Excuse Me!

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...

The other passengers were growing nervous with their own troubles. The next stop was Reno, and in spite of all the wit that is heaped upon the town, it is a solemn place to thos...

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 direct...

As the conductor left the Mallorys to their own devices, it rushed over him anew what sacrilege had been attempted--a fool bride had asked him to stop the Trans-American of all...

All this time Lieutenant Mallory had been thinking as hard as an officer in an ambuscade. His harrowing experiences and incessant defeats of the past days had unnerved him and s...

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...

The observation room was as lonely as a deserted battle-field and Marjorie as doleful as a wounded soldier left behind, and perishing of thirst, when the conductor came back wit...

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. Pe...

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...

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 o...

Mrs. Jimmie Wellington, who had traveled much abroad and learned in England the habit of smoking in the corridors of expensive hotels, had acquired also the habit, as travelers...

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 rec...

And the next morning they were in Wyoming--well toward the center of that State. They had left behind the tame levels and the truly rural towns and they were among foothills and...

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."

There was an air of domestic peace in the observation room, where Mallory and Marjorie had been left to themselves for some time. But the peace was like the ominous hush that pr...

The robber stared across his mask, and wondered, but laughed, and grunted: "Much obliged." Then he went back, and tapped Kathleen on the shoulder. When she turned round, in the...

Wellington's divorce breakfast reminded Ashton of a story. Ashton was one of the great That-Reminds-Me family. Perhaps it was to the credit of the Englishman that he missed the...

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 whimp...

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 passenger...

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...

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 a...

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 e...

Just as Kathleen flung her head in baffled vexation, and Mallory started to slink back to Marjorie, with another defeat, there came an abrupt shock as if that gigantic child to...

Mrs. Sammy Whitcomb had longed for the sweet privilege of squaring matters with Mrs. Jimmie Wellington. Sneers and back-biting, shrugs and shudders of contempt were poor compens...

They were suffering brain-fag from their one topic of conversation, and heart-fag from rapture deferred. Marjorie had pretended to take a nap and Mallory had pretended that he w...

Mallory had fled from the scene at the first hum of the minister's words. His fate was like alkali on his palate. For twelve hundred miles he had ransacked the world for a minis...

Marjorie, as the supposed wife of the rescuing angel, was permitted first search, and the first thing she hunted for was a certain gold bracelet that was none of hers. She found...

The train-butcher, entering the Observation Room, found only a loving couple. He took in at a glance their desire for solitude. A large part of his business was the forcing of w...

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...

Mallory tucked Marjorie under his arm and Marjorie tucked Snoozleums under hers, and they did a Sort of three-legged race down the platform. The porter was pale blue with excite...

Like the best of women and the worst of men, Marjorie was perfectly willing to do evil, that good might come of it. She advanced on the innocent conductor, as the lady from Sore...

The commotion of the matrimony-mad women brought the men trooping in from the smoking room and there was much circumstance of decorating the scene with white satin ribbons, a tr...

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...

Passion sent Mallory into the unequal fight with two armed and desperate outlaws. But reason had planned the way. He had been studying the robber all the time, as if the villain...

"You just grab her!" Marjorie explained. Then they relapsed into attitudes of impatient attention. Kathleen floated in and, seeing Mallory, she greeted him with radiant warmth:...

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 w...

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.

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 cler...

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,...

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 m...

It was late in the forenoon before the train came to the end of its iron furrow across that fertile space between two of the world's greatest rivers, which the Indians called "I...