“Course she will,” said Caleb, “Otherwise, d’you s’pose I’d waste my time goin’? I wonder how I was ever jollied into promisin’.”
“Conover,” remarked Caine, rising to leave, “You may have spent a long time learning to read men; but what you don’t know about women—and about yourself, for that matter—would fill a Carnegie Library. Goodnight.”
CHAPTER XIX
ON THE TOP OF THE WORLD
Conover woke from a quaint dream of being buried alive in an ill-fitting coffin. And dawning consciousness proved the dream to have been but a mild exaggeration. For he was ensconced in a sleeping car berth. Gray light was peeping through the lowered shade. Much-breathed air, mingled with black dust pressed down upon the Fighter’s lungs. From a nearby section came the fretful whine of a baby. The stiff berth-curtains swished awkwardly inward and out, to the swing of the car.
Caleb performed, with ease born of long practise, that contortionist feat known as “Dressing in the berth.” Then, scrambling out, he lurched down the narrow, dark aisle toward the washroom at the rear. The place was already full of half-clad, red-eyed, touseled men. Some were washing, others painfully scraping lather from their jaws with safety razors; still others ransacking bag or suit case for clean linen. One early bird had completed his toilet and was lounging in a leather-and-wicker chair, trying to translate a pink time table; meanwhile industriously filling the semi-airtight compartment with cigarette smoke.
Conover surveyed his taciturn fellow sufferers; glanced over the too-populous room, from the rack-frieze of neatly triangular folded towels to the ash-and-cuspidor strewn carpet; then he slouched out into the relatively fresh air of the aisle. He looked at his watch. The hour was six-thirty. At seven they were due at Raquette Lake station. The car was last of the train. It occurred to Caleb to take his first glimpse of the Adirondacks. He walked to the rear door and looked out.
Behind him wound the single track of the little spur road. On either side it was lined by dark evergreens that stretched away in an endless vista of monochrome until the silver mist that hung low over everything blotted them from vision. The train seemed to be ploughing its way straight into the untrodden wilderness; to be the first alien that ever had intruded upon the vast mystic solitudes of green and gray.
Caleb looked long and without stirring. Then as the negro porter chanced to come near, the watcher’s pent up volume of emotion found vent in one pregnant sentence:
“Here, you!” he hailed. “I’ll give you a dollar if you can rustle me a cup of hot coffee!”