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."