The old lady again composed herself. The tall man bowed again, resumed his seat and tried to read, but his feelings had been too much ruffled, it was evident, to allow a peaceful resumption of his former mood.
"The idea! The very idea!" he murmured, speaking to the window, against the glass of which the raindrops were now dashing impotently, and as though angry at not being admitted to the warmth and light of the car. For dusk had fallen and the electric lights were aglow in the Pullman, making it a very cosy place in contrast to the damp and muddy country through which the train was rushing.
"Gad! what's the world coming to when a man can't read what he likes without every whippersnapper interrupting him with—Shag! I say, Shag!" he went on, raising his voice from a murmured whisper to a louder command. "Porter, send my man here! Where's that rascal Shag?"
"Yes, sah, Colonel! I'm right yeah! Yeah I is, Colonel!" and a negro, with a picturesque fringe of white, kinky hair, shuffled from the porter's quarters, where he had been enjoying a quiet chat with the black knight of the whisk broom. "What is you' desire, Colonel?"
"I want peace and quiet, Shag! That's what I want! Twice I've tried to read my book undisturbed, and that insufferable train-boy—that rascal who probably doesn't know an ant-fly from a piece of cheese—has bothered me with books and papers. He ought to know I've vowed not to look at a paper for two weeks, and, as for books—"
Colonel Robert Lee Ashley closed his volume, which bore, in gold letters on the front green cover the words: "Walton's Complete Angler," and laughed silently, the wrinkles of his face and around his steel-blue eyes sending the frown scurrying for some unseen trench.
"Shag," asked the colonel, still chuckling, "what do you think that nincompoop had the infernal audacity to offer me in the way of a book?"
"I ain't got no idea, Colonel—not th' leastest in th' world!"
"He offered me a—detective story, Shag!"
"Oh, mah good Lord, Colonel! Not really?"