“Oh, well,” said Peggy, with a mighty yawn and stretching her little locked hands before her lazily, “I’m perfectly happy, and I feel so contented I’m almost—sleepy.”
“Almost—” indignantly laughed Katherine, “I feel free to say that you’re the most perfect imitation of a sleepy head that I ever saw—imitation, I said, Peggy, imitation—” she cried, ducking, for Peggy had reached for her hair to pull it.
“Let’s imitate sleeping heads instead of only sleepy ones then,” suggested Peggy when all her attempts to wreak vengeance upon her room-mate had proved unsuccessful.
“Porter, will you make up our section next?” asked Katherine as that white-coated individual went by. And Peggy stored it away in her mind that when you wanted to address him you called him “Porter.” It was difficult to explain exactly why, but this impressed her as just the highest mark of knowing the proper thing that she had seen yet. Now if she had been forced to ask him the same question she had a feeling that she would have begun with “Say.”
“How shall we sleep—you in the upper, or me, or both of us in the lower so that the upper needn’t be let down at all and then we can have plenty of room to dress in our berths in the morning without bumping our heads.”
Peggy agreed to this last plan as the best, and a few minutes later the two snuggled down into the cold sheets to be lulled almost instantly to sleep by the rhythmic motion of the train and the even sound of its metal click, click on the rails.
“Good-night,” murmured Peggy sleepily just before drifting off into the great shining world of dreams with their marvelous adventures that do not tire but rest and equip the dreamer afresh for the series of real events crowding in with the new day.
“Goo—ood—night—” answered Katherine in an even drawlier tone, but her room-mate was already asleep and did not notice it.
[CHAPTER IX—THE FORTUNE TELLER]
Oh, the glory of waking up in the morning and then before you have time to wonder where you are, seeing the telegraph poles flying by! On a train, on a train, on a train, Peggy’s joyous thought kept time to the sound of the wheels on the rails. After looking interestedly out for a few minutes on a barren sort of white crusted country, level as a prairie and without house or building of any kind, Peggy turned and shook Katherine heartily by the shoulder.