Excuse Me! Part 5

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 st.i.tching 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-a-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. Ya.s.sah." 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 embarra.s.sed the porter almost as much as it would have embarra.s.sed the pa.s.senger 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 pa.s.sengers 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:

"Wha.s.s 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!"