Excuse Me! Part 21

"The h.e.l.l you say!"

Mallory pursued the question no further.

CHAPTER XVIII

IN THE COMPOSITE CAR

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'm trying to make up a game of stud poker. Will you join me?"

Mallory shook his heavy head in refusal, and with dull eyes watched the man, whose profession he no longer misunderstood, saunter up to the blissful Doctor from Ypsilanti, and murmur again:

"Will you join me?"

"Join you in what, sir?" said Dr. Temple, with alert courtesy.

"A little game."

"I don't mind," the doctor smiled, rising with amiable readiness. "The checkers are in the next room."

"Quit your kiddin'," the stranger coughed. "How about a little freeze-out?"

"Freeze-out?" said Dr. Temple. "It sounds interesting. Is it something like authors?"

The newcomer shot a quick glance at this man, whose innocent air he suspected. But he merely drawled: "Well, you play it with cards."

"Would you mind teaching me the rules?" said the old sport from Ypsilanti.

The gambler was growing suspicious of this too, too childlike innocence. He whined: "Say, what's your little game, eh?" but decided to risk the venture. He sat down at a table, and Dr. Temple, bringing along his gla.s.s, drew up a chair. The gambler took a pack of cards from his pocket, and shuffled them with a snap that startled Dr.

Temple and a dexterity that delighted him.

"Go on, it's beautiful to see," he exclaimed. The gambler set the pack down with the one word "Cut!" but since the old man made no effort to comply, the gambler did not insist. He took up the pack again and ran off five cards to each place with a grace that staggered the doctor.

Mallory was about to intervene for the protection of the guileless physician when the conductor chanced to saunter in.

The gambler, seeing him, s.n.a.t.c.hed Dr. Temple's cards from his hand and slipped the pack into his pocket.

"What's the matter now?" Dr. Temple asked, but the newcomer huskily answered: "Wait a minute. Wait a minute."

The conductor took in the scene at a glance and, stalking up to the table, spoke with the grimness of a sea-captain: "Say, I've got my eye on you. Don't start nothin'."

The stranger stared at him wonderingly and demanded: "Why, what you drivin' at?"

"You know all right," the conductor growled, and then turned on the befuddled old clergyman, "and you, too."

"Me, too?" the preacher gasped.

"Yes, you, too," the conductor repeated, shaking an accusing forefinger under his nose. "Your actions have been suspicious from the beginning. We've all been watching you."

Dr. Temple was so agitated that he nearly let fall his secret. "Why, do you realize that I'm a----"

"Ah, don't start that," sneered the conductor, "I can spot a gambler as far as I can see one. You and your side partner here want to look out, that's all, or I'll drop you at the next tank." Then he walked out, his very shoulder blades uttering threats.

Dr. Temple stared after him, but the gambler stared at Dr. Temple with a mingling of accusation and of homage. "So you're one of us," he said, and seizing the old man's limp hand, shook it heartily: "I got to slip it to you. Your make-up is great. You nearly had me for a come-on. Great!"

And then he sauntered out, leaving the clergyman's head swimming. Dr.

Temple turned to Mallory for explanations, but Mallory only waved him away. He was not quite convinced himself. He was convinced only that whatever else anybody might be, n.o.body apparently desired to be a clergyman in these degenerate days.

The conductor returned and threw into Dr. Temple the glare of two basilisk eyes. The old man put out a beseeching hand and began:

"My good man, you do me a grave injustice."

The conductor snapped back: "You say a word to me and I'll do you worse than that. And if I spot you with a pack of cards in your hand again, I'll tie you to the cow-ketcher."

Then he marched off again. The doctor fell back into a chair, trying to figure it out. Then Ashton and Fosd.i.c.k and little Jimmie Wellington and Wedgewood strolled in and, dropping into chairs, ordered drinks.

Before the doctor could ask anybody to explain, Ashton was launched on a story. His mind was a suitcase full of anecdotes, mostly of the smoking-room order.

Wherever three or four men are gathered together, they rapidly organize a clearing-house of off-color stories. The doctor listened in spite of himself, and in spite of himself he was amused, for stories that would be stupid if they were decent, take on a certain verve and thrill from their very forbiddenness.

The dear old clergyman felt that it would be priggish to take flight, but he could not make the corners of his mouth behave. Strange twitchings of the lips and little steamy escapes of giggle-jets disturbed him. And when Ashton, who was a practiced raconteur, finished a drolatic adventure with the epilogue, "And the next morning they were at Niagara Falls," the old doctor was helpless with laughter. Some superior force, a devil no doubt, fairly shook him with glee.

"Oh, that's bully," he shrieked, "I haven't heard a story like that for ages."

"Why, where have you been, Dr. Temple?" asked Ashton, who could not imagine where a man could have concealed himself from such stories.

But he laughed loudest of all when the doctor answered: "You see, I live in Ypsilanti. They don't tell me stories like that."

"They--who?" said Fosd.i.c.k.

"Why, my pa--my patients," the doctor explained, and laughed so hard that he forgot to feel guilty, laughed so hard that his wife in the next room heard him and giggled to Mrs. Whitcomb:

"Listen to dear Walter. He hasn't laughed like that since he was a--a medical student." Then she buried her face guiltily in a book.

"Wasn't it good?" Dr. Temple demanded, wiping his streaming eyes and nudging the solemn-faced Englishman, who understood his own nation's humor, but had not yet learned the Yankee quirks.

Wedgewood made a hollow effort at laughter and answered: "Extremely--very droll, but what I don't quite get was--why the porter said----" The others drowned him in a roar of laughter, but Ashton was angry. "Why, you blamed fool, that's where the joke came in. Don't you see, the bridegroom said to the bride----" then he lowered his voice and diagrammed the story on his fingers.

Mrs. Temple was still shaking with sympathetic laughter, never dreaming what her husband was laughing at. She turned to Mrs.

Whitcomb, but Mrs. Whitcomb was still glaring at Mrs. Wellington, who was still writing with flying fingers and underscoring every other word.

"Some people seem to think they own the train," Mrs. Whitcomb raged.

"That creature has been at the writing desk an hour. The worst of it is, I'm sure she's writing to _my_ husband."

Mrs. Temple looked shocked, but another peal of laughter came through the part.i.tion between the male and female sections of the car, and she beamed again. Then Mrs. Wellington finished her letter, glanced it over, addressed an envelope, sealed and stamped it with a deliberation that maddened Mrs. Whitcomb. When at last she rose, Mrs. Whitcomb was in the seat almost before Mrs. Wellington was out of it.

Mrs. Wellington paused at another wave of laughter from the men's room. She commented petulantly: