it's our section till Mallory and Mrs. Mallory come."
They moved on into the car, where the porter confronted them. When he saw that they were loaded with bundles of all shapes and sizes, he waved them away with scorn:
"The emigrant sleepa runs only Toosdays and Thuzzdays."
From behind the first mass of packages came a brisk military answer:
"You black hound! About face—forward march! Section number one."
The porter retreated down the aisle, apologizing glibly. "'Scuse me for questionin' you, but you-all's baggage looked kind o' eccentric at first."
The two young men dumped their parcels on the seats and began to unwrap them hastily.
"If Mallory catches us, he'll kill us," said Lieutenant Shaw. Lieutenant Hudson only laughedand drew out a long streamer of white satin ribbon. Its glimmer, and the glimmering eyes of the young man excited Mrs. Whitcomb so much that after a little hesitance she moved forward, followed by the jealous Ashton.
"Oh, what's up?" she ventured. "It looks like something bridal."
"Talk about womanly intuition!" said Lieutenant Hudson, with an ingratiating salaam.
And then they explained to her that their classmate at West Point, being ordered suddenly to the Philippines, had arranged to elope with his beloved Marjorie Newton; had asked them to get the tickets and check the baggage while he stopped at a minister's to "get spliced and hike for Manila by this train."
Having recounted this plan in the full belief that it was even at that moment being carried out successfully, Lieutenant Hudson, with a ghoulish smile, explained:
"Being old friends of the bride and groom, we want to fix their section up in style and make them truly comfortable."
"Delicious!" gushed Mrs. Whitcomb. "But you ought to have some rice and old shoes."
"Here's the rice," said Hudson.
"Here's the old shoes," said Shaw.
"Lovely!" cried Mrs. Whitcomb, but then she grew soberer. "I should think, though, that they—theyoung couple—would have preferred a stateroom."
"Of course," said Hudson, almost blushing, "but it was taken. This was the best we could do for them."
"That's why we want to make it nice and bridelike," said Shaw. "Perhaps you could help us—a woman's touch——"
"Oh, I'd love to," she glowed, hastening into the section among the young men and the bundles. The unusual stir attracted the porter's suspicions. He came forward with a look of authority:
"'Scuse me, but wha—what's all this?"
"Vanish—get out," said Hudson, poking a coin at him. As he turned to obey, Mrs. Whitcomb checked him with: "Oh, Porter, could you get us a hammer and some nails?"
The porter almost blanched: "Good Lawd, Miss, you ain't allowin' to drive nails in that woodwork, is you?" That woodwork was to him what the altar is to the priest.
But Hudson, resorting to heroic measures, hypnotized him with a two-dollar bill: "Here, take this and see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing." The porter caressed it and chuckled: "I'm blind, deaf and speechless." He turned away, only to come back at once with a timid "'Scuse me!"
"You here yet?" growled Hudson.
Anxiously the porter pleaded: "I just want toast one question. Is you all fixin' up for a bridal couple?"
"Foolish question, number eight million, forty-three," said Shaw. "Answer, no, we are."
The porter's face glistened like fresh stove polish as he gloated over the prospect. "I tell you, it'll be mahty refreshin' to have a bridal couple on bode! This dog-on old Reno train don't carry nothin' much but divorcees. I'm just nachally hongry for a bridal couple."
"Brile coup-hic-le?" came a voice, like an echo that had somehow become intoxicated in transit. It was Little Jimmie Wellington looking for more sympathy. "Whass zis about brile couple?"
"Why, here's Little Buttercup!" sang out young Hudson, looking at him in amazed amusement.
"Did I un'stan' somebody say you're preparing for a brile coupl'?"
Lieutenant Shaw grinned. "I don't know what you understood, but that's what we're doing."
Immediately Wellington's great face began to churn and work like a big eddy in a river. Suddenly he was weeping. "Excuse these tears, zhentlemen, but I was once—I was once a b-b-bride myself."
"He looks like a whole wedding party," was Ashton's only comment on the copious grief. It was poor Wellington's fate to hunt as vainly for sympathy as Diogenes for honesty. The decorators either ignored him or shunted him aside. Theywere interested in a strange contrivance of ribbons and a box that Shaw produced.
"That," Hudson explained, "is a little rice trap. We hang that up there and when the bridal couple sit down—biff! a shower of rice all over them. It's bad, eh?"
Everybody agreed that it was a happy thought and even Jimmie Wellington, like a great baby, bounding from tears to laughter on the instant, was chortling: "A rishe trap? That's abslootly splendid—greates' invensh' modern times. I must stick around and see her when she flops." And then he lurched forward like a too-obliging elephant. "Let me help you."
Mrs. Whitcomb, who had now mounted a step ladder and poised herself as gracefully as possible, shrieked with alarm, as she saw Wellington's bulk rolling toward her frail support.
If Hudson and Shaw had not been football veterans at West Point and had not known just what to do when the center rush comes bucking the line, they could never have blocked that flying wedge. But they checked him and impelled him backward through his own curtains into his own berth.
Finding himself on his back, he decided to remain there. And there he remained, oblivious of the carnival preparations going on just outside his canopy.
Being an angel must have this great advantage at least, that one may sit in the grandstand overlooking the earth and enjoy the ludicrous blunders of that great blind man's buff we call life.
This night, if any angels were watching Chicago, the Mallory mix-up must have given them a good laugh, or a good cry—according to their natures.
Here were Mallory and Marjorie, still merely engaged, bitterly regretting their inability to get married and to continue their journey together. There in the car were the giggling conspirators preparing a bridal mockery for their sweet confusion.
Then the angels might have nudged one another and said:
"Oh, it's all right now. There goes a minister hurrying to their very car. Mallory has the license in his pocket, and here comes the parson. Hooray!"
And then the angelic cheer must have died outas the one great hurrah of a crowded ball-ground is quenched in air when the home team's vitally needed home run swerves outside the line and drops useless as a stupid foul ball.
In a shabby old hack, were two of the happiest runaways that ever sought a train. They were not miserable like the young couple in the taxicab. They were white-haired both. They had been married for thirty years. Yet this was their real honeymoon, their real elopement.
The little woman in the timid gray bonnet clapped her hands and tittered like a schoolgirl.
"Oh, Walter, I can't believe we're really going to leave Ypsilanti for a while. Oh, but you've earned it after thirty years of being a preacher."
"Hush. Don't let me hear you say the awful word," said the little old man in the little black hat and the close-fitting black bib. "I'm so tired of it, Sally, I don't want anybody on the train to know it."
"They can't help guessing it, with your collar buttoned behind."
And then the amazing minister actually dared to say, "Here's where I change it around." What's more, he actually did it. Actually took off his collar and buttoned it to the front. The old carriage seemed almost to rock with the earthquake of the deed.
"Why, Walter Temple!" his wife exclaimed. "What would they say in Ypsilanti?"
"They'll never know," he answered, defiantly.
"But your bib?" she said.
"I've thought of that, too," he cried, as he whipped it off and stuffed it into a handbag. "Look, what I've bought." And he dangled before her startled eyes a long affair which the sudden light from a passing lamppost revealed to be nothing less than a flaring red tie.
The little old lady touched it to make sure she was not dreaming it. Then, omitting further parley with fate, she snatched it away, put it round his neck, and, since her arms were embracing him, kissed him twice before she knotted the ribbon into a flaming bow. She sat back and regarded the vision a moment, then flung her arms around him and hugged him till he gasped:
"Watch out-watch out. Don't crush my cigars."
"Cigars! Cigars!" she echoed, in a daze.
And then the astounding husband produced them in proof.
"Genuine Lillian Russells—five cents straight."
"But I never saw you smoke."
"Haven't taken a puff since I was a young fellow," he grinned, wagging his head. "But now it's my vacation, and I'm going to smoke up."
She squeezed his hand with an earlier ardor: "Now you're the old Walter Temple I used to know."
Now it's my vacation"NOW IT'S MY VACATION, AND I'M GOING TO SMOKE UP"....
"NOW IT'S MY VACATION, AND I'M GOING TO SMOKE UP"....
"Sally," he said, "I've been traveling throughlife on a half-fare ticket. Now I'm going to have my little fling. And you brace up, too, and be the old mischievous Sally I used to know. Aren't you glad to be away from those sewing circles and gossip-bees, and——"
"Ugh! Don't ever mention them," she shuddered. Then she, too, felt a tinge of recurring springtide. "If you start to smoking, I think I'll take up flirting once more."
He pinched her cheek and laughed. "As the saying is, go as far as you desire and I'll leave the coast clear."
He kept his promise, too, for they were no sooner on the train and snugly bestowed in section five, than he was up and off.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"To the smoking-room," he swaggered, brandishing a dangerous looking cigar.
"Oh, Walter," she snickered, "I feel like a young runaway."
"You look like one. Be careful not to let anybody know that you're a"—he lowered his voice—"an old preacher's wife."
"I'm as ashamed of it as you are," she whispered. Then he threw her a kiss and a wink. She threw him a kiss and winked, too. And he went along the aisle eyeing his cigar gloatingly. As he entered the smoking-room, lighted the weed and blew out a great puff with a sigh of rapture, who could havetaken him, with his feet cocked up, and his red tie rakishly askew, for a minister?
And Sally herself was busy disguising herself, loosening up her hair coquettishly, smiling the primness out of the set corners of her mouth and even—let the truth be told at all costs—even passing a pink-powdered puff over her pale cheeks with guilty surreptition.
Thus arrayed she was soon joining the conspirators bedecking the bower for the expected bride and groom. She was the youngest and most mischievous of the lot. She felt herself a bride again, and vowed to protect this timid little wife to come from too much hilarity at the hands of the conspirators.
Mrs. Whitcomb had almost blushed when she had murmured to Lieutenant Hudson:
"I should think the young couple would have preferred a stateroom."
And Mr. Hudson had flinched a little as he explained:
"Yes, of course. We tried to get it, but it was gone."
It was during the excitement over the decoration of the bridal section, that the stateroom-tenants slipped in unobserved.
First came a fluttering woman whose youthful beauty had a certain hue of experience, saddening and wisering. The porter brought her in from the station-platform, led her to the stateroom's concave door and passed in with her luggage. But she lingered without, a Peri at the gate of Paradise. When the porter returned to bow her in, she shivered and hesitated, and then demanded:
"Oh, Porter, are you sure there's nobody else in there?"
The porter chuckled, but humored her panic.
"I ain't seen nobody. Shall I look under the seat?"
To his dismay, she nodded her head violently. He rolled his eyes in wonderment, but returned to the stateroom, made a pretense of examination, and came back with a face full of reassurance. "No'm, they's nobody there. Take a mighty small-size burglar to squeeje unda that baid—er—berth. No'm, nobody there."
"Oh!"
The gasp was so equivocal that he made bold to ask:
"Is you pleased or disappointed?"
The mysterious young woman was too much agitated to rebuke the impudence. She merely sighed: "Oh, porter, I'm so anxious."
"I'm not—now," he muttered, for she handed him a coin.
"Porter, have you seen anybody on board that looks suspicious?"
"Evvabody looks suspicious to me, Missy. But what was you expecting—especial?"
"Oh, porter, have you seen anybody that looks like a detective in disguise?"
"Well, they's one man looks 's if he was disguised as a balloon, but I don't believe he's no slooch-hound."
"Well, if you see anything that looks like a detective and he asks for Mrs. Fosdick——"
"Mrs. What-dick?"
"Mrs. Fosdick! You tell him I'm not on board." And she gave him another coin.
"Yassum," said the porter, lingering willingly on such fertile soil. "I'll tell him Mrs. Fosdick done give me her word she wasn't on bode."
"Yes!—and if a woman should ask you."
"What kind of a woman?"
"The hideous kind that men call handsome."
"Oh, ain't they hideous, them handsome women?"
"Well, if such a woman asks for Mrs. Fosdick—she's my husband's first wife—but of course that doesn't interest you."
"No'm—yes'm."
"If she comes—tell her—tell her—oh, what shall we tell her?"
The porter rubbed his thick skull: "Lemme see—we might say you—I tell you what we'll tell her: we'll tell her you took the train for New York; and if she runs mighty fast she can just about ketch it."
"Fine, fine!" And she rewarded his genius with another coin. "And, porter." He had not budged. "Porter, if a very handsome man with luscious eyes and a soulful smile asks for me——"
"I'll th'ow him off the train!"
"Oh, no—no!—that's my husband—my present husband. You may let him in. Now is it all perfectly clear, porter?"
"Oh, yassum, clear as clear." Thus guaranteedshe entered the stateroom, leaving the porter alone with his problem. He tried to work it out in a semi-audible mumble: "Lemme see! If your present husband's absent wife gits on bode disguised as a handsome hideous woman I'm to throw him—her—off the train and let her—him—come in—oh, yassum, you may rely on me." He bowed and held out his hand again. But she was gone. He shuffled on into the car.
He had hardly left the little space before the stateroom when a handsome man with luscious eyes, but without any smile at all, came slinking along the corridor and tapped cautiously on the door. Silence alone answered him at first, then when he had rapped again, he heard a muffled:
"Go away. I'm not in."
He put his lips close and softly called: "Edith!"
At this Sesame the door opened a trifle, but when he tried to enter, a hand thrust him back and a voice again warned him off. "You musn't come in."
"But I'm your husband."
"That's just why you musn't come in." The door opened a little wider to give him a view of a downcast beauty moaning:
"Oh, Arthur, I'm so afraid."
"Afraid?" he sniffed. "With your husband here?"
"That's the trouble, Arthur. What if your former wife should find us together?"
"But she and I are divorced."
"In some states, yes—but other states don't acknowledge the divorce. That former wife of yours is a fiend to pursue us this way."
"She's no worse than your former husband. He's pursuing us, too. My divorce was as good as yours, my dear."
"Yes, and no better."
The angels looking on might have judged from the ready tempers of the newly married and not entirely unmarried twain that their new alliance promised to be as exciting as their previous estates. Perhaps the man subtly felt the presence of those eternal eavesdroppers, for he tried to end the love-duel in the corridor with an appeasing caress and a tender appeal: "But let's not start our honeymoon with a quarrel."
His partial wife returned the caress and tried to explain: "I'm not quarreling with you, dear heart, but with the horrid divorce laws. Why, oh, why did we ever interfere with them?"
He made a brave effort with: "We ended two unhappy marriages, Edith, to make one happy one."
"But I'm so unhappy, Arthur, and so afraid."
He seemed a trifle afraid himself and his gaze was askance as he urged: "But the train will start soon, Edith—and then we shall be safe."
Mrs. Fosdick had a genius for inventing unpleasantpossibilities. "But what if your former wife or my former husband should have a detective on board?"
"A detective?—poof!" He snapped his fingers in bravado. "You are with your husband, aren't you?"
"In Illinois, yes," she admitted, very dolefully. "But when we come to Iowa, I'm a bigamist, and when we come to Nebraska, you're a bigamist, and when we come to Wyoming, we're not married at all."
It was certainly a tangled web they had woven, but a ray of light shot through it into his bewildered soul. "But we're all right in Utah. Come, dearest."
He took her by the elbow to escort her into their sanctuary, but still she hung back.
"On one condition, Arthur—that you leave me as soon as we cross the Iowa state line, and not come back till we get to Utah. Remember, the Iowa state line!"
"Oh, all right," he smiled. And seeing the porter, he beckoned him close and asked with careless indifference: "Oh, Porter, what time do we reach the Iowa state line?"
"Two fifty-five in the mawning, sah."
"Two fifty-five A.M.?" the wretch exclaimed.
"Two fifty-five A.M., yassah," the porter repeated, and wondered why this excerpt from thetime-table should exert such a dramatic effect on the luscious-eyed Fosdick.
He had small time to meditate the puzzle, for the train was about to be launched upon its long voyage. He went out to the platform, and watched a couple making that way. As their only luggage was a dog-basket he supposed that they were simply come to bid some of his passengers good-bye. No tips were to be expected from such transients, so he allowed them to help themselves up the steps.
Mallory and his Marjorie had tried to kiss the farewell of farewells half a dozen times, but she could not let him go at the gate. She asked the guard to let her through, and her beauty was bribe enough.
Again and again, she and Mallory paused. He wanted to take her back to the taxicab, but she would not be so dismissed. She must spend the last available second with him.
"I'll go as far as the steps of the car," she said. When they were arrived there, two porters, a sleeping car conductor and several smoking saunterers profaned the tryst. So she whispered that she would come aboard, for the corridor would be a quiet lane for the last rites.
And now that he had her actually on the train, Mallory's whole soul revolted against letting her go. The vision of her standing on the platform sad-eyed and lorn, while the train swept him off intospace was unendurable. He shut his eyes against it, but it glowed inside the lids.
And then temptation whispered him its old "Why not?" While it was working in his soul like a fermenting yeast, he was saying:
"To think that we should owe all our misfortune to an infernal taxicab's break-down."
Out of the anguish of her loneliness crept one little complaint:
"If you had really wanted me, you'd have had two taxicabs."
"Oh, how can you say that? I had the license bought and the minister waiting."
"He's waiting yet."
"And the ring—there's the ring." He fished it out of his waistcoat pocket and held it before her as a golden amulet.
"A lot of good it does now," said Marjorie. "You won't even wait over till the next train."
"I've told you a thousand times, my love," he protested, desperately, "if I don't catch the transport, I'll be courtmartialed. If this train is late, I'm lost. If you really loved me you'd come along with me."
Her very eyes gasped at this astounding proposal.
"Why, Harry Mallory, you know it's impossible."
Like a sort of benevolent Satan, he laid the ground for his abduction: "You'll leave me, then,to spend three years without you—out among those Manila women."
She shook her head in terror at this vision. "It would be too horrible for words to have you marry one of those mahogany sirens."
He held out the apple. "Better come along, then."
"But how can I? We're not married."
He answered airily: "Oh, I'm sure there's a minister on board."
"But it would be too awful to be married with all the passengers gawking. No, I couldn't face it. Good-bye, honey."
She turned away, but he caught her arm: "Don't you love me?"
"To distraction. I'll wait for you, too."
"Three years is a long wait."
"But I'll wait, if you will."
With such devotion he could not tamper. It was too beautiful to risk or endanger or besmirch with any danger of scandal. He gave up his fantastic project and gathered her into his arms, crowded her into his very soul, as he vowed: "I'll wait for you forever and ever and ever."
Her arms swept around his neck, and she gave herself up as an exile from happiness, a prisoner of a far-off love:
"Good-bye, my husband-to-be."
"Good-bye my wife-that-was-to-have-been-and-will-be-yet-maybe."
"Good-bye."
"Good-bye."
"Good-bye."
"Good-bye."
"I must go."
"Yes, you must."
"One last kiss."
"One more--one long last kiss."
And there, entwined in each other's arms, with lips wedded and eyelids clinched, they clung together, forgetting everything past, future, or present. Love's anguish made them blind, mute, and deaf.
They did not hear the conductor crying his, "All Aboard!" down the long wall of the train. They did not hear the far-off knell of the bell. They did not hear the porters banging the vestibules shut. They did not feel the floor sliding out with them.
And so the porter found them, engulfed in one embrace, swaying and swaying, and no more aware of the increasing rush of the train than we other passengers on the earth-express are aware of its speed through the ether-routes on its ancient schedule.
The porter stood with his box-step in his hand, and blinked and wondered. And they did not even know they were observed.
The starting of the train surprised the ironical decorators in the last stages of their work. Their smiles died out in a sudden shame, as it came over them that the joke had recoiled on their own heads. They had done their best to carry out the time-honored rite of making a newly married couple as miserable as possible—and the newly married couple had failed to do its share.
The two lieutenants glared at each other in mutual contempt. They had studied much at West Point about ambushes, and how to avoid them. Could Mallory have escaped the pit they had digged for him? They looked at their handiwork in disgust. The cosy-corner effect of white ribbons and orange flowers, gracefully masking the concealed rice-trap, had seemed the wittiest thing ever devised. Now it looked the silliest.
The other passengers were equally downcast. Meanwhile the two lovers in the corridor were kissing good-byes as if they were hoping to store up honey enough to sustain their hearts for a threeyears' fast. And the porter was studying them with perplexity.
He was used, however, to waking people out of dreamland, and he began to fear that if he were discovered spying on the lovers, he might suffer. So he coughed discreetly three or four times.
Since the increasing racket of the train made no effect on the two hearts beating as one, the small matter of a cough was as nothing.
Finally the porter was compelled to reach forward and tap Mallory's arm, and stutter:
"'Scuse me, but co-could I git b-by?"
The embrace was untied, and the lovers stared at him with a dazed, where-am-I? look. Marjorie was the first to realize what awakened them. She felt called upon to say something, so she said, as carelessly as if she had not just emerged from a young gentleman's arms:
"Oh, porter, how long before the train starts?"
"Train's done started, Missy."
This simple statement struck the wool from her eyes and the cotton from her ears, and she was wide enough awake when she cried: "Oh, stop it—stop it!"
"That's mo'n I can do, Missy," the porter expostulated.
"Then I'll jump off," Marjorie vowed, making a dash for the door.
But the porter filled the narrow path, and waved her back.
"Vestibule's done locked up—train's going lickety-split." Feeling that he had safely checkmated any rashness, the porter squeezed past the dumbfounded pair, and went to change his blue blouse for the white coat of his chambermaidenly duties. Mallory's first wondering thought was a rapturous feeling that circumstances had forced his dream into a reality. He thrilled with triumph: "You've got to go with me now."
"Yes—I've got to go," Marjorie assented meekly; then, sublimely, "It's fate. Kismet!"
They clutched each other again in a fiercely blissful hug. Marjorie came back to earth with a bump: "Are you really sure there's a minister on board?"
"Pretty sure," said Mallory, sobering a trifle.
"But you said you were sure?"
"Well, when you say you're sure, that means you're not quite sure."
It was not an entirely satisfactory justification, and Marjorie began to quake with alarm: "Suppose there shouldn't be?"
"Oh, then," Mallory answered carelessly, "there's bound to be one to-morrow."
Marjorie realized at once the enormous abyss between then and the morrow, and she gasped: "Tomorrow! And no chaperon! Oh, I'll jump out of the window."
Mallory could prevent that, but when she pleaded, "What shall we do?" he had no solution to offer. Again it was she who received the first inspiration.
"I have it," she beamed.
"Yes, Marjorie?" he assented, dubiously.
"We'll pretend not to be married at all."
He seized the rescuing ladder: "That's it! Not married—just friends."
"Till we can get married——"
"Yes, and then we can stop being friends."
"My love—my friend!" They embraced in a most unfriendly manner.
An impatient yelp from the neglected dog-basket awoke them.
"Oh, Lord, we've brought Snoozleums."
"Of course we have." She took the dog from the prison, tucked him under her arm, and tried to compose her bridal face into a merely friendly countenance before they entered the car. But she must pause for one more kiss, one more of those bittersweet good-byes. And Mallory was nothing loath.
Hudson and Shaw were still glumly perplexed, when the porter returned in his white jacket.
"I bet they missed the train; all this work for nothing," Hudson grumbled. But Shaw, seeing the porter, caught a gleam of hope, and asked anxiously:
"Say, porter, have you seen anything anywhere that looks like a freshly married pair?"
"Well," and the porter rubbed his eyes with theback of his hand as he chuckled, "well, they's a mighty lovin' couple out theah in the corridor."
"That's them—they—it!"
Instantly everything was alive and in action. It was as if a bugle had shrilled in a dejected camp.
"Get ready!" Shaw commanded. "Here's rice for everybody."
"Everybody take an old shoe," said Hudson. "You can't miss in this narrow car."
"There's a kazoo for everyone, too," said Shaw, as the outstretched hands were equipped with wedding ammunition. "Do you know the 'Wedding March'?"
"I ought to by this time," said Mrs. Whitcomb.
Right into the tangle of preparation, old Ira Lathrop stalked, on his way back to his seat to get more cigars.
"Have some rice for the bridal couple?" said Ashton, offering him of his own double-handful.
But Lathrop brushed him aside with a romance-hater's growl.
"Watch out for your head, then," cried Hudson, and Lathrop ducked just too late to escape a neck-filling, hair-filling shower. An old shoe took him a clip abaft the ear, and the old woman-hater dropped raging into the same berth where the spinster, Anne Gattle, was trying to dodge the same downpour.
Still there was enough of the shrapnel left to overwhelm the two young "friends," who marchedinto the aisle, trying to look indifferent and prepared for nothing on earth less than for a wedding charivari.
Mallory should have done better than to entrust his plans to fellows like Hudson and Shaw, whom he had known at West Point for diabolically joyous hazers and practical jokers. Even as he sputtered rice and winced from the impact of flying footgear, he was cursing himself as a double-dyed idiot for asking such men to engage his berth for him. He had a sudden instinct that they had doubtless bedecked his trunk and Marjorie's with white satin furbelows and ludicrous labels. But he could not shelter himself from the white sleet and the black thumps. He could hardly shelter Marjorie, who cowered behind him and shrieked even louder than the romping tormentors.
When the assailants had exhausted the rice and shoes, they charged down the aisle for the privilege of kissing the bride. Mallory was dragged and bunted and shunted here and there, and he had to fight his way back to Marjorie with might and main. He was tugging and striking like a demon, and yelling, "Stop it! stop it!"
Hudson took his punishment with uproarious good nature, laughing:
"Oh, shut up, or we'll kiss you!"
But Shaw was scrubbing his wry lips with a seasick wail of:
"Wow! I think I kissed the dog."
There was, of necessity, some pause for breath, and the combatants draped themselves limply about the seats. Mallory glared at the twin Benedict Arnolds and demanded:
"Are you two thugs going to San Francisco with us?"
"Don't worry," smiled Hudson, "we're only going as far as Kedzie Avenue, just to start the honeymoon properly."
If either of the elopers had been calmer, the solution of the problem would have been simple. Marjorie could get off at this suburban station and drive home from there. But their wits were like pied type, and they were further jumbled, when Shaw broke in with a sudden: "Come, see the little dovecote we fixed for you."
Before they knew it, they were both haled along the aisle to the white satin atrocity. "Love in a bungalow," said Hudson. "Sit down—make yourselves perfectly at home."
"No—never—oh, oh, oh!" cried Marjorie, darting away and throwing herself into the first empty seat—Ira Lathrop's berth. Mallory followed to console her with caresses and murmurs of, "There, there, don't cry, dearie!"
Hudson and Shaw followed close with mawkish mockery: "Don't cry, dearie."
And now Mrs. Temple intervened. She had enjoyedthe initiation ceremony as well as anyone. But when the little bride began to cry, she remembered the pitiful terror and shy shame she had undergone as a girl-wife, and she hastened to Marjorie's side, brushing the men away like gnats.
"You poor thing," she comforted. "Come, my child, lean on me, and have a good cry."
Hudson grinned, and put out his own arms: "She can lean on me, if she'd rather."
Mrs. Temple glanced up with indignant rebuke: "Her mother is far away, and she wants a mother's breast to weep on. Here's mine, my dear."
The impudent Shaw tapped his own military chest: "She can use mine."
Infuriated at this bride-baiting, Mallory rose and confronted the two imps with clenched fists: "You're a pretty pair of friends, you are!"
The imperturbable Shaw put out a pair of tickets as his only defence: "Here are your tickets, old boy."
And Hudson roared jovially: "We tried to get you a stateroom, but it was gone."
"And here are your baggage checks," laughed Shaw, forcing into his fists a few pasteboards. "We got your trunks on the train ahead, all right. Don't mention it—you're entirely welcome."
It was the porter that brought the first relief from the ordeal.
"If you gemmen is gettin' off at Kedzie Avenue, you'd better step smart. We're slowin' up now."
Marjorie was sobbing too audibly to hear, and Mallory swearing too inaudibly to heed the opportunity Kedzie Avenue offered. And Hudson was yelling: "Well, good-bye, old boy and old girl. Sorry we can't go all the way." He had the effrontery to try to kiss the bride good-bye, and Shaw was equally bold, but Mallory's fury enabled him to beat them off. He elbowed and shouldered them down the aisle, and sent after them one of his own shoes. But it just missed Shaw's flying coattails.
Mallory stood glaring after the departing traitors. He was glad that they at least were gone, till he realized with a sickening slump in his vitals, that they had not taken with them his awful dilemma. And now the train was once more clickety-clicking into the night and the West.
Never was a young soldier so stumped by a problem in tactics as Lieutenant Harry Mallory, safely aboard his train, and not daring to leave it, yet hopelessly unaware of how he was to dispose of his lovely but unlabelled baggage.
Hudson and Shaw had erected a white satin temple to Hymen in berth number one, had created such commotion, and departed in such confusion, that there had been no opportunity to proclaim that he and Marjorie were "not married—just friends."
And now the passengers had accepted them as that enormous fund of amusement to any train, a newly wedded pair. To explain the mistake would have been difficult, even among friends. But among strangers—well, perhaps a wiser and a colder brain than Harry Mallory's could have stood there and delivered a brief oration restoring truth to her pedestal. But Mallory was in no condition for such a stoic delivery.
He mopped his brow in agony, lost in a blizzard of bewilderments. He drifted back toward Marjorie, half to protect and half for companionship.He found Mrs. Temple cuddling her close and mothering her as if she were a baby instead of a bride.
"Did the poor child run away and get married?"
Marjorie's frantic "Boo-hoo-hoo" might have meant anything. Mrs. Temple took it for assent, and murmured with glowing reminiscence:
"Just the way Doctor Temple and I did."
She could not see the leaping flash of wild hope that lighted up Mallory's face. She only heard his voice across her shoulder:
"Doctor? Doctor Temple? Is your husband a reverend doctor?"
"A reverend doctor?" the little old lady repeated weakly.
"Yes—a—a preacher?"
The poor old congregation-weary soul was abruptly confronted with the ruination of all the delight in her little escapade with her pulpit-fagged husband. If she had ever dreamed that the girl who was weeping in her arms was weeping from any other fright than the usual fright of young brides, fresh from the preacher's benediction, she would have cast every other consideration aside, and told the truth.
But her husband's last behest before he left her had been to keep their precious pretend-secret. She felt—just then—that a woman's first duty is to obey her husband. Besides, what business was it of thisyoung husband's what her old husband's business was? Before she had fairly begun to debate her duty, almost automatically, with the instantaneous instinct of self-protection, her lips had uttered the denial:
"Oh—he's—just a—plain doctor. There he is now."
Mallory cast one miserable glance down the aisle at Dr. Temple coming back from the smoking room. As the old man paused to stare at the bridal berth, whose preparation he had not seen, he was just enough befuddled by his first cigar for thirty years to look a trifle tipsy. The motion of the train and the rakish tilt of his unwonted crimson tie confirmed the suspicion and annihilated Mallory's new-born hope, that perhaps repentant fate had dropped a parson at their very feet.
He sank into the seat opposite Marjorie, who gave him one terrified glance, and burst into fresh sobs:
"Oh—oh—boo-hoo—I'm so unhap—hap—py."
Perhaps Mrs. Temple was a little miffed at the couple that had led her astray and opened her own honeymoon with a wanton fib. In any case, the best consolation she could offer Marjorie was a perfunctory pat, and a cynicism:
"There, there, dear! You don't know what real unhappiness is yet. Wait till you've been married a while."
And then she noted a startling lack of completeness in the bride's hand.
"Why—my dear!—where's your wedding ring?"
With what he considered great presence of mind, Mallory explained: "It—it slipped off—I—I picked it up. I have it here." And he took the little gold band from his waistcoat and tried to jam it on Marjorie's right thumb.
"Not on the thumb!" Mrs. Temple cried. "Don't you know?"
"You see, it's my first marriage."
"You poor boy—this finger!" And Mrs. Temple, raising Marjorie's limp hand, selected the proper digit, and held it forward, while Mallory pressed the fatal circlet home.
And then Mrs. Temple, having completed their installation as man and wife, utterly confounded their confusion by her final effort at comfort: "Well, my dears, I'll go back to my seat, and leave you alone with your dear husband."
"My dear what?" Marjorie mumbled inanely, and began to sniffle again. Whereupon Mrs. Temple resigned her to Mallory, and consigned her to fate with a consoling platitude:
"Cheer up, my dear, you'll be all right in the morning."
Marjorie and Mallory's eyes met in one wild clash, and then both stared into the window, and did not notice that the shades were down.
While Mrs. Temple was confiding to her husband that the agitated couple in the next seat had just come from a wedding-factory, and had got on while he was lost in tobacco land, the people in the seat on the other side of them were engaged in a little drama of their own.
Ira Lathrop, known to all who knew him as a woman-hating snapping-turtle, was so busily engaged trying to drag the farthest invading rice grains out of the back of his neck, that he was late in realizing his whereabouts. When he raised his head, he found that he had crowded into a seat with an uncomfortable looking woman, who crowded against the window with old-maidenly timidity.
He felt some apology to be necessary, and he snarled: "Disgusting things, these weddings!" After he heard this, it did not sound entirely felicitous, so he grudgingly ventured: "Excuse me—you married?"
She denied the soft impeachment so heartily that he softened a little:
"You're a sensible woman. I guess you and I are the only sensible people on this train."
"It—seems—so," she giggled. It was the first time her spinstership had been taken as material for a compliment. Something in the girlish giggle and the strangely young smile that swept twenty years from her face and belied the silver lines in her hair, seemed to catch the old bachelor's attention. He stared at her so fiercely that she looked about for a way of escape. Then a curiously anxious, almost a hungry, look softened his leonine jowls into a boyish eagerness, and his growl became a sort of gruff purr:
"Say, you look something like an old sweetheart—er—friend—of mine. Were you ever in Brattleboro, Vermont?"
A flush warmed her cheek, and a sense of home warmed her prim speech, as she confessed:
"I came from there originally."
"So did I," said Ira Lathrop, leaning closer, and beaming like a big sun: "I don't suppose you remember Ira Lathrop?"
The old maid stared at the bachelor as if she were trying to see the boy she had known, through the mask that time had modeled on his face. And then she was a girl again, and her voice chimed as she cried:
"Why, Ira!—Mr. Lathrop!—is it you?"
She gave him her hand—both her hands, and he smothered them in one big paw and laid the otheron for extra warmth, as he nodded his savage head and roared as gentle as a sucking dove:
"Well, well! Annie—Anne—Miss Gattle! What do you think of that?"
They gossiped across the chasm of years about people and things, and knew nothing of the excitement so close to them, saw nothing of Chicago slipping back into the distance, with its many lights shooting across the windows like hurled torches.
Suddenly a twinge of ancient jealousy shot through the man's heart, recurring to old emotions.
"So you're not married, Annie. Whatever became of that fellow who used to hang round you all the time?"
"Charlie Selby?" She blushed at the name, and thrilled at the luxury of meeting jealousy. "Oh, he entered the church. He's a minister out in Ogden, Utah."
"I always knew he'd never amount to much," was Lathrop's epitaph on his old rival. Then he started with a new twinge: "You bound for Ogden, too?"
"Oh, no," she smiled, enraptured at the new sensation of making a man anxious, and understanding all in a flash the motives that make coquettes. Then she told him her destination. "I'm on my way to China."
"China!" he exclaimed. "So'm I!"
She stared at him with a new thought, and gushed: "Oh, Ira—are you a missionary, too?"
"Missionary? Hell, no!" he roared. "Excuse me—I'm an importer—Anne, I—I——"
But the sonorous swear reverberated in their ears like a smitten bell, and he blushed for it, but could not recall it.
The almost-married couple sat long in mutual terror and a common paralysis of ingenuity. Marjorie, for lack of anything better to do, was absent-mindedly twisting Snoozleums's ears, while he, that pocket abridgment of a dog, in a well meaning effort to divert her from her evident grief, made a great pretence of ferocity, growling and threatening to bite her fingers off. The new ring attracted his special jealousy. He was growing discouraged at the ill-success of his impersonation of a wolf, and dejected at being so crassly ignored, when he suddenly became, in his turn, a center of interest.
Marjorie was awakened from her trance of inanition by the porter's voice. His plantation voice was ordinarily as thick and sweet as his own New Orleans sorghum, but now it had a bitterness that curdled the blood:
"'Scuse me, but how did you-all git that theah dog in this heah cah?"
"Snoozleums is always with me," said Marjorie briskly, as if that settled it, and turned for confirmation to the dog himself, "aren't you, Snoozleums?"
"Well," the porter drawled, trying to be gracious with his great power, "the rules don't 'low no live stock in the sleepin' cars, 'ceptin' humans."
Marjorie rewarded his condescension with a blunt: "Snoozleums is more human than you are."
"I p'sume he is," the porter admitted, "but he can't make up berths. Anyway, the rules says dogs goes with the baggage."
Marjorie swept rules aside with a defiant: "I don't care. I won't be separated from my Snoozleums."
She looked to Mallory for support, but he was too sorely troubled with greater anxieties to be capable of any action.
The porter tried persuasion: "You betta lemme take him, the conducta is wuss'n what I am. He th'owed a couple of dogs out the window trip befo' last."
"The brute!"
"Oh, yassum, he is a regulah brute. He just loves to hear 'm splosh when they light."
Noting the shiver that shook the girl, the porter offered a bit of consolation:
"Better lemme have the pore little thing up in the baggage cah. He'll be in charge of a lovely baggage-smasher."
"Are you sure he's a nice man?"
"Oh, yassum, he's death on trunks, but he's a natural born angel to dogs."
"Well, if I must, I must," she sobbed. "Poor little Snoozleums! Can he come back and see me to-morrow?" Marjorie's tears were splashing on the puzzled dog, who nestled close, with a foreboding of disaster.
"I reckon p'haps you'd better visit him."
"Poor dear little Snoozleums—good night, my little darling. Poor little child—it's the first night he's slept all by his 'ittle lonesome, and——"
The porter was growing desperate. He clapped his hands together impatiently and urged: "I think I hear that conducta comin'."
The ruse succeeded. Marjorie fairly forced the dog on him. "Quick—hide him—hurry!" she gasped, and sank on the seat completely crushed. "I'll be so lonesome without Snoozleums."
Mallory felt called upon to remind her of his presence. "I—I'm here, Marjorie." She looked at him just once—at him, the source of all her troubles—buried her head in her arms, and resumed her grief. Mallory stared at her helplessly, then rose and bent over to whisper:
"I'm going to look through the train."
"Oh, don't leave me," she pleaded, clinging to him with a dependence that restored his respect.
"I must find a clergyman," he whispered. "I'll be back the minute I find one, and I'll bring him with me."