Transcriber's Note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.

The book uses both "Doc." and "Doc".

EXCUSE ME!

EXCUSE ME!

By RUPERT HUGHES

Author of "The Old Nest"

With Five Illustrations

A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers New York

Copyright, 1911, by
The H. K. Fly Company

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

EXCUSE ME!

CHAPTER I
THE WRECK OF THE TAXICAB

The young woman in the taxicab scuttling frantically down the dark street, clung to the arm of the young man alongside, as if she were terrified at the lawbreaking, neck-risking speed. But evidently some greater fear goaded her, for she gasped:

"Can't he go a little faster?"

"Can't you go a little faster?" The young man alongside howled as he thrust his head and shoulders through the window in the door.

But the self-created taxi-gale swept his voice aft, and the taut chauffeur perked his ear in vain to catch the vanishing syllables.

"What's that?" he roared.

"Can't you go a little faster?"

The indignant charioteer simply had to shoot one barbed glare of reproach into that passenger. He turned his head and growled:

"Say, do youse want to lose me me license?"

For just one instant he turned his head. One instant was just enough. The unguarded taxicab seized the opportunity, bolted from the track, and flung, as it were, its arms drunkenly around a perfectly respectable lamppost attending strictly to its business on the curb. There ensued a condensed Fourth of July. Sparks flew, tires exploded, metals ripped, two wheels spun in air and one wheel, neatly severed at the axle, went reeling down the sidewalk half a block before it leaned against a tree and rested.

A dozen or more miracles coincided to save the passengers from injury. The young man found himself standing on the pavement with the unhinged door still around his neck. The young woman's arms were round his neck. Her head was on his shoulder. It had reposed there often enough, but never before in the street under a lamppost. The chauffeur found himself in the road, walking about on all fours, like a bewildered quadruped.

Evidently some overpowering need for speed possessed the young woman, for even now she did not scream, she did not faint, she did not murmur, "Where am I?" She simply said:

"What time is it, honey?"

And the young man, not realizing how befuddled he really was, or how his hand trembled, fetched out his watch and held it under the glow of the lamppost, which was now bent over in a convenient but disreputable attitude.

"A quarter to ten, sweetheart. Plenty of time for the train."

"But the minister, honey! What about the minister? How are we going to get to the minister?"

The consideration of this riddle was interrupted by a muffled hubbub of yelps, whimpers, and canine hysterics. Immediately the young woman forgot ministers, collisions, train-schedules—everything. She showed her first sign of panic.

"Snoozleums! Get Snoozleums!"

They groped about in the topsy-turvy taxicab, rummaged among a jumble of suitcases, handbags, umbrellas and minor impedimenta, and fished out a small dog-basket with an inverted dog inside. Snoozleums was ridiculous in any position, but as he slid tail foremost from the wicker basket, he resembled nothing so much as a heap of tangled yarn tumbling out of a work-basket. He was an indignant skein, and had much to say before he consented to snuggle under his mistress' chin.

About this time the chauffeur came prowling into view. He was too deeply shocked to emit any language of the garage. He was too deeply shocked to achieve any comment more brilliant than:

"That mess don't look much like it ever was a taxicab, does it?"

The young man shrugged his shoulders, and stared up and down the long street for another. The young woman looked sorrowfully at the wreck, and queried:

"Do you think you can make it go?"

The chauffeur glanced her way, more in pity for her whole sex than in scorn for this one type, as he mumbled:

"Make it go? It'll take a steam winch a week to unwrap it from that lamppost."

The young man apologized.

"I oughtn't to have yelled at you."

He was evidently a very nice young man. Not to be outdone in courtesy, the chauffeur retorted:

"I hadn't ought to have turned me head."

The young woman thought, "What a nice chauffeur!" but she gasped: "Great heavens, you're hurt!"

"It's nuttin' but a scratch on me t'umb."

"Lend me a clean handkerchief, Harry."

The young man whipped out his reserve supply, and in a trice it was a bandage on the chauffeur's hand. The chauffeur decided that the young woman was even nicer than the young man. But he could not settle on a way to say to it. So he said nothing, and grinned sheepishly as he said it.

The young man named Harry was wondering how they were to proceed. He had already studied the region with dismay, when the girl resolved:

"We'll have to take another taxi, Harry."

"Yes, Marjorie, but we can't take it till we get it."

"You might wait here all night wit'out ketchin' a glimp' of one," the chauffeur ventured. "I come this way because you wanted me to take a short cut."

"It's the longest short cut I ever saw," the young man sighed, as he gazed this way and that.

The place of their shipwreck was so deserted that not even a crowd had gathered. The racket of the collision had not brought a single policeman. They were in a dead world of granite warehouses, wholesale stores and factories, all locked and forbidding, and full of silent gloom.

In the daytime this was a big trade-artery of Chicago, and all day long it was thunderous with trucks and commerce. At night it was Pompeii, so utterly abandoned that the night watchmen rarely slept outside, and no footpad found it worth while to set up shop.

The three castaways stared every which way, and every which way was peace. The ghost of a pedestrian or two hurried by in the far distance. A cat or two went furtively in search of warfare or romance. The lampposts stretched on and on in both directions in two forevers.

In the faraway there was a muffled rumble and the faint clang of a bell. Somewhere a street car was bumping along its rails.

"Our only hope," said Harry. "Come along, Marjorie."

He handed the chauffeur five dollars as a poultice to his wounds, tucked the girl under one arm and the dog-basket under the other, and set out, calling back to the chauffeur:

"Good night!"

"Good night!" the girl called back.

"Good night!" the chauffeur echoed. He stood watching them with the tender gaze that even a chauffeur may feel for young love hastening to a honeymoon.

He stood beaming so, till their footsteps died in the silence. Then he turned back to the chaotic remnants of his machine. He worked at it hopelessly for some time, before he had reason to look within. There he found the handbags and suitcases, umbrellas and other equipment. He ran to the corner to call after the owners. They were as absent of body as they had been absent of mind.

He remembered the street-number they had given him as their destination. He waited till at last a yawning policeman sauntered that way like a lonely beach patrol, and left him in charge while he went to telephone his garage for a wagon and a wrecking crew.

It was close on midnight before he reached the number his fares had given him. It was a parsonage leaning against a church. He rang the bell and finally produced from an upper window a nightshirt topped by a frowsy head. He explained the situation, and his possession of certain properties belonging to parties unknown except by their first names. The clergyman drowsily murmured:

"Oh, yes. I remember. The young man was Lieutenant Henry Mallory, and he said he would stop here with a young lady, and get married on the way to the train. But they never turned up."

"Lieutenant Mallory, eh? Where could I reach him?"

"He said he was leaving to-night for the Philippines."

"The Philippines! Well, I'll be——"

The minister closed the window just in time.

CHAPTER II
THE EARLY BIRDS AND THE WORM

In the enormous barn of the railroad station stood many strings of cars, as if a gigantic young Gulliver stabled his toys there and invisibly amused himself; now whisking this one away, now backing that other in.

Some of the trains were noble equipages, fitted to glide across the whole map with cargoes of Lilliputian millionaires and their Lilliputian ladies. Others were humble and shabby linked-up day-coaches and dingy smoking-cars, packed with workers, like ants.

Cars are mere vehicles, but locomotives have souls. The express engines roll in or stalk out with grandeur and ease. They are like emperors. They seem to look with scorn at the suburban engines snorting and grunting and shaking the arched roof with their plebeian choo-choo as they puff from shop to cottage and back.

The trainmen take their cue from the behavior of their locomotives. The conductor of a transcontinental nods to the conductor of a shuttle-train with less cordiality than to a brakeman of his own. The engineers of the limiteds look like senators in overalls. They are far-traveled men, leading a mighty life of adventure. They are pilots of land-ships across land-oceans. They have a right to a certain condescension of manner.

But no one feels or shows so much arrogance as the sleeping car porters. They cannot pronounce "supercilious," but they can be it. Their disdain for the entire crew of any train that carries merely day-coaches or half-baked chair-cars, is expressed as only a darkey in a uniform can express disdain for poor white trash.

Of all the haughty porters that ever curled a lip, the haughtiest by far was the dusky attendant in the San Francisco sleeper on the Trans-American Limited. His was the train of trains in that whole system. His car the car of cars. His passengers the surpassengers of all.

His train stood now waiting to set forth upon a voyage of two thousand miles, a journey across seven imperial States, a journey that should end only at that marge where the continent dips and vanishes under the breakers of the Pacific Ocean.

At the head of his car, with his little box-step waiting for the foot of the first arrival, the porter stood, his head swelling under his cap, his breast swelling beneath his blue blouse, with its brass buttons like reflections of his own eyes. His name was Ellsworth Jefferson, but he was called anything from "Poarr-turr" to "Pawtah," and he usually did not come when he was called.

To-night he was wondering perhaps what passengers, with what dispositions, would fall to his lot. Perhaps he was wondering what his Chicago sweetheart would be doing in the eight days before his return. Perhaps he was wondering what his San Francisco sweetheart had been doing in the five days since he left her, and how she would pass the three days that must intervene before he reached her again.

He had Othello's ebon color. Did he have Othello's green eye?

Whatever his thoughts, he chatted gaily enough with his neighbor and colleague of the Portland sleeper.

Suddenly he stopped in the midst of a soaring chuckle.

"Lordy, man, looky what's a-comin'!"

The Portland porter turned to gaze.

"I got my fingers crossed."

"I hope you git him."

"I hope I don't."

"He'll work you hard and cuss you out, and he won't give you even a Much Obliged."

"That's right. He ain't got a usher to carry his things. And he's got enough to fill a van."

The oncomer was plainly of English origin. It takes all sorts of people to make up the British Empire, and there is no sort lacking—glorious or pretty, or sour or sweet. But this was the type of English globe-trotter that makes himself as unpopular among foreigners as he is among his own people. He is almost as unendurable as the Americans abroad who twang their banjo brag through Europe, and berate France and Italy for their innocence of buckwheat cakes.

The two porters regarded Mr. Harold Wedgewood with dread, as he bore down on them. He was almost lost in the plethora of his own luggage. He asked for the San Francisco sleeper, and the Portland porter had to turn away to smother his gurgling relief.

Ellsworth Jefferson's heart sank. He made a feeble effort at self-protection. The Pullman conductor not being present at the moment, he inquired:

"Have you got yo' ticket?"

"Of cawse."

"Could I see it?"

"Of cawse not. Too much trouble to fish it out."

The porter was fading. "Do you remember yo' numba?"

"Of cawse. Take these." He began to pile things on the porter like a mountain unloading an avalanche. The porter stumbled as he clambered up the steps, and squeezed through the strait path of the corridor into the slender aisle. He turned again and again to question the invader, but he was motioned and bunted down the car, till he was halted with a "This will do."

The Englishman selected section three for his own. The porter ventured: "Are you sho' this is yo' numba?"

"Of cawse I'm shaw. How dare you question my——"

"I wasn't questionin' you, boss, I was just astin' you."

He resigned himself to the despot, and began to transfer his burdens to the seat. But he did nothing to the satisfaction of the Englishman. Everything must be placed otherwise; the catch-all here, the portmanteau there, the Gladstone there, the golfsticks there, the greatcoat there, the raincoat there. The porter was puffing like a donkey-engine, and mutiny was growing in his heart. His last commission was the hanging up of the bowler hat.

He stood on the arm of the seat to reach the high hook. From here he paused to glare down with an attempt at irony.

"Is they anything else?"

"No. You may get down."

The magnificent patronage of this wilted the porter completely. He returned to the lower level, and shuffled along the aisle in a trance. He was quickly recalled by a sharp:

"Pawtah!"

"Yassah!"

"What time does this bally train start?"

"Ten-thutty, sah."

"But it's only ten now."

"Yassah. It'll be ten-thutty a little later."

"Do you mean to tell me that I've got to sit hyah for half an hour—just waitin'?"

The porter essayed another bit of irony:

"Well," he drawled, "I might tell the conducta you're ready. And mebbe he'd start the train. But the time-table says ten-thutty."

He watched the effect of his satire, but it fell back unheeded from the granite dome of the Englishman, whose only comment was:

"Oh, never mind. I'll wait."

The porter cast his eyes up in despair, and turned away, once more to be recalled.

"Oh, pawtah!"

"Yassah!"

"I think we'll put on my slippahs."

"Will we?"

"You might hand me that large bag. No, stupid, the othah one. You might open it. No, its in the othah one. Ah, that's it. You may set it down."

Mr. Wedgewood brought forth a soft cap and a pair of red slippers. The porter made another effort to escape, his thoughts as black as his face. Again the relentless recall:

"Oh, pawtah, I think we'll unbutton my boots."

He was too weak to murmur "Yassah." He simply fell on one knee and got to work.

There was a witness to his helpless rage—a newcomer, the American counterpart of the Englishman in all that makes travel difficult for the fellow travelers. Ira Lathrop was zealous to resent anything short of perfection, quick and loud of complaint, apparently impossible to please.

In everything else he was the opposite of the Englishman. He was burly, middle-aged, rough, careless in attire, careless of speech—as uncouth and savage as one can well be who is plainly a man of means.

It was not enough that a freeborn Afro-American should be caught kneeling to an Englishman. But when he had escaped this penance, and advanced hospitably to the newcomer, he must be greeted with a snarl.

"Say, are you the porter of this car, or that man's nurse?"

"I can't tell yet. What's yo' numba, please?"

The answer was the ticket. The porter screwed up his eyes to read the pencilled scrawl.

"Numba se'm. Heah she is, boss."

"Right next to a lot of women, I'll bet. Couldn't you put me in the men's end of the car?"

"Not ve'y well, suh. I reckon the cah is done sold out."

With a growl of rage, Ira Lathrop slammed into the seat his entire hand baggage, one ancient and rusty valise.

The porter gazed upon him with increased depression. The passenger list had opened inauspiciously with two of the worst types of travelers the Anglo-Saxon race has developed.

But their anger was not their worst trait in the porter's eyes. He was, in a limited way, an expert in human character.

When you meet a stranger you reveal your own character in what you ask about his. With some, the first question is, "Who are his people?" With others, "What has he achieved?" With others, "How much is he worth?" Each gauges his cordiality according to his estimate.

The porter was not curious on any of these points. He showed a democratic indifference to them. His one vital inquiry was:

"How much will he tip?"

His inspection of his first two charges promised small returns. He buttoned up his cordiality, and determined to waste upon them the irreducible minimum of attention.

It would take at least a bridal couple to restore the balance. But bridal couples in their first bloom rarely fell to the lot of that porter, for what bridal couple wants to lock itself in with a crowd of passengers for the first seventy-two hours of wedded bliss?

The porter banished the hope as a vanity. Little he knew how eagerly the young castaways from that wrecked taxicab desired to be a bridal couple, and to catch this train.

But the Englishman was restive again:

"Pawtah! I say, pawtah!"

"Yassah!"

"What time are we due in San Francisco?"

"San Francisco? San Francisco? We are doo thah the evenin' of the fo'th day. This bein' Monday, that ought to bring us in abote Thuzzday evenin'."

The Yankee felt called upon to check the foreign usurper.

"Porrterr!"

"Yassah!"

"Don't let that fellow monopolize you. He probably won't tip you at all."

The porter grew confidential:

"Oh, I know his kind, sah. They don't tip you for what you do do, but they're ready letter writers to the Sooperintendent for what you don't do."

"Pawtah! I say, pawtah!"

"Here, porrterr."

The porter tried to imitate the Irish bird, and be in two places at once. The American had a coin in his hand. The porter caught the gleam of it, and flitted thither. The Yankee growled:

"Don't forget that I'm on the train, and when we get to 'Frisco there may be something more."

The porter had the coin in his hand. Its heft was light. He sighed: "I hope so."

The Englishman was craning his head around owlishly to ask:

"I say, pawtah, does this train ever get wrecked?"

"Well, it hasn't yet," and he murmured to the Yankee, "but I has hopes."

The Englishman's voice was querulous again.

"I say, pawtah, open a window, will you? The air is ghastly, abso-ripping-lutely ghastly."

The Yankee growled:

"No wonder we had the Revolutionary War!"

Then he took from his pocket an envelope addressed to Ira Lathrop & Co., and from the envelope he took a contract, and studied it grimly. The envelope bore a Chinese stamp.

The porter, as he struggled with an obstinate window, wondered what sort of passenger fate would send him next.

CHAPTER III
IN DARKEST CHICAGO

The castaways from the wrecked taxicab hurried along the doleful street. Both of them knew their Chicago, but this part of it was not their Chicago.

They hailed a pedestrian, to ask where the nearest street car line might be, and whither it might run. He answered indistinctly from a discreet distance, as he hastened away. Perhaps he thought their question merely a footpad's introduction to a sandbagging episode. In Chicago at night one never knows.

"As near as I can make out what he said, Marjorie," the lieutenant pondered aloud, "we walk straight ahead till we come to Umtyump Street, and there we find a Rarara car that will take us to Bloptyblop Avenue. I never heard of any such streets, did you?"

"Never," she panted, as she jog-trotted alongside his military pace. "Let's take the first car we meet, and perhaps the conductor can put us off at the street where the minister lives."

"Perhaps." There was not much confidence in that "perhaps."

When they reached the street-carred street, they found two tracks, but nothing occupying them, as far as they could peer either way. A small shopkeeper in a tiny shop proved to be a delicatessen merchant so busily selling foreign horrors to aliens, that they learned nothing from him.

At length, in the far-away, they made out a headlight, and heard the grind and squeal of a car. Lieutenant Mallory waited for it, watch in hand. He boosted Marjorie's elbow aboard and bombarded the conductor with questions. But the conductor had no more heard of their street than they had of his. Their agitation did not disturb his stoic calm, but he invited them to come along to the next crossing, where they could find another car and more learned conductors; or, what promised better, perhaps a cab.

He threw Marjorie into a panic by ordering her to jettison Snoozleums, but the lieutenant bought his soul for a small price, and overlooked the fact that he did not ring up their fares.

The young couple squeezed into a seat and talked anxiously in sharp whispers.

"Wouldn't it be terrible, Harry, if, just as we got to the minister's, we should find papa there ahead of us, waiting to forbid the bands, or whatever it is? Wouldn't it be just terrible?"

"Yes, it would, honey, but it doesn't seem probable. There are thousands of ministers in Chicago. He could never find ours. Fact is. I doubt if we find him ourselves."

Her clutch tightened till he would have winced, if he had not been a soldier.

"What do you mean, Harry?"

"Well, in the first place, honey, look what time it is. Hardly more than time enough to get the train, to say nothing of hunting for that preacher and standing up through a long rigmarole."

"Why, Harry Mallory, are you getting ready to jilt me?"

"Indeed I'm not—not for worlds, honey, but I've got to get that train, haven't I?"

"Couldn't you wait over one train—just one tiny little train?"

"My own, own honey love, you know it's impossible! You must remember that I've already waited over three trains while you tried to make up your mind."

"And you must remember, darling, that it's no easy matter for a girl to decide to sneak away from home and be married secretly, and go all the way out to that hideous Manila with no trousseau and no wedding presents and no anything."

"I know it isn't, and I waited patiently while you got up the courage. But now there are no more trains. I shudder to think of this train being late. We're not due in San Francisco till Thursday evening, and my transport sails at sunrise Friday morning. Oh, Lord, what if I should miss that transport! What if I should!"

"What if we should miss the minister?"

"It begins to look a great deal like it."

"But, Harry, you wouldn't desert me now—abandon me to my fate?"

"Well, it isn't exactly like abandonment, seeing that you could go home to your father and mother in a taxicab."

She stared at him in horror.

"So you don't want me for your wife! You've changed your mind! You're tired of me already! Only an hour together, and you're sick of your bargain! You're anxious to get rid of me! You——"

"Oh, honey, I want you more than anything else on earth, but I'm a soldier, dearie, a mere lieutenant in the regular army, and I'm the slave of the Government. I've gone through West Point, and they won't let me resign respectably and if I did, we'd starve. They wouldn't accept my resignation, but they'd be willing to courtmartial me and dismiss me the service in disgrace. Then you wouldn't want to marry me—and I shouldn't have any way of supporting you if you did. I only know one trade, and that's soldiering."

"Don't call it a trade, beloved, it's the noblest profession in all the world, and you're the noblest soldier that ever was, and in a year or two you'll be the biggest general in the army."

He could not afford to shatter such a devout illusion or quench the light of faith in those beloved and loving eyes. He tacitly admitted his ability to be promoted commander-in-chief in a year or two. He allowed that glittering possibility to remain, used it as a basis for argument.

"Then, dearest, you must help me to do my duty."

She clasped his upper arm as if it were an altar and she an Iphigenia about to be sacrificed to save the army. And she murmured with utter heroism:

"I will! Do what you like with me!"

He squeezed her hand between his biceps and his ribs and accepted the offering in a look drenched with gratitude. Then he said, matter-of-factly:

"We'll see how much time we have when we get to—whatever the name of that street is."

The car jolted and wailed on its way like an old drifting rocking chair. The motorman was in no hurry. The passengers seemed to have no occasion for haste. Somebody got on or got off at almost every corner, and paused for conversation while the car waited patiently. But eventually the conductor put his head in and drawled:

"Hay! here's where you get off at."

They hastened to debark and found themselves in a narrow, gaudily-lighted region where they saw a lordly transfer-distributor, a profound scholar in Chicago streets. He informed them that the minister's street lay far back along the path they had come; they should have taken a car in the opposite direction, transferred at some remote center, descended at some unheard-of street, walked three blocks one way and four another, and there they would have been.

Mallory looked at his watch, and Marjorie's hopes dropped like a wrecked aeroplane, for he grimly asked how long it would take them to reach the railroad station.

"Well, you'd ought to make it in forty minutes," the transfer agent said—and added, cynically, "if the car makes schedule."

"Good Lord, the train starts in twenty minutes!"

"Well, I tell you—take this here green car to Wexford Avenoo—there's usually a taxicab or two standin' there."

"Thank you. Hop on, Marjorie."

Marjorie hopped on, and they sat down, Mallory with eyes and thoughts on nothing but the watch he kept in his hand.

During this tense journey the girl perfected her soul for graceful martyrdom.

"I'll go to the train with you, Harry, and then you can send me home in a taxicab."

Her nether lip trembled and her eyes were filmed, but they were brave, and her voice was so tender that it wooed his mind from his watch. He gazed at her, and found her so dear, so devoted and so pitifully exquisite, that he was almost overcome by an impulse to gather her into his arms there and then, indifferent to the immediate passengers or to his far-off military superiors. An hour ago they were young lovers in all the lilt and thrill of elopement. She had clung to him in the gloaming of their taxicab, as it sped like a genie at their whim to the place where the minister would unite their hands and raise his own in blessing. Thence the new husband would have carried the new wife away, his very own, soul and body, duty and beauty. Then, ah, then in their minds the future was an unwaning honeymoon, the journey across the continent a stroll along a lover's lane, the Pacific ocean a garden lake, and the Philippines a chain of Fortunate Isles decreed especially for their Eden. And then the taxicab encountered a lamppost. They thought they had merely wrecked a motor car—and lo, they had wrecked a Paradise.

The railroad ceased to be a lover's lane and became a lingering torment; the ocean was a weltering Sahara, and the Philippines a Dry Tortugas of exile.

Mallory realized for the first time what heavy burdens he had taken on with his shoulder straps; what a dismal life of restrictions and hardships an officer's life is bound to be. It was hard to obey the soulless machinery of discipline, to be a brass-buttoned slave. He felt all the hot, quick resentment that turns a faithful soldier into a deserter. But it takes time to evolve a deserter, and Mallory had only twenty minutes. The handcuffs and leg-irons of discipline hobbled him. He was only a little cog in a great clock, and the other wheels were impinging on him and revolving in spite of himself.

In the close-packed seats where they were jostled and stared at, the soldier could not even attempt to explain to his fascinated bride the war of motives in his breast. He could not voice the passionate rebellion her beauty had whipped up in his soul. Perhaps if Romeo and Juliet had been forced to say farewell on a Chicago street car instead of a Veronese balcony, their language would have lacked savor, too.

Perhaps young Mr. Montague and young Miss Capulet, instead of wailing, "No, that is not the lark whose notes do beat the vaulty heaven so high above our heads," would have done no better than Mr. Mallory and Miss Newton. In any case, the best these two could squeeze out was:

"It's just too bad, honey."

"But I guess it can't be helped, dear."

"It's a mean old world, isn't it?"

"Awful!"

And then they must pile out into the street again so lost in woe that they did not know how they were trampled or elbowed. Marjorie's despair was so complete that it paralyzed instinct. She forgot Snoozleums! A thoughtful passenger ran out and tossed the basket into Mallory's arms even as the car moved off.

Fortune relented a moment and they found a taxicab waiting where they had expected to find it. Once more they were cosy in the flying twilight, but their grief was their only baggage, and the clasp of their hands talked all the talk there was.

Anxiety within anxiety tormented them and they feared another wreck. But as they swooped down upon the station, a kind-faced tower clock beamed the reassurance that they had three minutes to spare.

The taxicab drew up and halted, but they did not get out. They were kissing good-byes, fervidly and numerously, while a grinning station-porter winked at the winking chauffeur.

Marjorie simply could not have done with farewells.

"I'll go to the gate with you," she said.

He told the chauffeur to wait and take the young lady home. The lieutenant looked so honest and the girl so sad that the chauffeur simply touched his cap, though it was not his custom to allow strange fares to vanish into crowded stations, leaving behind nothing more negotiable than instructions to wait.

CHAPTER IV
A MOUSE AND A MOUNTAIN

All the while the foiled elopers were eloping, the San Francisco sleeper was filling up. It had been the receptacle of assorted lots of humanity tumbling into it from all directions, with all sorts of souls, bodies, and destinations.

The porter received each with that expert eye of his. His car was his laboratory. A railroad journey is a sort of test-tube of character; strange elements meet under strange conditions and make strange combinations. The porter could never foresee the ingredients of any trip, nor their actions and reactions.

He had no sooner established Mr. Wedgewood of London and Mr. Ira Lathrop of Chicago, in comparative repose, than his car was invaded by a woman who flung herself into the first seat. She was flushed with running, and breathing hard, but she managed one gasp of relief:

"Thank goodness, I made it in time."

The mere sound of a woman's voice in the seat back of him was enough to disperse Ira Lathrop. With not so much as a glance backward to see what manner of woman it might be, he jammed his contract into his pocket, seized his newspapers and retreated to the farthest end of the car, jouncing down into berth number one, like a sullen snapping turtle.

Miss Anne Gattle's modest and homely valise had been brought aboard by a leisurely station usher, who set it down and waited with a speaking palm outstretched. She had her tickets in her hand, but transferred them to her teeth while she searched for money in a handbag old fashioned enough to be called a reticule.

The usher closed his fist on the pittance she dropped into it and departed without comment. The porter advanced on her with a demand for "Tickets, please."

She began to ransack her reticule with flurried haste, taking out of it a small purse, opening that, closing it, putting it back, taking it out, searching the reticule through, turning out a handkerchief, a few hairpins, a few trunk keys, a baggage check, a bottle of salts, a card or two and numerous other maidenly articles, restoring them to place, looking in the purse again, restoring that, closing the reticule, setting it down, shaking out a book she carried, opening her old valise, going through certain white things blushingly, closing it again, shaking her skirts, and shaking her head in bewilderment.

She was about to open the reticule again, when the porter exclaimed:

"I see it! Don't look no mo'. I see it!"

When she cast up her eyes in despair, her hatbrim had been elevated enough to disclose the whereabouts of the tickets. With a murmured apology, he removed them from her teeth and held them under the light. After a time he said:

"As neah as I can make out from the—the undigested po'tion of this ticket, yo' numba is six."

"That's it—six!"

"That's right up this way."

"Let me sit here till I get my breath," she pleaded, "I ran so hard to catch the train."

"Well, you caught it good and strong."

"I'm so glad. How soon do we start?"

"In about half a houah."

"Really? Well, better half an hour too soon than half a minute too late." She said it with such a copy-book primness that the porter set her down as a school-teacher. It was not a bad guess. She was a missionary. With a pupil-like shyness he volunteered:

"Yo' berth is all ready whenever you wishes to go to baid." He caught her swift blush and amended it to—"to retiah."

"Retire?—before all the car?" said Miss Anne Gattle, with prim timidity. "No, thank you! I intend to sit up till everybody else has retired."

The porter retired. Miss Gattle took out a bit of more or less useful fancy stitching and set to work like another Dorcas. Her needle had not dived in and emerged many times before she was holding it up as a weapon of defense against a sudden human mountain that threatened to crush her.

A vague round face, huge and red as a rising moon, dawned before her eyes and from it came an uncertain voice:

"Esscuzhe me, mad'm, no 'fensh intended."

The words and the breath that carried them gave the startled spinster an instant proof that her vis-à-vis did not share her Prohibition principles or practices. She regarded the elephant with mouselike terror, and the elephant regarded the mouse with elephantine fright, then he removed himself from her landscape as quickly as he could and lurched along the aisle, calling out merrily to the porter:

"Chauffeur! chauffeur! don't go so fasht 'round these corners."

He collided with a small train-boy singing his nasal lay, but it was the behemoth and not the train-boy that collapsed into a seat, sprawling as helplessly as a mammoth oyster on a table-cloth.

The porter rushed to his aid and hoisted him to his feet with an uneasy sense of impending trouble. He felt as if someone had left a monstrous baby on his doorstep, but all he said was:

"Tickets, please."

There ensued a long search, fat, flabby hands flopping and fumbling from pocket to pocket. Once more the porter was the discoverer.

"I see it. Don't look no mo'. Here it is—up in yo' hatband." He lifted it out and chuckled. "Had it right next his brains and couldn't rememba!" He took up the appropriately huge luggage of the bibulous wanderer and led him to the other end of the aisle.

"Numba two is yours, sah. Right heah—all nice and cosy, and already made up."

The big man looked through the curtains into the cabined confinement, and groaned:

"That! Haven't you got a man's size berth?"

"Sorry, sah. That's as big a bunk as they is on the train."

"Have I got to be locked up in that pigeon-hole for—for how many days is it to Reno?"

"Reno?" The porter greeted that meaningful name with a smile. "We're doo in Reno the—the—the mawnin' of the fo'th day, sah. Yassah." He put the baggage down and started away, but the sad fat man seized his hand, with great emotion:

"Don't leave me all alone in there, porter, for I'm a broken-hearted man."

"Is that so? Too bad, sah."

"Were you ever a broken-hearted man, porter?"

"Always, sah."

"Did you ever put your trust in a false-hearted woman?"

"Often, sah."

"Was she ever true to you, porter?"

"Never, sah."

"Porter, we are partners in mis-sis-ery."

And he wrung the rough, black hand with a solemnity that embarrassed the porter almost as much as it would have embarrassed the passenger himself if he could have understood what he was doing. The porter disengaged himself with a patient but hasty:

"I'm afraid you'll have to 'scuse me. I got to he'p the other passengers on bode."

"Don't let me keep you from your duty. Duty is the—the——" But he could not remember what duty was, and he would have dropped off to sleep, if he had not been startled by a familiar voice which the porter had luckily escaped.

"Pawtah! Pawtah! Can't you raise this light—or rather can't you lower it? Pawtah! This light is so infernally dim I can't read."

To the Englishman's intense amazement his call brought to him not the porter, but a rising moon with the profound query:

"Whass a li'l thing like dim light, when the light of your life has gone out?"

"I beg your pardon?"

Without further invitation, the mammoth descended on the Englishman's territory.

"I'm a broken-hearted man, Mr.—Mr.—I didn't get your name."

"Er—ah—I dare say."

"Thanks, I will sit down." He lifted a great carry-all and airily tossed it into the aisle, set the Gladstone on the lap of the infuriated Englishman, and squeezed into the seat opposite, making a sad mix-up of knees.

"My name's Wellington. Ever hear of li'l Jimmie Wellington? That's me."

"Any relation to the Duke?"

"Nagh!"

He no longer interested Mr. Wedgewood. But Mr. Wellington was not aware that he was being snubbed. He went right on getting acquainted:

"Are you married, Mr.—Mr.——?"

"No!"

"My heartfelt congrashlations. Hang on to your luck, my boy. Don't let any female take it away from you." He slapped the Englishman on the elbow amiably, and his prisoner was too stifled with wrath to emit more than one feeble "Pawtah!"

Mr. Wellington mused on aloud: "Oh, if I had only remained shingle. But she was so beautiful and she swore to love, honor and obey. Mrs. Wellington is a queen among women, mind you, and I have nothing to say against her except that she has the temper of a tarantula." He italicized the word with a light fillip of his left hand along the back of the seat. He did not notice that he filliped the angry head of Mr. Ira Lathrop in the next seat. He went on with his portrait of his wife. "She has the 'stravaganza of a sultana"—another fillip for Mr. Lathrop—"the zhealousy of a cobra, the flirtatiousness of a humming bird." Mr. Lathrop was glaring round like a man-eating tiger, but Wellington talked on. "She drinks, swears, and smokes cigars, otherwise she's fine—a queen among women."

Neither this amazing vision of womankind, nor this beautiful example of longing for confession and sympathy awakened a response in the Englishman's frozen bosom. His only action was another violent effort to disengage his cramped knees from the knees of his tormentor; his only comment a vain and weakening cry for help, "Pawtah! Pawtah!"

Wellington's bleary, teary eyes were lighted with triumph. "Finally I saw I couldn't stand it any longer so I bought a tic-hic-et to Reno. I 'stablish a residensh in six monfths—get a divorce—no shcandal. Even m'own wife won't know anything about it."

The Englishman was almost attracted by this astounding picture of the divorce laws in America. It sounded so barbarically quaint that he leaned forward to hear more, but Mr. Wellington's hand, like a mischievous runaway, had wandered back into the shaggy locks atop of Mr. Lathrop. His right hand did not let his left know what it was doing, but proceeded quite independently to grip as much of Lathrop's hair as it would hold.

Then as Mr. Wellington shook with joy at the prospect of "Dear old Reno!" he began unconsciously to draw Ira Lathrop's head after his hair across the seat. The pain of it shot the tears into Lathrop's eyes, and as he writhed and twisted he was too full of profanity to get any one word out.

When he managed to wrench his skull free, he was ready to murder his tormentor. But as soon as he confronted the doddering and blinking toper, he was helpless. Drunken men have always been treated with great tenderness in America, and when Wellington, seeing Lathrop's white hair, exclaimed with rapture: "Why, hello, Pop! here's Pop!" the most that Lathrop could do was to tear loose those fat, groping hands, slap them like a school teacher, and push the man away.

But that one shove upset Mr. Wellington and sent him toppling down upon the pit of the Englishman's stomach.

For Wedgewood, it was suddenly as if all the air had been removed from the world. He gulped like a fish drowning for lack of water. He was a long while getting breath enough for words, but his first words were wild demands that Mr. Wellington remove himself forthwith.

Wellington accepted the banishment with the sorrowful eyes of a dying deer, and tottered away wagging his fat head and wailing:

"I'm a broken-hearted man, and nobody gives a ——." At this point he caromed over into Ira Lathrop's berth and was welcomed with a savage roar:

"What the devil's the matter with you?"

"I'm a broken-hearted man, that's all."

"Oh, is that all," Lathrop snapped, vanishing behind his newspaper. The desperately melancholy seeker for a word of human kindness bleared at the blurred newspaper wall a while, then waded into a new attempt at acquaintance. Laying his hand on Lathrop's knee, he stammered: "Esscuzhe me, Mr.—Mr.——"

From behind the newspaper came a stingy answer: "Lathrop's my name—if you want to know."

"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Lothrop."

"Lathrop!"

"Lathrop! My name's Wellington. Li'l Jimmie Wellington. Ever hear of me?"

He waited with the genial smile of a famous man; the smile froze at Lathrop's curt, "Don't think so."

He tried again: "Ever hear of well-known Chicago belle, Mrs. Jimmie Wellington?"

"Yes, I've heard of her!" There was an ominous grin in the tone.

Wellington waved his hand with modest pride. "Well, I'm Jimmie."

"Serves you right."

This jolt was so discourteous that Wellington decided to protest: "Mister Latham!"

"Lathrop!"

The name came out with a whip-snap. He tried to echo it, "La-throp!" "I don't like that Throp. That's a kind of a seasick name, isn't it?" Finding the newspaper still intervening between him and his prey, he calmly tore it down the middle and pushed through it like a moon coming through a cloud. "But a man can't change his name by marrying, can he? That's the worst of it. A woman can. Think of a heartless cobra di capello in woman's form wearing my fair name—and wearing it out. Mr. La-throp, did you ever put your trust in a false-hearted woman?"

"Never put my trust in anybody."

"Didn't you ever love a woman?"

"No!"

"Well, then, didn't you ever marry a woman?"

"Not one. I've had the measles and the mumps, but I've never had matrimony."

"Oh, lucky man," beamed Wellington. "Hang on to your luck."

"I intend to," said Lathrop, "I was born single and I like it."

"Oh, how I envy you! You see, Mrs. Wellington—she's a queen among women, mind you—a queen among women, but she has the 'stravagance of a——"

Lathrop had endured all he could endure, even from a privileged character like little Jimmy Wellington. He rose to take refuge in the smoking-room. But the very vigor of this departure only served to help Wellington to his feet, for he seized Lathrop's coat and hung on, through the door, down the little corridor, always explaining:

"Mrs. Wellington is a queen among women, mind you, but I can't stand her temper any longer."

He had hardly squeezed into the smoking-room when the porter and an usher almost invisible under the baggage they carried brought in a new passenger. Her first question was:

"Oh, porter, did a box of flowers, or candy, or anything, come for me?"

"What name would they be in, miss?"

"Mrs. Wellington—Mrs. James Wellington."

CHAPTER V
A QUEEN AMONG WOMEN

Miss Anne Gattle, seated in Mrs. Jimmie Wellington's seat, had not heard Mr. Jimmie Wellington's sketch of his wife. But she needed hardly more than a glance to satisfy herself that she and Mrs. Jimmie were as hopelessly antipathetic as only two polite women can be.

Mrs. Jimmie was accounted something of a snob in Chicago society, but perhaps the missionary was a trifle the snobbisher of the two when they met.

Miss Gattle could overlook a hundred vices in a Zulu queen more easily than a few in a fellow countrywoman. She did not like Mrs. Jimmie, and she was proud of it.

When the porter said, "I'm afraid you got this lady's seat," Miss Gattle shot one glance at the intruder and rose stiffly. "Then I suppose I'll have to——"

"Oh, please don't go, there's plenty of room," Mrs. Wellington insisted, pressing her to remain. This nettled Miss Gattle still more, but she sank back, while the porter piled up expensive traveling-bags and hat boxes till there was hardly a place to sit. But even at that Mrs. Jimmie felt called on to apologize:

"I haven't brought much luggage. How I'll ever live four days with this, I can't imagine. It will be such a relief to get my trunks at Reno."

"Reno?" echoed Miss Gattle. "Do you live there?"

"Well, theoretically, yes."

"I don't understand you."

"I've got to live there to get it."

"To get it? Oh!" A look of sudden and dreadful realization came over the missionary. Mrs. Wellington interpreted it with a smile of gay defiance:

"Do you believe in divorces?"

Anne Gattle stuck to her guns. "I must say I don't. I think a law ought to be passed stopping them."

"So do I," Mrs. Wellington amiably agreed, "and I hope they'll pass just such a law—after I get mine." Then she ventured a little shaft of her own. "You don't believe in divorces. I judge you've never been married."

"Not once!" The spinster drew herself up, but Mrs. Wellington disarmed her with an unexpected bouquet:

"Oh, lucky woman! Don't let any heartless man delude you into taking the fatal step."

Anne Gattle was nothing if not honest. She confessed frankly: "I must say that nobody has made any violent efforts to compel me to. That's why I'm going to China."

"To China!" Mrs. Wellington gasped, hardly believing her ears. "My dear! You don't intend to marry a laundryman?"

"The idea! I'm going as a missionary."

"A missionary? Why leave Chicago?" Mrs. Wellington's eye softened more or less convincingly: "Oh, lovely! How I should dote upon being a missionary. I really think that after I get my divorce I might have a try at it. I had thought of a convent, but being a missionary must be much more exciting." She dismissed the dream with an abrupt shake of the head. "Excuse me, but do you happen to have any matches?"

"Matches! I never carry them!"

"They never have matches in the women's room, and I've used my last one."

Miss Gattle took another reef in her tight lips. "Do you smoke cigarettes?"

Mrs. Wellington's echoed disgust with disgust: "Oh, no, indeed. I loathe them. I have the most dainty little cigars. Did you ever try one?"

Miss Gattle stiffened into one exclamation point: "Cigars! Me!"

Mrs. Jimmie was so well used to being disapproved of that it never disturbed her. She went on as if the face opposite were not alive with horror: "I should think that cigars might be a great consolation to a lady missionary in the long lone hours of—what do missionaries do when they're not missionarying?"

"That depends."

There was something almost spiritual in Mrs. Jimmie's beatific look: "I can't tell you what consolation my cigars have given me in my troubles. Mr. Wellington objected—but then Mr. Wellington objected to nearly everything I did. That's why I am forced to this dreadful step."

"Cigars?"

"Divorces."

"Divorces!"

"Well, this will be only my second—my other was such a nuisance. I got that from Jimmie, too. But it didn't take. Then we made up and remarried. Rather odd, having a second honeymoon with one's first husband. But remarriage didn't succeed any better. Jimmie fell off the water-wagon with an awful splash, and he quite misunderstood my purely platonic interest in Sammy Whitcomb, a nice young fellow with a fool of a wife. Did you ever meet Mrs. Sammy Whitcomb—no? Oh, but you are a lucky woman! Indeed you are! Well, when Jimmie got jealous, I just gave him up entirely. I'm running away to Reno. I sent a note to my husband's club, saying that I had gone to Europe, and he needn't try to find me. Poor fellow, he will. He'll hunt the continent high and low for me, but all the while I'll be in Nevada. Rather good joke on little Jimmie, eh?"

"Excruciating!"

"But now I must go. Now I must go. I've really become quite addicted to them."

"Divorces?"

"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.

CHAPTER VI
A CONSPIRACY IN SATIN

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 at once. "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 laughed and 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—the young 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 to ast 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. They were 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.

CHAPTER VII
THE MASKED MINISTER

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 out as 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, AND I'M GOING TO SMOKE UP"....

"Sally," he said, "I've been traveling through life 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 have taken 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.

CHAPTER VIII
A MIXED PICKLE

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 guaranteed she 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 unpleasant possibilities. "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 the time-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 into space 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.

CHAPTER IX
ALL ABOARD!

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 three years' 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 the back 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 marched into 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 enjoyed the 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.

CHAPTER X
EXCESS BAGGAGE

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 this young 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.

CHAPTER XI
A CHANCE RENCOUNTER

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 other on 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.

CHAPTER XII
THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK

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."

MARJORIE FAIRLY FORCED THE DOG ON HIM....

The porter thought he wanted the dog back, and quickened his pace till he reached the corridor, where Mallory overtook him and asked, in an effort at casual indifference, if he had seen anything of a clergyman on board.

"Ain't seen nothin' that even looks like one," said the porter. Then he hastened ahead to the baggage car with the squirming Snoozleums, while Mallory followed slowly, going from seat to seat and car to car, subjecting all the males to an inspection that rendered some of them indignant, others of them uneasy.

If dear old Doctor Temple could only have known what Mallory was hunting, he would have snatched off the mask, and thrown aside the secular scarlet tie at all costs. But poor Mallory, unable to recognize a clergyman so dyed-in-the-wool as Doctor Temple, sitting in the very next seat—how could he be expected to pick out another in the long and crowded train?

All clergymen look alike when they are in convention assembled, but sprinkled through a crowd they are not so easily distinguished.

In the sleeping car bound for Portland, Mallory picked one man as a clergyman. He had a lean, ascetic face, solemn eyes, and he was talking to his seat-mate in an oratorical manner. Mallory bent down and tapped the man's shoulder.

The effect was surprising. The man jumped as if he were stabbed, and turned a pale, frightened face on Mallory, who murmured:

"Excuse me, do you happen to be a clergyman?"

A look of relief stole over the man's features, followed closely by a scowl of wounded vanity:

"No, damn you, I don't happen to be a parson. I have chosen to be—well, if you had watched the billboards in Chicago during our run, you would not need to ask who I am!"

Mallory mumbled an apology and hurried on, just overhearing his victim's sigh:

"Such is fame!"

He saw two or three other clerical persons in that car, but feared to touch their shoulders. One man in the last seat held him specially, and he hid in the turn of the corridor, in the hope of eavesdropping some clue. This man was bent and scholastic of appearance, and wore heavy spectacles and a heavy beard, which Mallory took for a guaranty that he was not another actor. And he was reading what appeared to be printer's proofs. Mallory felt certain that they were a volume of sermons. He lingered timorously in the environs for some time before the man spoke at all to the dreary-looking woman at his side. Then the stranger spoke. And this is what he said and read:

"I fancy this will make the bigots sit up and take notice, mother: 'If there ever was a person named Moses, it is certain, from the writings ascribed to him, that he disbelieved the Egyptian theory of a life after death, and combated it as a heathenish superstition. The Judaic idea of a future existence was undoubtedly acquired from the Assyrians, during the captivity.'"

He doubtless read much more, but Mallory fled to the next car. There he found a man in a frock coat talking solemnly to another of equal solemnity. The seat next them was unoccupied, and Mallory dropped into it, perking his ears backward for news.

"Was you ever in Moline?" one voice asked.

"Was I?" the other muttered. "Wasn't I run out of there by one of my audiences. I was givin' hypnotic demonstrations, and I had a run-in with one of my 'horses,' and he done me dirt. Right in the midst of one of his cataleptic trances, he got down from the chairs where I had stretched him out and hollered: 'He's a bum faker, gents, and owes me two weeks' pay.' Thank Gawd, there was a back door openin' on a dark alley leadin' to the switch yard. I caught a caboose just as a freight train was pullin' out."

Mallory could hardly get strength to rise and continue his search. On his way forward he met the conductor, crossing a vestibule between cars. A happy thought occurred to Mallory. He said:

"Excuse me, but have you any preachers on board?"

"None so far."

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

"How can you tell?"

"Well, if a grown man offers me a half-fare ticket, I guess that's a pretty good sign, ain't it?"

Mallory guessed that it was, and turned back, hopeless and helpless.

CHAPTER XIII
HOSTILITIES BEGIN

During Mallory's absence, Marjorie had met with a little adventure of her own. Ira Lathrop finished his re-encounter with Anne Gattle shortly after Mallory set out stalking clergymen. In the mingled confusion of finding his one romantic flame still glowing on a vestal altar, and of shocking her with an escape of profanity, he backed away from her presence, and sank into his own berth.

He realized that he was not alone. Somebody was alongside. He turned to find the great tear-sprent eyes of Marjorie staring at him. He rose with a recrudescence of his woman-hating wrath, and dashing up the aisle, found the porter just returning from the baggage car. He seized the black factotum and growled:

"Say, porter, there's a woman in my berth."

The porter chuckled, incredulous:

"Woman in yo' berth!"

"Yes—get her out."

"Yassah," the porter nodded, and advanced on Marjorie with a gentle, "'Scuse me, missus—ye' berth is numba one."

"I don't care," snapped Marjorie, "I won't take it."

"But this un belongs to that gentleman."

"He can have mine—ours—Mr. Mallory's," cried Marjorie, pointing to the white-ribboned tent in the farther end of the car. Then she gripped the arms of the seat, as if defying eviction. The porter stared at her in helpless chagrin. Then he shuffled back and murmured: "I reckon you'd betta put her out."

Lathrop withered the coward with one contemptuous look, and strode down the aisle with a determined grimness. He took his ticket from his pocket as a clinching proof of his title, and thrust it out at Marjorie. She gave it one indifferent glance, and then her eyes and mouth puckered, as if she had munched a green persimmon, and a long low wail like a distant engine-whistle, stole from her lips. Ira Lathrop stared at her in blank wrath, doddered irresolutely, and roared:

"Agh, let her have it!"

The porter smiled triumphantly, and said: "She says you kin have her berth." He pointed at the bridal arbor. Lathrop almost exploded at the idea.

Now he felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned to see Little Jimmie Wellington emerging from his berth with an enormous smile:

"Say, Pop, have you seen lovely rice-trap? Stick around till she flops."

But Lathrop flung away to the smoking room. Little Jimmie turned to the jovial negro:

"Porter, porter."

"I'm right by you."

"What time d'you say we get to Reno?"

"Mawnin' of the fo'th day, sah."

"Well, call me just before we roll in."

And he rolled in. His last words floated down the aisle and met Mrs. Little Jimmie Wellington just returning from the Women's Room, where she had sought nepenthe in more than one of her exquisite little cigars. The familiar voice, familiarly bibulous, smote her ear with amazement. She beckoned the porter to her anxiously.

"Porter! Porter! Do you know the name of the man who just hurried in?"

"No'm," said the porter. "I reckon he's so broken up he ain't got any name left."

"It couldn't be," Mrs. Jimmie mused.

"Things can be sometimes," said the porter.

"You may make up my berth now," said Mrs. Wellington, forgetting that Anne Gattle was still there. Mrs. Wellington hastened to apologize, and begged her to stay, but the spinster wanted to be far away from the disturbing atmosphere of divorce. She was dreaming already with her eyes open, and she sank into number six in a lotus-eater's reverie.

Mrs. Wellington gathered certain things together and took up her handbag, to return to the Women's Room, just as Mrs. Whitcomb came forth from the curtains of her own berth, where she had made certain preliminaries to disrobing, and put on a light, decidedly negligée negligée.

The two women collided in the aisle, whirled on one another, as women do when they jostle, recognized each other with wild stares of amazement, set their teeth, and made a simultaneous dash along the corridor, shoulder wrestling with shoulder. They reached the door marked "Women" at the same instant, and as neither would have dreamed of offering the other a courtesy, they squeezed through together in a Kilkenny jumble.

CHAPTER XIV
THE DORMITORY ON WHEELS

Of all the shocking institutions in human history, the sleeping car is the most shocking—or would be, if we were not so used to it. There can be no doubt that we are the most moral nation on earth, for we admit it ourselves. Perhaps we prove it, too, by the Arcadian prosperity of these two-story hotels on wheels, where miscellaneous travelers dwell in complete promiscuity, and sleep almost side by side, in apartments, or compartments, separated only by a plank and a curtain, and guarded only by one sleepy negro.

After the fashion of the famous country whose inhabitants earned a meagre sustenance by taking in each other's washing, so in Sleeping Carpathia we attain a meagre respectability by everybody's chaperoning everybody else.

So topsy-turvied, indeed, are our notions, once we are aboard a train, that the staterooms alone are regarded with suspicion; we question the motives of those who must have a room to themselves!—a room with a real door! that locks!!

And, now, on this sleeping car, prettily named "Snowdrop," scenes were enacting that would have thrown our great-grandmothers into fits—scenes which, if we found them in France, or Japan, we should view with alarm as almost unmentionable evidence of the moral obliquity of those nations.

But this was our own country—the part of it which admits that it is the best part—the moralest part, the staunch Middle West. This was Illinois. Yet dozens of cars were beholding similar immodesties in chastest Illinois, and all over the map, thousands of people, in hundreds of cars, were permitting total strangers to view preparations which have always, hitherto, been reserved for the most intimate and legalized relations.

The porter was deftly transforming the day-coach into a narrow lane entirely surrounded by portières. Behind most of the portières, fluttering in the lightest breeze, and perilously following the hasty passer-by, homely offices were being enacted. The population of this little town was going to bed. The porter was putting them to sleep as if they were children in a nursery, and he a black mammy.

The frail walls of little sanctums were bulging with the bodies of people disrobing in the aisle, with nothing between them and the beholder's eye but a clinging curtain that explained what it did not reveal. From apertures here and there disembodied feet were protruding and mysterious hands were removing shoes and other things.

Women in risky attire were scooting to one end of the car, and men in shirt sleeves, or less, were hastening to the other.

When Mallory returned to the "Snowdrop," his ear was greeted by the thud of dropping shoes. He found Marjorie being rapidly immured, like Poe's prisoner, in a jail of closing walls.

She was unspeakably ill at ease, and by the irony of custom, the one person on whom she depended for protection was the one person whose contiguity was most alarming—and all for lack of a brief trialogue, with a clergyman, as the tertium quid.

When Mallory's careworn face appeared round the edge of the partition now erected between her and the abode of Doctor and Mrs. Temple, Marjorie shivered anew, and asked with all anxiety:

"Did you find a minister?"

Perhaps the Recording Angel overlooked Mallory's answer: "Not a damn' minister."

When he dropped at Marjorie's side, she edged away from him, pleading: "Oh, what shall we do?"

He answered dismally and ineffectively: "We'll have to go on pretending to be—just friends."

"But everybody thinks we're married."

"That's so!" he admitted, with the imbecility of fatigued hope. They sat a while listening to the porter slipping sheets into place and thumping pillows into cases, a few doors down the street. He would be ready for them at any moment. Something must be done, but what? what?

CHAPTER XV
A PREMATURE DIVORCE

Suddenly Marjorie's heart gave a leap of joy. She was having another idea. "I'll tell you, Harry. We'll pretend to quarrel, and then——"

"And then you can leave me in high dudgeon."

The ruse struck him as a trifle unconvincing. "Don't you think it looks kind of improbable on—on—such an occasion?"

Marjorie blushed, and lowered her eyes and her voice: "Can you suggest anything better?"

"No, but——"

"Then, we'll have to quarrel, darling."

He yielded, for lack of a better idea: "All right, beloved. How shall we begin?"

On close approach, the idea did seem rather impossible to her. "How could I ever quarrel with you, my love?" she cooed.

He gazed at her with a rush of lovely tenderness: "And how could I ever speak crossly to you?"

"We never shall have a harsh word, shall we?" she resolved.

"Never!" he seconded. So that resolution passed the House unanimously.

They held hands in luxury a while, then she began again: "Still, we must pretend. You start it, love."

"No, you start it," he pleaded.

"You ought to," she beamed. "You got me into this mess."

The word slipped out. Mallory started: "Mess! How is it my fault? Good Lord, are you going to begin chucking it up?"

"Well, you must admit, darling," Marjorie urged, "that you've bungled everything pretty badly."

It was so undeniable that he could only groan: "And I suppose I'll hear of this till my dying day, dearest."

Marjorie had a little temper all her own. So she defended it: "If you are so afraid of my temper, love, perhaps you'd better call it all off before it's too late."

"I didn't say anything about your temper, sweetheart," Mallory insisted.

"You did, too, honey. You said I'd chuck this up till your dying day. As if I had such a disposition! You can stay here." She rose to her feet. He pressed her back with a decisive motion, and demanded: "Where are you going?"

"Up in the baggage car with Snoozleums," she sniffled. "He's the only one that doesn't find fault with me."

Mallory was stung to action by this crisis: "Wait," he said. He leaned out and motioned down the alley. "Porter! Wait a moment, darling. Porter!"

The porter arrived with a half-folded blanket in his hands, and his usual, "Yassah!"

Beckoning him closer, Mallory mumbled in a low tone: "Is there an extra berth on this car?"

The porter's eyes seemed to rebuke his ears. "Does you want this upper made up?"

"No—of course not."

"Ex—excuse me, I thought——"

"Don't you dare to think!" Mallory thundered. "Isn't there another lower berth?"

The porter breathed hard, and gave this bridal couple up as a riddle that followed no known rules. He went to find the sleeping car conductor, and returned with the information that the diagram showed nobody assigned to number three.

"Then I'll take number three," said Mallory, poking money at the porter. And still the porter could not understand.

"Now, lemme onderstan' you-all," he stammered. "Does you both move over to numba three, or does yo'—yo' lady remain heah, while jest you preambulates?"

"Just I preambulate, you black hound!" Mallory answered, in a threatening tone. The porter could understand that, at least, and he bristled away with a meek: "Yassah. Numba three is yours, sah."

The troubled features of the baffled porter cleared up as by magic when he arrived at number three, for there he found his tyrant and tormentor, the English invader.

He remembered how indignantly Mr. Wedgewood had refused to show his ticket, how cocksure he was of his number, how he had leased the porter's services as a sort of private nurse, and had paid no advance royalties.

And now he was sprawled and snoring majestically among his many luggages, like a sleeping lion. Revenge tasted good to the humble porter; it tasted like a candied yam smothered in 'possum gravy. He smacked his thick lips over this revenge. With all the insolence of a servant in brief authority, he gloated over his prey, and prodded him awake. Then murmured with hypocritical deference: "Excuse me, but could I see yo' ticket for yo' seat?"

"Certainly not! It's too much trouble," grumbled the half asleeper. "Confound you!"

The porter lured him on: "Is you sho' you got one?"

Wedgewood was wide awake now, and surly as any Englishman before breakfast: "Of cawse I'm shaw. How dare you?"

"Too bad, but I'm 'bleeged to ask you to gimme a peek at it."

"This is an outrage!"

"Yassah, but I just nachelly got to see it."

Wedgewood gathered himself together, and ransacked his many pockets with increasing anger, muttering under his breath. At length he produced the ticket, and thrust it at the porter: "Thah, you idiot, are you convinced now?"

The porter gazed at the billet with ill-concealed triumph. "Yassah. I's convinced," Mr. Wedgewood settled back and closed his eyes. "I's convinced that you is in the wrong berth!"

"Impossible! I won't believe you!" the Englishman raged, getting to his feet in a fury.

"Perhaps you'll believe Mista Ticket," the porter chortled. "He says numba ten, and that's ten across the way and down the road a piece."

"This is outrageous! I decline to move."

"You may decline, but you move just the same," the porter said, reaching out for his various bags and carryalls. "The train moves and you move with it."

Wedgewood stood fast: "You had no right to put me in here in the first place."

The porter disdained to refute this slander. He stumbled down the aisle with the bundles. "It's too bad, it's sutt'nly too bad, but you sholy must come along."

Wedgewood followed, gesticulating violently.

"Here—wait—how dare you! And that berth is made up. I don't want to go to bed now!"

"Mista Ticket says, 'Go to baid!'"

"Of all the disgusting countries! Heah, don't put that thah—heah."

The porter flung his load anywhere, and absolved himself with a curt, "I's got otha passengers to wait on now."

"I shall certainly report you to the company," the Englishman fumed.

"Yassah, I p'sume so."

"Have I got to go to bed now? Really, I——" but the porter was gone, and the irate foreigner crawled under his curtains, muttering: "I shall write a letter to the London Times about this."

To add to his misery, Mrs. Whitcomb came from the Women's Room, and as she passed him, she prodded him with one sharp elbow and twisted the corner of her heel into his little toe. He thrust his head out with his fiercest, "How dare you!" But Mrs. Whitcomb was fresh from a prolonged encounter with Mrs. Wellington, and she flung back a venomous glare that sent the Englishman to cover.

The porter reveled in his victory till he had to dash out to the vestibule to give vent to hilarious yelps of laughter. When he had regained composure, he came back to Mallory, and bent over him to say:

"Yo' berth is empty, sah. Shall I make it up?"

Mallory nodded, and turned to Marjorie, with a sad, "Good night, darling."

The porter rolled his eyes again, and turned away, only to be recalled by Marjorie's voice: "Porter, take this old handbag out of here."

The porter thought of the vanquished Lathrop, exiled to the smoking room, and he answered: "That belongs to the gemman what owns this berth."

"Put it in number one," Marjorie commanded, with a queenly gesture.

The porter obeyed meekly, wondering what would happen next. He had no sooner deposited Lathrop's valise among the incongruous white ribbons, than Marjorie recalled him to say: "And, Porter, you may bring me my own baggage."

"Yo' what—missus?"

"Our handbags, idiot," Mallory explained, peevishly.

"I ain't seen no handbags of you-alls," the porter protested. "You-all didn't have no handbags when you got on this cah."

Mallory jumped as if he had been shot. "Good Lord, I remember! We left 'em in the taxicab!"

The porter cast his hands up, and walked away from the tragedy. Marjorie stared at Mallory in horror.

"We had so little time to catch the train," Mallory stammered. Marjorie leaped to her feet: "I'm going up in the baggage car."

"For the dog?"

"For my trunk."

And now Mallory annihilated her completely, for he gasped: "Our trunks went on the train ahead!"

Marjorie fell back for one moment, then bounded to her feet with shrill commands: "Porter! Porter! I want you to stop this train this minute!"

The porter called back from the depths of a berth: "This train don't stop till to-morrow noon."

Marjorie had strength enough for only one vain protest: "Do you mean to say that I've got to go to San Francisco in this waist—a waist that has seen a whole day in Chicago?"

The best consolation Mallory could offer was companionship in misery. He pushed forward one not too immaculate cuff. "Well, this is the only linen I have."

"Don't speak to me," snapped Marjorie, beating her heels against the floor.

"But, my darling!"

"Go away and leave me. I hate you!"

Mallory rose up, and stumbling down the aisle, plounced into berth number three, an allegory of despair.

About this time, Little Jimmie Wellington, having completed more or less chaotic preparations for sleep, found that he had put on his pyjamas hindside foremost. After vain efforts to whirl round quickly and get at his own back, he put out a frowsy head, and called for help.

"Say, Porter, Porter!"

"I'm still on the train," answered the porter, coming into view.

"You'll have to hook me up."

The porter rendered what aid and correction he could in Wellington's hippopotamine toilet. Wellington was just wide enough awake to discern the undisturbed bridal-chamber. He whined:

"Say, Porter, that rice-trap. Aren't they going to flop the rice-trap?"

The porter shook his head sadly. "Don't look like that floppers a'goin' to flip. That dog-on bridal couple is done divorced a'ready!"

CHAPTER XVI
GOOD NIGHT, ALL!

The car was settling gradually into peace. But there was still some murmur and drowsy energy. Shoes continued to drop, heads to bump against upper berths, the bell to ring now and then, and ring again and again.

The porter paid little heed to it; he was busy making up number five (Ira Lathrop's berth) for Marjorie, who was making what preparations she could for her trousseauless, husbandless, dogless first night out.

Finally the Englishman, who had almost rung the bell dry of electricity, shoved from his berth his indignant and undignified head. Once more the car resounded with the cry of "Pawtah! Pawtah!"

The porter moved up with noticeable deliberation. "Did you ring, sah?"

"Did I ring! Paw-tah, you may draw my tub at eight-thutty in the mawning."

"Draw yo'—what, sah?" the porter gasped.

"My tub."

"Ba-ath tub?"

"Bahth tub."

"Lawdy, man. Is you allowin' to take a ba-ath in the mawnin'?"

"Of course I am."

"Didn't you have one befo' you stahted?"

"How dare you! Of cawse I did."

"Well, that's all you git."

"Do you mean to tell me that there is no tub on this beastly train?" Wedgewood almost fell out of bed with the shock of this news.

"We do not carry tubs—no, sah. There's a lot of tubs in San Francisco, though."

"No tub on this train for four days!" Wedgewood sighed. "But whatever does one do in the meanwhile?"

"One just waits. Yassah, one and all waits."

"It's ghahstly, that's what it is, ghahstly."

"Yassah," said the porter, and mumbled as he walked away, "but the weather is gettin' cooler."

He finished preparing Marjorie's bunk, and was just suggesting that Mallory retreat to the smoking room while number three was made up, when there was a commotion in the corridor, and a man in checked overalls dashed into the car.

His ear was slightly red, and he held at arm's length, as if it were a venomous monster, Snoozleums. And he yelled:

"Say, whose durn dog is this? He bit two men, and he makes so much noise we can't sleep in the baggage car."

Marjorie went flying down the aisle to reclaim her lost lamb in wolf's clothing, and Snoozleums, the returned prodigal, yelped and leaped, and told her all about the indignities he had been subjected to, and his valiant struggle for liberty.

Marjorie, seeing only Snoozleums, stepped into the fatal berth number one, and paid no heed to the dangling ribbons. Mallory, eager to restore himself to her love by loving her dog, crowded closer to her side, making a hypocritical ado over the pup.

Everybody was popping his or her face out to learn the cause of such clamor. Among the bodiless heads suspended along the curtains, like Dyak trophies, appeared the great mask of Little Jimmie Wellington. He had been unable to sleep for mourning the wanton waste of that lovely rice-trap.

When he peered forth, his eyes hardly believed themselves. The elusive bride and groom were actually in the trap—the hen pheasant and the chanticleer. But the net did not fall. He waited to see them sit down, and spring the infernal machine. But they would not sit.

In fact, Marjorie was muttering to Harry—tenderly, now, since he had won her back by his efforts to console Snoozleums—she was muttering tenderly:

"We must not be seen together, honey. Go away, I'll see you in the morning."

And Mallory was saying with bitterest resignation: "Good night—my friend."

And they were shaking hands! This incredible bridal couple was shaking hands with itself—disintegrating! Then Wellington determined to do at least his duty by the sacred rites.

The gaping passengers saw what was probably the largest pair of pyjamas in Chicago. They saw Little Jimmie, smothering back his giggles like a schoolboy, tiptoe from his berth, enter the next berth, brushing the porter aside, climb on the seat, and clutch the ribbon that pulled the stopper from the trap.

Down upon the unsuspecting elopers came this miraculous cloudburst of ironical rice, and with it came Little Jimmie Wellington, who lost what little balance he had, and catapulted into their midst like the offspring of an iceberg.

It was at this moment that Mrs. Wellington, hearing the loud cries of the panic-stricken Marjorie, rushed from the Women's Room, absent-mindedly combing a totally detached section of her hair. She recognized familiar pyjamas waving in air, and with one faint gasp: "Jimmie! on this train!" she swooned away. She would have fallen, but seeing that no one paid any attention to her, she recovered consciousness on her own hook, and vanished into her berth, to meditate on the whys and wherefores of her husband's presence in this car.

DOWN UPON THE UNSUSPECTING ELOPERS CAME THIS MIRACULOUS CLOUDBURST OF IRONICAL RICE....

Dr. Temple in a nightgown and trousers, Roger Ashton in a collarless estate, and the porter, managed to extricate Mr. Wellington from his plight, and stow him away, though it was like putting a whale to bed.

Mallory, seeing that Marjorie had fled, vented his wild rage against fate in general, and rice traps in particular, by tearing the bridal bungalow to pieces, and then he stalked into the smoking room, where Ira Lathrop, homeless and dispossessed, was sound asleep, with his feet in the chair.

He was dreaming that he was a boy in Brattleboro, the worst boy in Brattleboro, trying to get up the courage to spark pretty Anne Gattle, and throwing rocks at the best boy in town, Charlie Selby, who was always at her side. The porter woke Ira, an hour later, and escorted him to the late bridal section.

Marjorie had fled with her dog, as soon as she could grope her way through the deluge of rice. She hopped into her berth, and spent an hour trying to clear her hair of the multitudinous grains. And as for Snoozleums, his thick wool was so be-riced that for two days, whenever he shook himself, he snew.

Eventually, the car quieted, and nothing was heard but the rumble and click of the wheels on the rails, the creak of timbers, and the frog-like chorus of a few well-trained snorers. As the porter was turning down the last of the lights, a rumpled pate was thrust from the stateroom, and the luscious-eyed man whispered:

"Porter, what time did you say we crossed the Iowa State line?"

"Two fifty-five A.M."

From within the stateroom came a deep sigh, then with a dismal groan: "Call me at two fifty-five A.M.," the door was closed.

Poor Mallory, pyjamaless and night-shirtless, lay propped up on his pillows, staring out of the window at the swiftly shifting night scene. The State of Illinois was being pulled out from under the train like a dark rug.

Farmhouses gleamed or dreamed lampless. The moonlight rippled on endless seas of wheat and Indian corn. Little towns slid up and away. Large towns rolled forward, and were left behind. Ponds, marshes, brooks, pastures, thickets and great gloomy groves flowed past as on a river. But the same stars and the moon seemed to accompany the train. If the flying witness had been less heavy of heart, he would have found the reeling scene full of grace and night beauty. But he could not see any charm in all the world, except his tantalizing other self, from whom a great chasm seemed to divide him, though she was only two windows away.

He had not yet fallen asleep, and he was still pondering how to attain his unmarried, unmarriable bride, when the train rolled out in air above a great wide river, very noble under the stars. He knew it for the Mississippi. He heard a faint knocking on a door at the other end of the car. He heard sounds as of kisses, and then somebody tiptoed along the aisle stealthily. He did not know that another bridegroom was being separated from his bride because they were too much married.

Somewhere in Iowa he fell asleep.

CHAPTER XVII
LAST CALL FOR BREAKFAST

It was still Iowa when Mallory awoke. Into his last moments of heavy sleep intruded a voice like a town-crier's voice, crying:

"Lass call for breakfuss in the Rining Rar," and then, again louder, "Lass call for breakfuss in Rinin-rar," and, finally and faintly, "Lasscall breakfuss ri'rar."

Mallory pushed up his window shade. The day was broad on rolling prairies like billows established in the green soil. He peeked through his curtains. Most of the other passengers were up and about, their beds hidden and beddings stowed away behind the bellying veneer of the upperworks of the car. All the berths were made up except his own and number two, in the corner, where Little Jimmie Wellington's nose still played a bagpipe monody, and one other berth, which he recognized as Marjorie's.

His belated sleep and hers had spared them both the stares and laughing chatter of the passengers. But this bridal couple's two berths, standing like towers among the seats had provided conversation for everybody, had already united the casual group of strangers into an organized gossip-bee.

Mallory got into his shoes and as much of his clothes as was necessary for the dash to the washroom, and took on his arm the rest of his wardrobe. Just as he issued from his lonely chamber, Marjorie appeared from hers, much disheveled and heavy-eyed. The bride and groom exchanged glances of mutual terror, and hurried in opposite directions.

The spickest and spannest of lieutenants soon realized that he was reduced to wearing yesterday's linen as well as yesterday's beard. This was intolerable. A brave man can endure heartbreaks, loss of love, honor and place, but a neat man cannot abide the traces of time in his toilet. Lieutenant Mallory had seen rough service in camp and on long hikes, when he gloried in mud and disorder, and he was to see campaigns in the Philippines, when he should not take off his shoes or his uniform for three days at a time. But that was the field, and this car was a drawing room.

In this crisis in his affairs, Little Jimmie Wellington waddled into the men's room, floundering about with every lurch of the train, like a cannon loose in the hold of a ship. He fumbled with the handles on a basin, and made a crazy toilet, trying to find some abatement of his fever by filling a glass at the ice-water tank and emptying it over his head.

These drastic measures restored him to some sort of coherency, and Mallory appealed to him for help in the matter of linen. Wellington effusively offered him everything he had, and Mallory selected from his store half a dozen collars, any one of which would have gone round his neck nearly twice.

Wellington also proffered his safety razor, and made him a present of a virgin wafer of steel for his very own.

With this assistance, Mallory was enabled to make himself fairly presentable. When he returned to his seat, the three curtained rooms had been whisked away by the porter. There was no place now to hide from the passengers.

He sat down facing the feminine end of the car, watching for Marjorie. The passengers were watching for her, too, hoping to learn what unheard-of incident could have provoked the quarrel that separated a bride and groom at this time, of all times.

To the general bewilderment, when Marjorie appeared, Mallory and she rushed together and clasped hands with an ardor that suggested a desire for even more ardent greeting. The passengers almost sprained their ears to hear how they would make up such a dreadful feud. But all they heard was: "We'll have to hurry, Marjorie, if we want to get any breakfast."

"All right, honey. Come along."

Then the inscrutable couple scurried up the aisle, and disappeared in the corridor, leaving behind them a mighty riddle. They kissed in the corridor of that car, kissed in the vestibule, kissed in the two corridors of the next car, and were caught kissing in the next vestibule by the new conductor.

The dining car conductor, who flattered himself that he knew a bride and groom when he saw them, escorted them grandly to a table for two; and the waiter fluttered about them with extraordinary consideration.

They had a plenty to talk of in prospect and retrospect. They both felt sure that a minister lurked among the cars somewhere, and they ate with a zest to prepare for the ceremony, arguing the best place for it, and quarreling amorously over details. Mallory was for one of the vestibules as the scene of their union, but Marjorie was for the baggage car, till she realized that Snoozleums might be unwilling to attend. Then she swung round to the vestibule, but Mallory shifted to the observation platform.

Marjorie had left Snoozleums with Mrs. Temple, who promised to hide him when the new conductor passed through the car, and she reminded Harry to get the waiter to bring them a package of bones for their only "child," so far.

On the way back from the dining car they kissed each other good-bye again at all the trysting places they had sanctified before. The sun was radiant, the world good, and the very train ran with jubilant rejoicing. They could not doubt that a few more hours would see them legally man and wife.

Mallory restored Marjorie to her place in their car, and with smiles of assurance, left her for another parson-hunt through the train. She waited for him in a bridal agitation. He ransacked the train forward in vain, and returned, passing Marjorie with a shake of the head and a dour countenance. He went out to the observation platform, where he stumbled on Ira Lathrop and Anne Gattle, engaged in a conversation of evident intimacy, for they jumped when he opened the door, as if they were guilty of some plot.

Mallory mumbled his usual, "Excuse me," whirled on his heel, and dragged his discouraged steps back through the Observation Room, where various women and a few men of evident unclericality were draped across arm chairs and absorbed in lazy conversation or bobbing their heads over magazines that trembled with the motion of the train.

Mrs. Wellington was busily writing at the desk, but he did not know who she was, and he did not care whom she was writing to. He did not observe the baleful glare of Mrs. Whitcomb, who sat watching Mrs. Wellington, knowing all too well who she was, and suspecting the correspondent—Mrs. Whitcomb was tempted to spell the word with one "r."

Mallory stumbled into the men's portion of the composite car. Here he nodded with a sickly cheer to the sole occupant, Dr. Temple, who was looking less ministerial than ever in an embroidered skull cap. The old rascal was sitting far back on his lumbar vertebræ. One of his hands clasped a long glass filled with a liquid of a hue that resembled something stronger than what it was—mere ginger ale. The other hand toyed with a long black cigar. The smoke curled round the old man's head like the fumes of a sultan's narghilé, and through the wisps his face was one of Oriental luxury.

Mallory's eyes were caught from this picture of beatitude by the entrance, at the other door, of a man who had evidently swung aboard at the most recent stop—for Mallory had not seen him. His gray hair was crowned with a soft black hat, and his spare frame was swathed in a frock coat that had seen better days. His soft gray eyes seemed to search timidly the smoke-clouded atmosphere, and he had a bashful air which Mallory translated as one of diffidence in a place where liquors and cigars were dispensed.

With equal diffidence Mallory advanced, and in a low tone accosted the newcomer cautiously:

"Excuse me—you look like a clergyman."

"The hell you say!"

Mallory pursued the question no further.

CHAPTER XVIII
IN THE COMPOSITE CAR

It was the gentle stranger's turn to miss his guess. He bent over the chair into which Mallory had flopped, and said in a tense, low tone: "You look like a t'oroughbred sport. I'm trying to make up a game of stud poker. Will you join me?"

Mallory shook his heavy head in refusal, and with dull eyes watched the man, whose profession he no longer misunderstood, saunter up to the blissful Doctor from Ypsilanti, and murmur again: