THE TOWN OF BATTLESBURG FINDS A PRIVATE RAILROAD CAR IN ITS MIDST!
Sleep, blessed sleep! Desperately Wallingford fought it off until the lawyer had arrived and the necessary documents had been signed, and then, more dead than alive, he allowed himself to be bundled into a cab.
"Now, J. Rufus," said Blackie Daw as he jumped in beside him, "we have your affairs all wound up and a red ribbon tied around them, so let's 'tend to Happy Horace. I'm a bridegroom! Congratulate muh."
"Huh?" grunted J. Rufus, and immediately there followed another succession of unintelligible sounds. Wallingford was snoring.
It was precisely twenty-four hours before Mr. Daw could convey this important information to his friend and make him understand it, and it was not until they had arrived in Jersey City that J. Rufus, still dull from his nerve-racking experience, was normal enough to ask:
"Who's the lucky lady?"
"The Star of Morning and the Queen of Night," responded Blackie with vast enthusiasm. "The one best bet of blazing Broadway. The sweetest peach in the orchard of joy. The fairest blossom in Cupid's garden. The—"
"It's a fine description," interrupted Wallingford. "I'd be able to pick her out any place from it; but what was her name before she shortened it?"
"You want to know too quick," complained Blackie. "You ought to have waited till I explained something more about her; but you always were an impatient cuss, and I'll tell you. Her name was and is, upon the bill-boards and in the barber-shop windows, Violet Bonnie, whose exquisite voice and perfect figure—"
"Is she divorced again?" once more interrupted Wallingford.
"Last week," answered Blackie with no abatement of his enthusiasm, "and Happy Horace happened to be on the spot. I was introduced to her over at Shirley's the night she was celebrating the granting of her decree, and I had so much money with me it made my clothes look lumpy. She took an awful shine to that bank roll; not so much the diameter of it but the way I rolled it. It never rested, and by two in the morning she had transferred her affections from the swiftly flowing mezuma to me. At four o'clock G. M. we waded out from among the ocean of empties and, attended by a party so happy they didn't care whether it was day before yesterday or day after to-morrow, we took passage in seaworthy taximeters and floated to the Little Church Around the Corner, where the bright and shining arc light of musical comedy became Mrs. Violet Bonnie Daw. It was a case of love at first sight."
"For how long have you secured a lease?" inquired Wallingford.
"I don't know," replied Blackie reflectively. "She was married the first time for three years, the second for two and the third for one. According to those figures Number Four would have a right to look forward to about six months of married bliss."
"I never was drunk for six months at a time in my life," reflected Wallingford, "but I can see how it could happen. When it's all over, come around to me and I'll lead you to a sanitarium. In the meantime, when am I to have a chance to congratulate the lady?"
"Right away. She is now awaiting yours truly with quite yearning yearns. You know, J. Rufus, your urgent telegram interrupted the howlingest honeymoon that ever turned the main stem into the Great Purple Way. Here's the address. Come over as soon as you have held up the United people, and interrupt us. If you don't find us at home, just go charter a car and roll up and down the avenue until you see the speediest automobile cab outdoors. Chase that, because it's us."
When he called at two o'clock on the following afternoon, however, after having seen Mr. Priestly to their mutual satisfaction, he found them at home just preparing for breakfast, and blinking at the gray world through the mists of a champagne headache. He found Violet Bonnie Daw, seen thus intimately, to be an extremely blond person with a slight tendency toward embonpoint, but her eyes were very blue, and her complexion, even without a make-up, very clear, able even to dominate her charming morning gown of a golden shade that exactly matched her hair. True, if one looked closely there were already traces of coming crow's-feet about the eyes, but one must not look closely; and her very real cordiality made amends for any such slight drawbacks.
"So you're my husband's old pal!" she exclaimed as she shook hands with him warmly. Then she surveyed him from head to foot with an expert appraisement. "You look like a good sport all right," she concluded. "Blackie tells me you just cleaned up a tidy wad of pin money out West, and that you could give Pittsburgh's Best cards and spades on how to spend it. And Blackie's no slouch himself," she rattled on. "My, you ought to have been with us last night."
Blackie grinned dolefully.
"We left a string of long-necked bottles from the Café Boulevard to Churchill's," he stated somberly, but still with quite justifiable pride, "and when we rolled home this morning even the bankers were coming to work."
"It was something fierce," smiled his wife reminiscently, "but I guess we had a good time. Anyhow, it was so hilarious that we can't tell this morning what to take for a pick-me-up."
"That's where I won my first gold medals," boasted Wallingford, chuckling. "What sort of a bar outfit have you?"
"Everything from plain poison to prussic acid," Blackie informed him. "The preceding husband of Mrs. Daw was a swell provider."
"You bet he was," agreed Mrs. Daw as she led the way to the dining room and threw open the cupboard of the sideboard. "Harry was a good sport all right, but his stomach gave out."
The sideboard, given over in most apartments to cut glass and other ordinary dining-room adornments, was in this case stocked with fancy bottles of all shapes and colors and sizes, and in the lower part of it was ice.
"Pardon the bartender, mum," observed J. Rufus, his eyes lighting up with the dawning of creative skill as he removed his coat.
Mrs. Daw watched him musingly through the open door of the dining room as he worked deftly among those bottles and utensils.
"He's a good sport all right," she confided to her present husband, and she was still more of that opinion when Wallingford served three tall, thin glasses with sugared edges, crowned with cracked ice and filled with a golden greenish liquid from which projected two straws. One sip and a sigh of satisfaction from both Mr. and Mrs. Daw, and then they drained the glasses.
"Our hero!" declaimed Mrs. Daw, looking up at him in gratitude. "You have saved our lives. Which will you have, Mr. Wallingford, breakfast or lunch?"
By evening she was calling him Jimmie, and any trifle of disapproving impression that Wallingford had at first harbored was gone. As Blackie claimed, she was born to adorn the night and became more beautiful as dusk fell. Perhaps clothes and consummate art in toilet had something to do with this, but before the three had parted in the morning, Wallingford had decided to introduce his wife after all, a matter about which he had been in considerable doubt. Now, however, he was convinced that the lady was thoroughly respectable. No breath of scandal had ever attached itself to her name. She was always off with the old love before she was on with the new, and could hold up her head in any society!
Mrs. Wallingford came to town the next day, and at no time did she share the enthusiasm of these two men for the incomparable Mrs. Daw. There was a striking contrast between the women, and even their beauty was not only of a strikingly different kind but of a strikingly different nature. Mrs. Daw was a flaming poinsettia, Mrs. Wallingford a rose, and the twain were as antagonistic as were their hues of cheek. Mrs. Daw, however, was more at ease, for she was in her natural environment, the niche to which her nature had fashioned her and of which she had made deliberate choice; but Mrs. Wallingford, in spite of her surroundings, had much in her—though she did not recognize it—of the quantities that would go to make up a Lady Godiva. Her proper sphere, one of calm, pure domesticity, she had never known, though she had vaguely yearned for it; but she was adaptable, and, particularly throughout her married life, she had been thrown with all sorts and conditions of chance nomads such as her husband was likely to pick up; so she accepted Mrs. Daw as a matter of course and got on with her without friction. Nevertheless, her face fell a trifle when her husband joyously announced one afternoon that he had just thought up a great stunt—a honeymoon party for the Daws. He had acted the moment the suggestion had come to him. He had already chartered a private car and had given orders to have it stocked with the very best of everything. He had telephoned the Daws. Mrs. Daw had only the day before signed a contract with a leading dramatic producer, but what was a contract?
The next day, in all the luxury that car builders and fitters had yet been able to devise, they started upon a hilarious tour across the continent; but so far as their mode of life and amusement was concerned they might just as well have stayed on Broadway, for their nights were spent in drinking, their mornings in sleep and their afternoons in sobering up, though in all this Mrs. Wallingford held herself as much reserved and aloof as she could without spoiling the content of the others. They were merely moving a section of the rapid hotel life of New York across the country with them, and the only things which made their hours seem different were the constantly changing scenic environment and the sensation of speed. So long as they were moving swiftly they were satisfied, but a slow rate brought forth howls of discontent. It was on a small connecting line in the middle west that this annoyance reached its climax, and after an hour of exceptionally slow travel Wallingford sent for the conductor and put in a vigorous protest. Yes, there was a faster train on that road. Then why hadn't they been attached to that fast train? The conductor did not know. It was orders.
"You go get different orders!" demanded Wallingford, and for another hour he made life a burden to that official.
Goaded to desperation, wiring at every stop, the conductor finally, with a sigh of relief, saw the polished private car "Theodore" shunted off on the siding at Battlesburg and left behind.
To the quartette of riotous travelers Battlesburg was only an uninteresting detail of their trip, which had intruded itself unbidden upon their sight; but to Battlesburg the arrival of a private car with real people in it was an epoch. Why, it might be the President! Long-legged Billy Ricks, standing idly upon the platform because the dragging hours passed by there as well as anywhere else, did not even wait to take a good look at it, but loped up the one long street, so fired with enthusiasm that he scarcely wobbled as his bony knees switched past each other in their faded blue overalls. He did not bother with people near the depot—they would find out soon enough; but at the little frame office of "Judge" Lampton, Justice of the Peace, Notary Public and Real Estate Dealer, he bobbed his head in for a moment.
"Private car on the sidin'!" he bawled. "Name's 'Theodore'!" and he was gone.
Judge Lampton, smoking a long, ragged stogie, jerked his feet down from among the dust-covered litter of ages upon his combination bookcase-desk. Doc Gunther, veterinary surgeon and proprietor of the livery stable across the way, lifted his head forward from against the dark-brown spot it had made during the past years upon the map of Battlesburg, where it hung upon the wall, and vigorously took a fresh chew of tobacco. Then the two friends, without exchanging one word, stalked solemnly out of the office and toward the depot. In the meantime Billy Ricks had paused to hurl his startling information in at the door of Joe Warren's cigar store, of Ben Kirby's cash grocery, of Tom Handy's Red Front saloon, of the Dogget Brothers' furniture and undertaking establishment, of the Barret & Lucas dry goods and notion store, and of every other place of business on that side of the street, including the Palace Hotel, until he came to Gus Newton's drug store and confectionery, where the real dyed-in-the-wool sports of the town shot dice and played penny-ante in a little back room. Here he met a round half dozen of these high-spirited youths piling out upon the street with their eyes depot-ward.
"Private car on the sidin'!" Billy shouted to them. "Name's 'Theodore'!"
"Uh-huh," agreed Gus Newton, "I ordered it. It's late," and, shouting back further ready mendacity, his crowd hurried on.
Just in front of the Battles County Bank, Billy met Clint Richards, owner and city editor of the Battlesburg Blade. Clint was also reporter, exchange and society editor and advertising solicitor of the Blade, and, as became a literary man, he wore his hair rather long. He was in a hurry, and had his broad-brimmed black felt hat pulled down determinedly upon his head.
"Private car—" began Billy Ricks.
"Yes," interrupted Clint, "I know about it. Thank you," and his coat tails fluttered behind him.
Billy stopped in dejection. The street which, when he started, had been so lazy and deserted, was now alive. People were pouring from all the places of business beyond him and hurrying toward him. Back of him they were all hurrying away from him. He had been outstripped by the telephone, and ungrateful Battlesburg would fail to connect him with the sensation in any way. Well, he might as well go down to the depot himself, and he turned in that direction; but now his feet shuffled.
At the siding, the denizens of Battlesburg—men, women, children and dogs—were packed four deep around the glistening, rolling palace "Theodore." Agitated groups of two and three and four, scattered from the depot platform to the siding, were discussing the occurrence excitedly, and Dave Walker, the station agent, turned suddenly crisp and brusque with importance, was refusing explanations and then relenting in neighborly confidence with each group in turn. Clint Richards, pale but calm and confident, bustled through the quivering throng, and they all but set up a cheer as they recognized the official and only authorized asker of important questions. The vestibule being open, he pulled himself up the steps and tried the door. It was locked.
"Push the button, Clint," advised Gus Newton, who knew a thing or two, you bet! and Clint, with a smile and a nod in his direction, for Gus was an advertiser, rang the bell.
A brisk and clean-looking young negro in a white apron and jacket came to the door and Clint handed in his card. The porter disappeared. A moment later the news gatherer was admitted. A sigh of relief went up from the waiting crowd, and they swayed in unison from side to side as they stood on tiptoe and craned their necks to see farther in through those broad windows.
Through the wicker-furnitured observation library the porter led the way into a rich compartment the full width of the car, where at luncheon sat the honeymoon quartette, rich in gay apparel and brave in sparkling adornment. They had evidently just sat down, for an untouched cocktail stood at each place. The extremely large and impressive Mr. Wallingford, the breadth of whose white waistcoat alone proclaimed him as a man of affairs, arose to greet the representative of the Battlesburg Blade with great cordiality.
"The members of the progressive press are always welcome," he announced, clasping Mr. Richards' hand in a vast, plump palm, and exuding democratic good will from every square inch of his surface. "We're just going to have a bit of luncheon. Join us."
"I wouldn't think of intruding," hesitated Mr. Richards, his eyes leaping with an appreciation of the rare opportunity and his brain already busy framing phrases like "priceless viands," "toothsome delicacies," "epicurean luxuries."
"Nonsense!" insisted Wallingford heartily, and introduced his visitor with much pompous ceremony to Mr. Horace G. Daw, mine dealer and investment specialist; to Mrs. Violet Daw, formerly Violet Bonnie, the famous comic-opera queen, but now the happy bride of a month; to Mrs. Fanny Wallingford; to himself as a recently retired manufacturer and capitalist; then he placed Mr. Richards in a chair with a cocktail in front of him.
Mr. Richards was naturally overwhelmed at this close contact with two of America's leading millionaires, and he agreed with his host that the P. D. S. Railroad was positively the worst-conducted streak of corrugated rust in the entire United States. He was even more indignant than the travelers that, after having been promised a through train, they had been hitched to the local egg accommodation, and was even more satisfied than they that Mr. Wallingford had given the chills and ague to the entire transportation system of the P. D. S. until their car had finally been dropped off here to wait for the 3.45, which was a through train and the one which should have carried them in the first place. Why, Wallingford ought to buy the P. D. S., plow up the right of way and sow it in pumpkins!
"Sir," declared Mr. Richards, "the P. D. S. is a disgrace to the science of railroading! Why, its through trains stop only on signal at this thriving manufacturing center of four thousand souls. From your car windows here you may see the smoke belching forth from the chimneys of the Battlesburg Wagon Works, of the G. W. Battles Plow Factory, of the Battles & Handy Sash, Door and Blind Company, of the Battles & Son Canning Company, of the Battles & Battles Pure Food Creamery and Cheese Concern; and yet the only two through trains of the 'Pretty Darn Slow Railroad,' as we call it here, clink right on through! The Honorable G. W. Battles himself has taken up this matter and can do nothing, and when he can do nothing—"
The utter hopelessness of a situation for which the Honorable G. W. Battles himself could do nothing was so far beyond mere words that Mr. Richards turned from the subject in dejection and inquired about the financial situation back East. He found out all about it, and more. Mr. Daw and Mr. Wallingford, their faculty of invention springing instantly to the opportunity, helped him to fill his notebook to the brim, and turned him loose at last with one final glowing fabrication about the priceless sparkling Burgundy which was served during the seven courses of the little midday morsel. Adorned with a big cigar, from which he did not remove the gold band, Mr. Richards hastened from the car, and to the pressing throng outside he observed, from the midst of an air of easy familiarity with the great ones of earth:
"That's Colonel Wallingford, the famous Eastern millionaire, and he's a prince! You certainly want to see the Blade to-night," and he hurried away to put his splendid sensation into type.