Excuse Me! Part 40

"How dare you!" the parson shrieked, and with a sudden wriggle writhed out of his coat, leaving it in Marjorie's hands. He darted to the door and flung it open, with Mallory hot after him.

The train was kicking up a cloud of dust and getting its stride. The kidnapped clergyman paused a moment, aghast at the speed with which the ground was being paid out. Then he climbed the bra.s.s rail and, with a hasty prayer, dropped overboard.

Mallory lunged at him, and seized him by his reversed collar. But the collar alone remained in his clutch. The parson was almost lost in the dust he created as he struck, bounded and rolled till he came to a stop, with his stars and his prayers to thank for injuries to nothing worse than his dignity and other small clothes.

Mallory returned to the observation room and flung the collar and bib to the floor in a fury of despair, howling:

"He got away! He got away!"

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE EMPTY BERTH

The one thing Mallory was beginning to learn about Marjorie was that she would never take the point of view he expected, and never proceed along the lines of his logic.

She had grown furious at him for what he could not help. She had told him that she would marry him out of spite. She had commanded him to pursue and apprehend the flying parson. He failed and returned crestfallen and wondering what new form her rage would take.

And, lo and behold, when she saw him so downcast and helpless, she rushed to him with caresses, cuddled his broad shoulders against her breast, and smothered him. It was the sincerity of his dejection and the complete helplessness he displayed that won her woman's heart.

Mallory gazed at her with almost more wonderment than delight. This was another flashlight on her character. Most courtships are conducted under a rose-light in which wooer and wooed wear their best clothes or their best behavior; or in a starlit, moonlit, or gaslit twilight where romance softens angles and wraps everything in velvet shadow.

Then the two get married and begin to live together in the cold, gray daylight of realism, with undignified necessities and harrowing situations at every step, and disillusion begins its deadly work.

This young couple was undergoing all the inconveniences and temper-exposures of marriage without its blessed compensations. They promised to be well acquainted before they were wed. If they still wanted each other after this ordeal, they were pretty well a.s.sured that their marriage would not be a failure.

Mallory rejoiced to see that the hurricane of Marjorie's jealousy had only whipped up the surface of her soul. The great depths were still calm and unmoved, and her love for him was in and of the depths.

Soon after leaving Ogden, the train entered upon the great bridge across the Great Salt Lake. The other pa.s.sengers were staring at the enormous engineering masterpiece and the conductor was pointing out that, in order to save forty miles and the crossing of two mountain chains, the railroad had devoted four years of labor and millions of dollars to stretching a thirty-mile bridge across this inland ocean.

But Marjorie and Mallory never noticed it. They were absorbed in exploring each other's souls, and they had safely bridged the Great Salt Lake which the first big bitter jealousy spreads across every matrimonial route.

They were undisturbed in their voyage, for all the other pa.s.sengers had their noses flattened against the window panes of the other cars--all except one couple, gazing each at each through time-wrinkled eyelids touched with the magic of a tardy honeymoon.

For all that Anne and Ira knew, the Great Salt Lake was a moon-swept lagoon, and the arid mountains of Nevada which the train went scaling, were the very hillsides of Arcadia.

But the other pa.s.sengers soon came trooping back into the observation room. Ira had told them nothing of Mallory's confession. In the first place, he was a man who had learned to keep a secret, and in the second place, he had forgotten that such persons as Mallory or his Marjorie existed. All the world was summed up in the fearsomely happy little spinster who had moved up into his section--the section which had begun its career draped in satin ribbons unwittingly prophetic.

The communion of Mallory and Marjorie under the benison of reconciliation was invaded by the jokes of the other pa.s.sengers, unconsciously ironic.

Dr. Temple chaffed them amiably: "You two will have to take a back seat now. We've got a new bridal couple to amuse us."

And Mrs. Temple welcomed them with: "You're only old married folks, like us."

The Mallorys were used to the misunderstanding. But the misplaced witticisms gave them rea.s.surance that their secret was safe yet a little while. At their dinner-table, however, and in the long evening that followed they were haunted by the fact that this was their last night on the train, and no minister to be expected.

And now once more the Mallorys regained the star roles in the esteem of the audience, for once more they quarreled at good-night-kissing time. Once more they required two sections, while Anne Gattle's berth was not even made up. It remained empty, like a deserted nest, for its occupant had flown South.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

FRESH TROUBLE DAILY

The following morning the daylight creeping into section number one found Ira and Anne staring at each other. Ira was tousled and Anne was unkempt, but her blush still gave her cheek at least an Indian summer glow.

After a violent effort to reach the s.p.a.ce between her shoulder blades, she was compelled to appeal to her new master to act as her new maid.

"Oh, Mr. Lathrop," she stammered--"Ira," she corrected, "won't you please hook me up?" she pleaded.

Ira beamed with a second childhood boyishness: "I'll do my best, my little ootsum-tootsums, it's the first time I ever tried it."

"Oh, I'm so glad," Anne sighed, "it's the first time I ever was hooked up by a gentleman."

He gurgled with joy and, forgetting the poverty of s.p.a.ce, tried to reach her lips to kiss her. He almost broke her neck and b.u.mped his head so hard that instead of saying, as he intended, "My darling," he said, "Oh, h.e.l.l!"

"Ira!" she gasped. But he, with all the proprietorship he had a.s.sumed, answered cheerily: "You'll have to get used to it, ducky darling. I could never learn not to swear." He proved the fact again and again by the remarks he addressed to certain refractory hooks. He apologized, but she felt more like apologizing for herself.

"Oh, Ira," she said, "I'm so ashamed to have you see me like this--the first morning."

"Well, you haven't got anything on me--I'm not shaved."

"You don't have to tell me that," she said, rubbing her smarting cheek. Then she b.u.mped her head and gasped: "Oh--what you said."

This made them feel so much at home that she attained the heights of frankness and honesty by reaching in her handbag for a k.n.o.b of supplementary hair, which she affixed dextrously to what was homegrown. Ira, instead of looking shocked, loved her for her honesty, and grinned:

"Now, that's where you have got something on me. Say, we're like a couple of sardines trying to make love in a tin can."

"It's cosy though," she said, and then vanished through the curtains and shyly ran the gauntlet of amused glances and over-cordial "Good mornings" till she hid her blushes behind the door of the women's room and turned the key. If she had thought of it she would have said, "G.o.d bless the man that invented doors--and the other angel that invented locks."

The pa.s.sengers this morning were all a little brisker than usual. It was the last day aboard for everybody and they showed a certain extra animation, like the inmates of an ocean liner when land has been sighted.

Ashton was shaving when Ira swaggered into the men's room. Without pausing to note whom he was addressing, Ashton sang out:

"Good morning. Did you rest well?"

"What!" Ira roared.

"Oh, excuse me!" said Ashton, hastily, devoting himself to a gash his safety razor had made in his cheek--even in that cheek of his.

Ira scrubbed out the basin, filled it and tried to dive into it, slapping the cold water in double handfuls over his glowing face and puffing through it like a porpoise.

Meanwhile the heavy-eyed Fosd.i.c.k was slinking through the dining-car, regarded with amazement by Dr. Temple and his wife, who were already up and breakfasting.

"What's the matter with the bridal couples on this train, anyway?"