“Yep! You give him sich a thumpin’ last night that I reckon he’s lit out. ’Feared you’d tell of it, and he hain’t the sand to face the laugh that the fellers will give him.”
Starbright also had been at the railway-station, though he had not been observed by Higgins.
“Didn’t know but there mought be an elopement, first off!” grinned Higgins. “Durn purty young woman come trippin’ ‘long at the same time he did, goin’ to take the same train, and he waltzed toward her and offered her his wing, er ruther I thought ’t he was goin’ to offer it to her. But dinged if she seen him at all! Mighty queer, too, for he was big enough. But she didn’t see him—didn’t notice him, when he tuck off his cap and scraped his foot across the floor like a nigger fiddler at a dance, per nuthin’, but jist sashayed right by him ’thout lookin’ at him, and hopped onto the car steps all by her lonesome! Say, ye don’t reckon she done that there fer a blind, and that they was really goin’ away together, do ye?”
Starbright had observed the same performance—had seen Rosalind Thornton come down to the station and cut Dade Morgan dead when he came forward to assist her to the platform of the car.
“No elopement!” said Dick. “I guess she wanted to cut his acquaintance.”
“Well, the manners of this hyer effete East goes ahead of me,” said Higgins. “Out on the ranches when ye want to cut an acquaintance ye do it with a knife. But I reckon I’ll ketch on bimeby. Had a notion hoppin’ on that there train myself, only it was goin’ the wrong way. I’d ‘a’ gone if’t hadn’t been fer Merriwell. Say! I tie to that feller! I never seen another like him. Hyer I come fer a day er two, and I’ve been hyer I don’t know how long, a-stayin’ jist on account of him. If them Yale perfessors would let a feller read their books with a lasso and write with a picket-pin, I’d enter the blamed old college myself, jist to stay with Merriwell. Never seen no sich man on this hyer earth. Treats every feller like a king! And ’t don’t make no difference to him whether a man stepped out of a bandbox er come straight off the ranges. All he asks is that a man shall be a man!”
Dick Starbright was quite as willing, ordinarily, to sing the praises of Frank Merriwell as any one, but just then his thoughts were too much engrossed with the departure of Dade Morgan and Rosalind Thornton from the city. He did not know that Dade was on his way to New London, with scheming brain filled with plans for the carrying out of the wishes of Dion Santenel, but he knew that Rosalind was on her way home after her prolonged visit in New Haven.
He made rather a poor companion for Bill Higgins, as he and the cowboy walked together up the street, almost forgetting Higgins’ chatter while thinking of all that had occurred since Rosalind came to New Haven on a visit to her aunt. He and Rosalind were confessed sweethearts then; now she had gone away, and he had not even said good-by to her.
It had been his intention to at least say “good-by” as she took the train, if a favorable opportunity came, but Morgan had loomed into the foreground at the wrong time, and the words had not been spoken. He had not even gone forward, and he did not believe that Rosalind had observed him as he stood in the crowd at the station.
“It’s just as well, no doubt!” he thought, with a little ache in his big, generous, manly young heart.