He is just outside Miss Travenion's Pullman car, and now, through a window that is slightly open, comes the voice of his divinity, who is seated at one of the organs those cars sometimes had in those days.
Curiously enough, the girl whom Buck had reported as having the blues last night, is singing the brightest and merriest of ditties this morning.
"By George! It must be because she has plenty to eat," cogitates Lawrence, lighting another cigar on the question.
But a few minutes after, in his own car, Mr. Powers chancing to come along, he gets some information which he thinks elucidates the matter.
"She's kind o' joyous in there, ain't she, Cap?" says Buck, with a grin. "An' I reckon I did it!"
"How?"
"Well, this morning, even over her breakfast, which was a long way ahead of any one else's on the train, she didn't have no appetite, and seemed in the dumps; whereupon, I suggested that I had hinted to you that she'd kind o' like company probably."
"You infernal—!" cries Lawrence, fire coming into his eye.
"If you take hold o' me, Cap, I won't tell you the rest!" remarks the boy, retreating a little before Harry's anger. Then he goes on: "She took it something like you—she got red in the face and said: 'Please don't mention the matter!' quite haughty. Whereupon I thought I'd guessed the p'int, and suggested: 'You an' the Cap must have been havin' a smash-up in California!' And then she got real anxious and nervous, and cried out at me: 'In California!—what do you mean?' So I told her how I'd seen you at Ogden, four or five days after her party left for California, and that I'd told you she'd gone West, and you took the journey, I reckoned, to catch up to her."
"And she—" says Lawrence, eagerly.