CHAPTER VI

A CONSPIRACY IN SATIN

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 whimpered: "I'm afraid so, Mr. Ashton."

He put down everything to take her other hand, and tuned his voice to condolence: "Why, I thought you and Sam Whitcomb were--"

"Oh, we were until that shameless Mrs. Wellington----"

"Mrs. Wellington? Don't believe I know her."

"I thought everybody had heard of Mrs. Jimmie Wellington."

"Mrs. Jimmie--oh, yes, I've heard of her!" Everybody seemed to have heard of Mrs. Jimmie Wellington.

"What a dance she has led her poor husband!" Mrs. Whitcomb said. "And my poor Sammy fell into her trap, too."

Ashton, zealous comforter, took a wrathful tone: "I always thought your husband was the most unmitigated----" But Mrs. Whitcomb bridled at once. "How dare you criticize Sammy! He's the nicest boy in the world."

Ashton recovered quickly. "That's what I started to say. Will he contest the--divorce?"

"Of course not," she beamed. "The dear fellow would never deny me anything. Sammy offered to get it himself, but I told him he'd better stay in Chicago and stick to business. I shall need such a lot of alimony."

"Too bad he couldn't have come along," Ashton insinuated.

But the irony was wasted, for she sighed: "Yes, I shall miss him terribly. But we feared that if he were with me it might hamper me in getting a divorce on the ground of desertion."

She was trying to look earnest and thoughtful and heartbroken, but the result was hardly plausible, for Mrs. Sammy Whitcomb could not possibly have been really earnest or really thoughtful; and her heart was quite too elastic to break. She proved it instantly, for when she heard behind her the voice of a young man asking her to let him pass, she turned to protest, but seeing that he was a handsome young man, her starch was instantly changed to sugar. And she rewarded his good looks with a smile, as he rewarded hers with another.

Then Ashton intervened like a dog in the manger and dragged her off to her seat, leaving the young man to exclaim:

"Some tamarind, that!"

Another young man behind him growled: "Cut out the tamarinds and get to business. Mallory will be here any minute."

"I hate to think what he'll do to us when he sees what we've done to him."

"Oh, he won't dare to fight in the presence of his little bridey-widey. Do you see the porter in there?"

"Yes, suppose he objects."

"Well, we have the tickets. We'll claim it's our section till Mallory and Mrs. Mallory come."

They moved on into the car, where the porter confronted them. When he saw that they were loaded with bundles of all shapes and sizes, he waved them away with scorn:

"The emigrant sleepa runs only Toosdays and Thuzzdays."

From behind the first mass of packages came a brisk military answer:

"You black hound! About face--forward march! Section number one."

The porter retreated down the aisle, apologizing glibly. "'Scuse me for questionin' you, but you-all's baggage looked kind o' eccentric at first."

The two young men dumped their parcels on the seats and began to unwrap them hastily.

"If Mallory catches us, he'll kill us," said Lieutenant Shaw. Lieutenant Hudson only laughed and drew out a long streamer of white satin ribbon. Its glimmer, and the glimmering eyes of the young man excited Mrs. Whitcomb so much that after a little hesitance she moved forward, followed by the jealous Ashton.

"Oh, what's up?" she ventured. "It looks like something bridal."

"Talk about womanly intuition!" said Lieutenant Hudson, with an ingratiating salaam.

And then they explained to her that their classmate at West Point, being ordered suddenly to the Philippines, had arranged to elope with his beloved Marjorie Newton; had asked them to get the tickets and check the baggage while he stopped at a minister's to "get spliced and hike for Manila by this train."

Having recounted this plan in the full belief that it was even at that moment being carried out successfully, Lieutenant Hudson, with a ghoulish smile, explained:

"Being old friends of the bride and groom, we want to fix their section up in style and make them truly comfortable."

"Delicious!" gushed Mrs. Whitcomb. "But you ought to have some rice and old shoes."

"Here's the rice," said Hudson.

"Here's the old shoes," said Shaw.

"Lovely!" cried Mrs. Whitcomb, but then she grew soberer. "I should think, though, that they--the young couple--would have preferred a stateroom."

"Of course," said Hudson, almost blushing, "but it was taken. This was the best we could do for them."

"That's why we want to make it nice and bridelike," said Shaw. "Perhaps you could help us--a woman's touch----"

"Oh, I'd love to," she glowed, hastening into the section among the young men and the bundles. The unusual stir attracted the porter's suspicions. He came forward with a look of authority:

"'Scuse me, but wha--what's all this?"

"Vanish--get out," said Hudson, poking a coin at him. As he turned to obey, Mrs. Whitcomb checked him with: "Oh, Porter, could you get us a hammer and some nails?"

The porter almost blanched: "Good Lawd, Miss, you ain't allowin' to drive nails in that woodwork, is you?" That woodwork was to him what the altar is to the priest.

But Hudson, resorting to heroic measures, hypnotized him with a two-dollar bill: "Here, take this and see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing." The porter caressed it and chuckled: "I'm blind, deaf and speechless." He turned away, only to come back at once with a timid "'Scuse me!"

"You here yet?" growled Hudson.

Anxiously the porter pleaded: "I just want to ast one question. Is you all fixin' up for a bridal couple?"

"Foolish question, number eight million, forty-three," said Shaw. "Answer, no, we are."

The porter's face glistened like fresh stove polish as he gloated over the prospect. "I tell you, it'll be mahty refreshin' to have a bridal couple on bode! This dog-on old Reno train don't carry nothin' much but divorcees. I'm just nachally hongry for a bridal couple."

"Brile coup-hic-le?" came a voice, like an echo that had somehow become intoxicated in transit. It was Little Jimmie Wellington looking for more sympathy. "Whass zis about brile couple?"

"Why, here's Little Buttercup!" sang out young Hudson, looking at him in amazed amusement.

"Did I un'stan' somebody say you're preparing for a brile coupl'?"

Lieutenant Shaw grinned. "I don't know what you understood, but that's what we're doing."

Immediately Wellington's great face began to churn and work like a big eddy in a river. Suddenly he was weeping. "Excuse these tears, zhentlemen, but I was once--I was once a b-b-bride myself."

"He looks like a whole wedding party," was Ashton's only comment on the copious grief. It was poor Wellington's fate to hunt as vainly for sympathy as Diogenes for honesty. The decorators either ignored him or shunted him aside. They were interested in a strange contrivance of ribbons and a box that Shaw produced.

"That," Hudson explained, "is a little rice trap. We hang that up there and when the bridal couple sit down--biff! a shower of rice all over them. It's bad, eh?"

Everybody agreed that it was a happy thought and even Jimmie Wellington, like a great baby, bounding from tears to laughter on the instant, was chortling: "A rishe trap? That's abslootly splendid--greates' invensh' modern times. I must stick around and see her when she flops." And then he lurched forward like a too-obliging elephant. "Let me help you."

Mrs. Whitcomb, who had now mounted a step ladder and poised herself as gracefully as possible, shrieked with alarm, as she saw Wellington's bulk rolling toward her frail support.

If Hudson and Shaw had not been football veterans at West Point and had not known just what to do when the center rush comes bucking the line, they could never have blocked that flying wedge. But they checked him and impelled him backward through his own curtains into his own berth.

Finding himself on his back, he decided to remain there. And there he remained, oblivious of the carnival preparations going on just outside his canopy.