Excuse Me! Part 48

"Oh, no," Mallory amended, "I mean I haven't had breakfast."

But Kathleen scowled with a jealousy of her own: "You seem to be getting along famously for mere train-acquaintances."

"Oh, that's all we are, and hardly that," Mallory hastened to say with too much truth. "Sit down here a moment, won't you?"

"No, no, I haven't time," she said, and sat down. "Mamma will be waiting for me. You haven't been in to see her yet?"

"No. You see----"

"She cried all night."

"For me?"

"No, for papa. He's such a good traveler--and he had such a good start. She really kept the whole car awake."

"Too bad," Mallory condoled, perfunctorily, then with sudden eagerness, and a trial at indifference: "I see you have that bracelet still."

"Of course, you dear fellow. I wouldn't be parted from it for worlds."

Marjorie gnashed her teeth, but Kathleen could not hear that. She gushed on: "And now we have met again! It looks like Fate, doesn't it?"

"It certainly does," Mallory a.s.sented, bitterly; then again, with zest: "Let me see that old bracelet, will you?"

He tried to lay hold of it, but Kathleen giggled coyly: "It's just an excuse to hold my hand." She swung her arm over the back of the seat coquettishly, and Marjorie made a desperate lunge at it, but missed, since Kathleen, finding that Mallory did not pursue the fugitive hand, brought it back at once and yielded it up:

"There--be careful, someone might look."

Mallory took her by the wrist in a gingerly manner, and said, "So that's the bracelet? Take it off, won't you?"

"Never!--it's wished on," Kathleen protested, sentimentally. "Don't you remember that evening in the moonlight?"

Mallory caught Marjorie's accusing eye and lost his head. He made a ferocious effort to s.n.a.t.c.h the bracelet off. When this onset failed, he had recourse to entreaty: "Just slip it off." Kathleen shook her head tantalizingly. Mallory urged more strenuously: "Please let me see it."

Kathleen shook her head with sophistication: "You'd never give it back. You'd pa.s.s it along to that--train-acquaintance."

"How can you think such a thing?" Mallory demurred, and once more made his appeal: "Please please, slip it off."

"What on earth makes you so anxious?" Kathleen demanded, with sudden suspicion. Mallory was stumped, till an inspiration came to him: "I'd like to--to get you a nicer one. That one isn't good enough for you."

Here was an argument that Kathleen could appreciate. "Oh, how sweet of you, Harry," she gurgled, and had the bracelet down to her knuckles, when a sudden instinct checked her: "When you bring the other, you can have this."

She pushed the circlet back, and Mallory's hopes sank at the gesture.

He grew frantic at being eternally frustrated in his plans. He caught Kathleen's arm and, while his words pleaded, his hands tugged: "Please--please let me take it--for the measure--you know!"

Kathleen read the determination in his fierce eyes, and she struggled furiously: "Why, Richard--Chauncey!--er--Billy! I'm amazed at you! Let go or I'll scream!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "WHY, RICHARD--CHAUNCEY!--ER--BILLY! I'M AMAZED AT YOU!

LET GO, OR I'LL SCREAM!"]

She rose and, twisting her arm from his grasp, confronted him with bewildered anger. Mallory cast toward Marjorie a look of surrender and despair. Marjorie laid her hand on her throat and in pantomime suggested that Mallory should throttle Kathleen, as he had promised.

But Mallory was incapable of further violence; and when Kathleen, with all her coquetry, bent down and murmured: "You are a very naughty boy, but come to breakfast and we'll talk it over," he was so addled that he answered: "Thanks, but I never eat breakfast."

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

DOWN BRAKES!

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 whom our railroad trains are toys, had reached down and laid violent hold on the Trans-American in full career.

Its smooth, swift flight became suddenly such a spasm of jars, s.h.i.+vers and thuds that Mallory cried:

"We're off the track."

He was sent flopping down the aisle like a bolster hurled through the car. He brought up with a sickening slam across the seat into which Marjorie had been jounced back with a breath-taking slam. And then Kathleen came flying backwards and landed in a heap on both of them.

Several of the other pa.s.sengers were just returning from breakfast and they were shot and scattered all over the car as if a great chain of human beads had burst.

Women screamed, men yelled, and then while they were still struggling against the seats and one another, the train came to a halt.

"Thank G.o.d, we stopped in time!" Mallory gasped, as he tried to disengage himself and Marjorie from Kathleen.

The pa.s.sengers began to regain their courage with their equilibrium.

Little Jimmie Wellington had flown the whole length of the car, clinging to his wife as if she were Francesca da Rimini, and he Paolo, flitting through Inferno. The flight ended at the stateroom door with such a thump that Mrs. Fosd.i.c.k was sure a detective had come for her at last, and with a battering ram.

But when Jimmie got back breath enough to talk, he remembered the train-stopping excitement of the day before and called out:

"Has Mrs. Mallory lost that pup again?"

Everybody laughed uproariously at this. People will laugh at anything or nothing when they have been frightened almost to death and suddenly relieved of anxiety.

Everybody was cracking a joke at Marjorie's expense. Everybody felt a good-natured grudge against her for being such a mystery. The car was ringing with hilarity, when the porter came stumbling in and paused at the door, with eyes all white, hands waving frantically, and lips flapping like flannel, in a vain effort to speak.

The pa.s.sengers stopped laughing at Marjorie, to laugh at the porter.

Ashton sang out:

"What's the matter with you, Porter? Are you trying to crow?"

Everybody roared at this, till the porter finally managed to articulate:

"T-t-t-train rob-rob-robbers!"

Silence shut down as if the whole crowd had been smitten with paralysis. From somewhere outside and ahead came a pop-popping as of firecrackers. Everybody thought, "Revolvers!" The reports were mingled with barbaric yells that turned the marrow in every bone to snow.

These regions are full of historic terror. All along the Nevada route the conductor, the brakemen and old travelers had pointed out scene after scene where the Indians had slaked the thirst of the arid land with white man's blood. Ashton, who had traveled this way many times, had made himself fascinatingly horrifying the evening before and ruined several breakfasts that morning in the dining-car, by regaling the pa.s.sengers with stories of pioneer ordeals, men and women ma.s.sacred in burning wagons, or dragged away to fiendish cruelty and obscene torture, staked out supine on burning wastes with eyelids cut off, bound down within reach of rattlesnakes, subjected to every misery that human deviltry could devise.