Part 2

It soon became evident that the girls belonged to a troupe on their way to Detroit; that they had danced in Kalamazoo but a few hours before, had supped with the drummers, and had boarded the train at 2.50. As their conversation was addressed to the circumambient air, there was no difficulty in my gaining these facts. If my grave and reverend presence acted as a damper on their hilarity, there was no evidence of it in their manner.

"Say, Liz," cried the girl in the pink waist, "did you catch on to the--" Here her head was tucked under the chin of the girl behind her.

"Oh, cut it out, Mame!" answered Liz. "Now, George, you stop!" This with a scream at one of the drummers, whose head had been thrust close to Mame's ear in an attempt to listen.

"Say, girls," broke in another--they were all talking at once--"why, them fellers in the front seat went on awful! I seen Sanders lookin' and--"

"Well, what if he _did_ look? That guy ain't--" etc., etc.

I began to realize now why the other passengers were packed together in the far end of the car. I broke camp and moved down their way.

The train sped on. I busied myself studying the loops and curls of snow that the eddying wind was piling up in the cuts and opens, as they lay glistening under the glow of the lights streaming through the car windows; noting, too, here and there, a fence post standing alone where some curious wind-fluke had scooped clear the drifts.

Soon I began to speculate on the outcome of the trip. I had at best only three hours leeway between 11.30 A.M., the schedule time of arriving in Cleveland, and 2.30 P.M., the hour of my lecture--not much in a storm like this, with every train delayed and the outlook worse every hour.

At Albion the drummers got out, the girls waving their hands at them through the frosted windows. When the jolly party of coryphées regained their seats, their regulation smiles, much to my surprise, had faded. Five minutes later, when I craned my neck to look at them, wondering why their boisterousness had ceased, the three had wrapped themselves up in their night cloaks and were fast asleep. The drummers, no doubt, forgot them as quickly.

The conductor now came along and shook a sleepy man on the seat behind me into consciousness. He had a small leather case with him and looked like a doctor--was, probably; picked up above Battle Creek, no doubt, by a hurry call. He had been catching a nap while he could. Jackson was ten minutes away, so the conductor told the man.

More stumbling down the snow-choked steps and plunging through drifts (it was too early yet for the yard shovellers), and I entered the depot at Jackson--my second stop on the way to Cleveland.

No cry of delight escaped my lips as I pushed open the door. The Middle Ages have it all their own way at Jackson and still do unless the Battle Creek architect has since modernized the building. Nothing longer than a poodle or a six months' old baby could stretch its length on these iron-divided seats. "Move on" must have been the watchword, for nobody sat--not if they could help it. I tried it, spreading the overcoat between two of them, but the iron soon entered my soul, or rather my hip joints, and yet I am not over large. No open wood fire, of course, no easy chairs, no lounge; somebody might pass a few minutes in comfort if there were. There was a sign, I remember, nailed up, reading "No loiterers allowed here," an utterly useless affair, for nobody that I saw _loitered_. They "skedaddled" at once (that's another expressive word, old as it is), and they failed to return until the next train came along. Then they gathered for a moment and again disappeared. No, the station building at Jackson is not an enticing place--not after Battle Creek.

And yet I was not unhappy. I had only an hour to wait--perhaps two--depending on the way the tracks were blocked.

I unlocked the grip. There was nothing left of the P. S.--the policeman had seen to that; and the collar-box was empty--the clerk had had a hand in that--two, if I remember. The proofs were finished and ready to mail, and so I buttoned up my fur coat and went out into the night again in search of the post-box, tramping the platform where the wind had swept it clean. The crisp air and the sting of the snow-flakes felt good to me.

Soon my eye fell on a lump tied up with rope and half-buried in the snow. The up-train from Detroit had thrown out a bundle of the morning edition of the Detroit papers. I lugged it inside the station, brushed off the snow, dragged it to a seat beneath a flaring gas jet, cut the rope with my knife and took out two copies damp with snow. I was in touch with the world once more, whatever happened! I soon forgot the hardness of the seat and only became conscious that someone had entered the room when a voice startled me with:

"Say, Boss!"

I looked up over my paper and saw a boy with his head tied up in an old-fashioned tippet. He was blowing his breath on his fingers, his cheeks like two red apples.

"Well, what is it?"

"How many poipers did ye swipe?"

"Oh, are you the newsboy? Do these belong to you?"

"You bet! How many ye got?"

"Two."

"Ten cents, Boss. Thank ye," and he shouldered the bundle and went out into the night, where a wagon was standing to receive it.

"Level-headed boy," I said to myself. "Be a millionaire if he lives. No back talk, no unnecessary remarks regarding an inexcusable violation of the law--petty larceny if anything. Just a plain business statement, followed by an immediate cash settlement. A most estimable boy."

A road employee now came in, looked at the dull-faced clock on the wall, went out through a door and into a room where a telegraph instrument was clicking away, returned with a piece of chalk and wrote on a black-board:

"No. 31--52 minutes late."

This handwriting on the wall had a Belshazzar-feast effect on me. If I lost the connection at Adrian, what would become of the lecture in Cleveland?

Another man now entered carrying a black carpet-bag--a sleepy man with his hair tousled and who looked as if he had gone to bed in his clothes. He fumbled in his pocket for a key, went straight to the slot machine, unlocked it, disclosing a reduced stock of chewing-gum and chocolate caramels, opened his carpet-bag and filled the machine to the top. This sort of a man works at night, I thought, when few people are about. To uncover the mysteries of a slot machine before a gaping crowd would be as foolish and unprofitable as for a conjurer to show his patrons how he performed his tricks.

I became conscious now, even as I turned the sheets of the journal, that while my flask of P. S. and the contents of my collar-box were admirable in their place, they were not capable of sustaining life, even had both receptacles been full, which they were not. There was evidently nothing to eat in the station, and from what I saw of the outside, no one had yet started a fire; no one had even struck a light.

At this moment a gas jet flashed its glare through a glass door to my right. I had seen this door, but supposed it led to the baggage-room--a fact that did not concern me in the least, for I had checked my red-banded trunk through to Cleveland. I got up and peered in. A stout woman in a hood, with a blanket shawl crossed over her bosom, its ends tied behind her back, was busying herself about a nickel-plated coffee-urn decorating one end of a long counter before which stood a row of high stools--the kind we sat on in school. I tried the knob of the door and walked in.

"Is this the restaurant?"

"What would ye take it for--a morgue?" she snapped out.

"Can I get a cup of coffee?"

"No, ye can't, not till six o'clock. And ye won't git it then if somebody don't turn out to help. Sittin' up all night lally-gaggin' and leavin' a pile o' dirty dishes for me to wash up. Look at 'em!"

"Who's sitting up?" I inquired in a mild voice.

"These '_ladies_'"--this with infinite scorn--"that's doin' waitin' for six dollars a week and what they kin pick up, and it's my opinion they picks up more'n 's good for 'em."

"And they make you do all the work?"

"Well, ye'd think so if ye stayed 'round here."

"Can I help?"

She had been swabbing down the counter as she talked, accentuating every sentence with an extra twist of her arm, the wash-cloth held tight between her fingers. She stopped now and looked me squarely in the face.

"_Help!_ What are _you_ good for?" There was a tone of contempt in her voice.

"Well, I'm handy passing plates and cutting bread and pie. I've nothing to do till the train comes along. Try me a while."

"You don't look like no waiter."

"But I am. I've been waiting on people all my life." I had crawled under the counter now and was standing beside her. "Where will you have this?" and I picked up from a side table a dish of apples and oranges caged in a wire screen. I knew I was lost if I hesitated.

"Lay 'em here," she answered without a word of protest. I was not surprised. The big and boundless West has no place for men ashamed to work with their hands. Only the week before, in Colorado Springs, I had dined at a house where the second son of a noble lord had delivered the family milk that same morning, he being the guest of honor. And then--I was hungry.

The woman watched me put the finishing touches on the dish of fruit, and said in an altered tone, as if her misgivings had been satisfied:

"Now, fill that bucket with water, will ye? The sink's behind ye. I'll start the coffee. And _here!_" and she handed me a key--"after ye fetch the water, unlock the refrigerator and bring me that ham and them baked beans."

Before the "ladies" had arrived--half an hour, in fact, before one of them had put in an appearance--I was seated at a small table covered with a clean cloth (I had set the table) with half a ham, a whole loaf of bread, a pitcher of milk that had been left outside in the snow and was full of lovely ice crystals, a smoking cup of coffee and a smoking pile of griddle cakes which the woman had compounded from the contents of two paper packages, and which she herself had cooked on a gas griddle--and very good cakes they were: total cost, as per schedule, fifty cents.

Breakfast over, I again sought the seclusion of the Torture Chamber. The man with the piece of chalk had been kept busy. No. 31 was now one hour and forty-two minutes late.

When it finally reached Jackson and I boarded it with my grip and overcoat, it looked as if it had run into a glacier somewhere up the road and had half a snowslide still clinging to its length.

Day had broken now, and what light could sift its way through the falling flakes, shone cold and gray into the frost-dimmed windows of the car. I had lost more than two hours of my leeway of three, and the drifts were still level with the hubs of the driving-wheels.

We shunted and puffed and jerked along, waiting on side tracks for freight trains hours behind time and switching out of the way of delayed "Flyers," and finally reached Adrian. (Does anybody know of a Flyer that is on time when but a bare inch of snow covers the track?)

Out of the car again, still lugging my impedimenta.

"Train for Toledo and the East, did you say?" answered the ticket agent. "Yes, No. 32 is due in ten minutes--she's way behind time and so you've just caught her. Your ticket is good, but you can't carry no baggage."

The information came as a distinct shock. No baggage meant no proper habiliments in which to appear before my distinguished and critical audience--the most distinguished and critical which I ever had the good fortune to address--a young ladies' school.

"Why no baggage?"

"'Cause there's nothing but Pullmans, and only express freight carried--it's a news train. Ought to have been here a week ago."

"Can I give up my check and send my trunk by express?"

"Yes. That's the agent over there by the radiator."

One American dollar accomplished it--a silver one; they don't use any other kind of money out West.

When No. 32 hove in sight--the Fast Mail is its proper name--and stopped opposite the small station at Adrian, a blessed, beloved, be-capped, be-buttoned and be-overcoated Pullman porter--an attentive, considerate, alert porter--emerged from it and at a sign from me picked up my overcoat and grip--they now weighed a ton apiece--and with a wave of his hand conducted me into a well-swept, well-ordered Pullman.

"Porter, what's your name?" I inquired. (I always ask a porter his name.)

"Samuel Thomas, sah."

"Sam, is there a berth left?"

"Yes, sah--No. 9 lower."

"Is it in order?"

"Yes, sah--made up for a gem'man at South Bend, but he didn't show up."

"Let me see it."

It was exactly as he had stated; even the upper berth was clewed up.

"Sam!"

"Yes, sah."

"Are you married?"

"Yes, sah."

"Got any children?"

"Yes, sah--two."

"Think a good deal of them?"

"Yes, sah." The darky was evidently at sea now.

"Well, Sam, I'm going to bed and to sleep. If anybody disturbs me until we get within fifteen minutes of Cleveland, your family will never see you alive again. Do you understand, Sam?"

"Yes, sah, I understand." His face was in a broad grin now. "Thank ye, sah. Here's an extra pillow," and he drew the curtains about me.

* * * * * * *

At twenty-five minutes past two, and with five minutes to spare, I stepped on to the platform of the Academy for Young Ladies in Cleveland, properly clothed and in my right mind.

The "weather had permitted."

AN EXTRA BLANKET

Steve was angry.

You could see that from the way he strode up and down the platform of the covered railroad station, talking to himself in staccato explosives, like an automobile getting under way. Steve had lost his sample trunk; and a drummer without his trunk is as helpless as a lone fisherman without bait.

Outside, a snow-storm was working itself up into a blizzard; cuts level with the fences, short curves choked with drifts, flat stretches bare of a flake. Inside, a panting locomotive crawled ahead of two Pullmans and a baggage--a Special from Detroit to Kalamazoo, six hours late, loaded with comic-opera people, their baggage, properties--and Steve's lost trunk.

When the train pulled up opposite to where Steve stood, the engine looked like a snow-plough that had burrowed through a drift.

Steve moved down to the step of the first Pullman, his absorbing eye taking in the train, the fragments of the drift, and the noses of the chorus girls pressed flat against the frosted panes. The conductor was now on the platform, crunching a tissue telegram which the station-master had just handed him. He had stopped for orders and for a wider breathing space, where he could get out into the open and stretch his arms, and become personal and perhaps profane without wounding the feelings of his passengers.

Steve stepped up beside him and showed him an open telegram.

"Yes, your trunk's aboard all right," replied the conductor, "but I couldn't find it in a week. A lot of scenery and ladders and truck all piled in. I am sorry, but I wouldn't----"

"What you 'wouldn't,' my sweet Aleck, don't interest me," exploded Steve. "You get a couple of porters and go through that stuff and find my trunk, or I'll wire the main office that----"

"See here, young feller. Don't get gay. Hit that gourd of yours another crack and maybe you'll knock some sense into it. We're six hours late, ain't we? We got three hours to make Kalamazoo in, ain't we? This show's got to get there on time, or there'll be H to pay and no pitch hot. Now go outside and stand in a door somewheres and let the wind blow through you. I'll wire you in the morning, or you can take the 5.40 and pick your trunk up at Kalamazoo.--Let her go, Johnny"--this to the engine-driver. "All aboard!"

Steve jerked a cigar from his waistcoat pocket, cut off the end, and said, with a bite-in-two-ten-penny-nail expression about his lips:

"Steve, you're 'it.' I'll git that trunk at Kalamazoo."

Then he crossed the platform, made his way to the street entrance, and stepped into the omnibus of the only hotel in the town.

When the swinging sign of the Two-dollar House, blurred in the whirl of the storm, hove in sight, Steve's face was still knotted in wrinkles. He had a customer in this town good for three hundred dozen table cutlery, and but for "this gang of cross-tie steppers," he said to himself, he would.... Here the hind heels of the 'bus hit the curb, cutting short Steve's anathema.

The drummer picked up his grip and made his way to the desk.

"What's the matter, Stevey?" asked Larry, the clerk. "You look sour."

"Sour? I am a green pickle, Larry, that's what I am--a green pickle. Been waiting five hours for my trunk in that oriental palm garden of yours you call a station. It was aboard a Special loaded with chorus girls and props. Conductor wouldn't dump it, and now it's gone on to Kalamazoo and----"

"Oh, but you'll get it all right. All you've got to do, Steve, is to----"

"Get it! Yes, when the daisies are blooming over us. I want it _now_, Larry. Whenever I run up against anything solid it's always one of these fly-by-nights. What do you think of going upstairs in the dark and hauling out a red silk hat and a pair of gilt slippers, instead of a sample card of carvers? Well, that's what a guy did for me last fall down at Logansport. Sent me two burial caskets full of chorus-girl props instead of my trunk. Oh, yes, I'll _get_ it--get it in the neck. Here, send this grip to my room."

The clerk pursed his lips and looked over his key-rack. He knew that he had no room--none that would suit Stephen Dodd--had known it when he saw him entering the door, the snow covering his hat and shoulders, his grip in his hands.

"Going to stay all night with us, Stephen?" Larry asked.

"Sure! What do you think I'm here for? Blowing and snowing outside fit to beat the band. What do you want me to do--bunk in the station?"

"H'm, h'm," muttered the clerk, studying the key-rack and name-board as if they were plans of an enemy's country.

Steve looked up. When a clerk began to say "H'm," Steve knew something was wrong.

"Full?"

"Well, not exactly full, Steve, but--h'm--we've got the 'Joe Gridley Combination' with us overnight, and about everything----"

"Go on--go on--what'd I tell you? Up ag'in these fly-by-nights as usual!" blurted out Steve.

The clerk raised his hand deprecatingly.

"Sorry, old man. Put you on the top floor with some of the troupe--good rooms, of course, but not what I like to give you. Leading lady's got your room, and the manager's got the one you sometimes have over the extension. It'll only be for to-night. They're going away in the morning, and I----"

"Cut it out--cut it out--and forget it," interrupted Steve. "So am I going away in the morning. Got to take the 5.40 and hunt up that trunk. Can't do a thing without it. Only waltzed in here to get something to eat and a bed. Be back later. Put me anywhere. This week's hoodooed, and these show guys are doing it. You want a guardian, Stephen--a gentle, mild-eyed little guardian. That's what you want."

The clerk rang a gong that sounded like a fire-alarm and the porter came in on a run.

"Take Mr. Dodd's grip and show him up to Number 11."

On the way upstairs Steve's quick eye caught the flare of a play-bill tacked to one wall.

"What is it?" he asked of the porter, pointing to the poster--"an 'East Lynne' or a 'Mother's Curse'?"

"No--one o' them mix-ups, I guess. Song and dance stunts. Number 11, did Larry say? There ye are--key's in the lock." And the porter pushed open the door of the room with his foot, dropped Steve's bag on the pine table, turned up the gas--the twilight was coming on--asked if there was "anything more"--found there wasn't--not even a dime--and left Steve in possession.

"'Bout as big as a coffin, and as cold," grumbled Steve, looking around the room. "No steam-heat--one pillow and"--here he punched the bed--"one blanket, and thin at that--the bed hard as a--Well, if this don't take the cake! If this burg don't get a hotel soon I'll cut it out of my territory."

Steve washed his hands; wiped them on a 14x20 towel; hung it flat, that it might dry and be useful in the morning, gave his hair a slick with his comb, scooped up a dozen cigars from a paper box, stuffed them in his outside pocket, relocked his grip, and retraced his steps downstairs.

When he reached the play-bill again he stopped for particulars. Condensed and pruned of inflammatory adjectives, the gay-colored document conveyed the information that the "Joe Gridley Combination" would play for this one night, performance beginning at 8 P.M., sharp. Molly Martin and Jessie Hannibal would dance, Jerry Gobo, the clown, would dislocate the ribs of the audience by his mirth-provoking sallies, and Miss Pearl Rogers of International, etc., etc., would charm them by her up-to-date delineations of genteel society. Then followed a list of the lesser lights, including chorus girls, clog dancers, and acrobats.

The porter was now shaking the red-hot stove with a cast-iron crank the size and shape of a burglar's jimmy, the ashes falling on a square of zinc protecting the uncarpeted floor. Steve recognized the noise, and looking down over the hand-rail called out, pointing to the poster:

"How far's this shebang?"

"'Bout a block."

"That settles it," said Steve to himself in the only contented tone of voice he had used since he entered the hotel. "I'll take this in." And continuing on downstairs, he dropped into a chair, completing the circle around the dispenser of comfort.

The business of the hotel went on. Trains arrived and were met by the lumbering stage, the passengers landing in the snow on the sidewalk--some for supper, one or two for rooms.

Supper was announced by a tight-laced blonde in white muslin, all hips and shoulders, throwing open the dining-room and mounting guard at the entrance, her face illumined by that knock-a-chip-off-my-shoulder expression common to her class.

Instantly, and with a simultaneous scraping of chair legs, the segments of the circle around the stove flung themselves into the narrow passageway.

Soon the racks were spotted with hats, their owners being drawn up in fours around the several tables--Steve one of them--the waiter-ladies serving with a sweetness of smile and elegance of manner found nowhere outside of a royal court, accompanied by a dignity of pose made all the more distinguished by a certain inward scoop of the back and instantaneous outward bulge below the waist line seen only in wax figures flanking a cloak counter.

Steve had a steak, liver and bacon, apple pie, a cup of coffee, and a toothpick--all in ten minutes. Then he resumed his place by the stove, lit a cigar, and kept his eye on the clock.

Three hours later Steve was again in his chair by the stove. He had been to the show and had sat through two hours of the performance. If his expression had savored of vinegar over the loss of his sample trunks, it was now double-proof vitriol!

"Thought you was goin' to the show," grunted the porter between his jerks at the handle; he was again at the stove, the thermometer marking zero outside.

"Been. Regular frost; buncoed out of fifty cents! That show is the limit! A couple of skinny-legged girls doing a clog stunt; a bag of bones in a low-necked dress playing Mrs. Langtry; and a wall-eyed clown that looked like a grave-digger. Rotten--worst I ever saw!"

"Full house?"

"Full of empties. 'Bout fifty people, I guess, counting deadheads--and ME."

Steve accentuated this last word as if his fifty cents had been the only real income of the house.

The outer door now opened, letting in a section of the north pole and a cough.

Steve twisted around in his chair and recognized Jerry Gobo, the clown. His grease paint was gone, but his haggard features and the graveyard hack settled his identity.