“All right,” he agreed, his voice not wholly steady. “All right, Mamie. Jump into your clothes. Maybe we kin ketch first ninety-eight.”
Neither Jack Welsh nor his wife could ever explain the spirit of desperate haste which suddenly possessed them. Mamie, apparently in a sort of trance, returned to her room and dressed herself deliberately and calmly, but with a wonderful celerity, as surely as she could have done in broad daylight; while Jack, in the semi-darkness, bungled into his clothes somehow, his fingers all thumbs.
Mrs. Welsh, meanwhile, throwing a wrapper around her, hastened downstairs, and when the other two came down five minutes later—Mamie having assisted her father in the last stages of his toilet—she had a cup of hot coffee for each of them, and a lunch done up in a napkin for them to take along. She kissed them both at the front door and stood watching them until they were out of sight. Then she turned slowly back into the house, blew out the lamp in the kitchen, and mounted to her bedroom. But not to sleep. In the cold light of the dawn, she sank on her knees beside the bed and buried her face in her hands.
Jack and Mamie reached the yards just as Bill Grimes, the conductor of first ninety-eight, was raising his hand to give the signal to start. He was charmed to have them as his guests, and hustled them into the caboose, much to the embarrassment of an impressionable young brakeman, who was just changing his shoes. He thought he had never seen anything so lovely as Mamie, and stammered profuse apologies, which Mamie acknowledged with an absent-minded nod. Poor fellow! her thoughts were far away from him.
He cheerfully undertook to climb forward over the long train and to ask the engineer to slow up at the spot where the abandoned train had been discovered, and fifteen minutes later, at some risk to life and limb, he was at the caboose steps to assist Mamie to alight.
As the train gathered speed again, conductor and brakeman shouted back good wishes; then the rumble died away in the distance, and the train disappeared in the morning mist.
“Well, and now what?” asked Jack Welsh, looking down at his daughter.
Something in her face arrested his gaze, a certain strained and fixed expression, as though she were gazing inward instead of outward, as though she were stretching every sense to catch the sound of some inward voice, faint and far-away.
Jack felt a little shiver creep along his spine and up over his scalp, as he noted that fixed gaze.