“Honest, pal,” he confided, “you kin search me! I was just goin’ through me clothes fer it when you come out. I was just sayin’ ter meself, ‘Son,’ says I, ‘where in —— is dat ducket?’”
“Ducket, eh!” repeated “Captain” Fallow. There was a pitiless, inquisitorial note in his voice, which the young man construed as ominous.
The young man bit his lip in annoyance. It was borne in upon him that he had made a most unfortunate choice of words. In police glossaries the term “ducket” is defined as thief and hobo vernacular for a railroad-ticket.
“You come up front with me,” suggested the conductor, pushing the youth ahead of him. In the baggage-coach ahead Mr. “Rat” Connors, for it was none other than he, was treated to a very creditable amateur production of the Third Degree. But Mr. Connors had made his one mistake and they wrung from him no further self-incrimination. He was unaccustomed to the ways of travel, he said, because he had to stay at home and work very hard to support a widowed mother and several small brothers and sisters. He had lost his ticket. He had no more money. He was sorry, extremely sorry—but what could he do?
He could get off, the conductor assured him, and to emphasize the suggestion he reached for the cord and signalled to the engineer. Mr. Connors stood supinely near the open door of the baggage-coach while the baggage-man and a brakeman ranged themselves at his back to assist him in alighting.
The train slowed down with a jarring wrench which startled Mr. Copewell out of a halcyon dream into a disturbed sense of being almost too late. Wildly seizing his hat and grip, he made a lunge through the open vestibule door. It was a highly creditable lunge. It carried him from a flat-footed nap out into the darkness in something like two seconds and a quarter.
He was not yet really awake. He acted subconsciously and in obedience to a sense of imperative haste. When he landed, blinking, on the side of the track and saw about him, instead of village lights, only inky silhouettes of the forest primeval, he felt that he had made a mistake. Already the tail-lights were receding. Mr. Copewell rubbed his eyes and inquired of his subjective self whether he were still dreaming. His subjective self said “No.” Thereupon Mr. Copewell sprinted after the tail-lights. Mr. Copewell was going some, but the shriek of the whistle drowned his shouting, and the rear-end lanterns were whisked like runaway comets from before his outstretched hands. He stumbled on a projecting tie—and the train was gone!
The wedding-guest who beat his breast because his journey to the ceremony was interrupted had no valid cause of complaint as compared with this would-be bridgeroom who stood bereft on the cinders.
He dropped limply to the ground and covered his face with his hands. About him stretched the unbroken gloom of singular blackness. Nowhere was the glimmer of a light. Nowhere, it seemed, was a human habitation. Somewhere a girl was rushing on an express train toward a broken tryst! No one would meet her save a woman-hating best man! What could he do? For a time he did nothing but sit stunned in the darkness, a hundred yards from his abandoned baggage.
It was in just such desperate exigencies as this that chagrined warriors of antiquity were wont to fall upon their swords. Unhappily he had no sword upon which to fall. In the midst of crisis and defeat he sat and strove to evolve out of chaos some bright plan by which he, stranded in juxtaposition to the murmuring pines and the hemlocks, might, in the space of a few minutes, transport himself across an unknown distance and be married at Jaffa Junction.