He bowed and felt his way down the corridor.
'I can't, can't I!' Cargan flung after him; then jerked a sheet from the telegraph pad in the rack beside him and wrote: 'Sell out Waldron at noon to-morrow unless 5000 collateral.' 'Something'll drop for you, old boy,' he growled, addressed the telegram to his partner, and gave it to the porter.
Outside, Cargan heard a burst of merry voices and saw Waldron hurried away by two laughing girls to an automobile waiting with a trunk strapped behind it. Mrs. Waldron followed. She was a stiff woman, a little faded, quietly dressed. Her face was troubled, and when they reached the motor, she caught her husband's elbow gently as if to ask him something, but he merely nodded and turned her glance toward Cargan's window. She bowed and smiled very sweetly in his direction, and Cargan smiled sourly in return. Then the children hustled the old folks into the tonneau and they were off, just as the train started.
Cargan felt hardly used. 'A man's got to look out for himself,' he thought angrily. 'Business is business—that's the thing for him to remember. "It's impossible!" Nevertheless, in self-defense he began to calculate what it might have cost to carry the account, until the appalling magnitude of the risk shut off the discussion. 'The darned old self-confident aristocrat!' he murmured, working himself up into a fury. 'Thinks he can bluff me, but he'll find out what's impossible, believe me!' Then he dispelled his irritation by a cocktail and hurried into the diner.
He snored in his berth while the train ran out farther and farther upon the great Kansas plain; slept while signs of culture disappeared one by one, and arose in the midst of an endless, unfamiliar world of grass. When he sat down in the diner for his morning meal, the great wheel of the horizon rimmed round his little train without a notch on the perfect circle; over night the outer world had changed, but he was absorbed in fitting his choices into a sixty-cent breakfast.
The train stopped quickly and firmly, and lay dead upon the prairie.
'Eccentrics or hot-box,' said the man who jumped off the step beside him. 'Nothing much else goes wrong with an engine nowadays. What is it, Bill?'
And the conductor, looking about him to see that no more passengers were within earshot, answered, 'Eccentrics—two hours anyway.'
Cargan flung his cigarette on the ground. 'I'll miss my connection at Hay Junction!' he protested. 'I've gotta be in Hamden this afternoon.'
'Walk then,' said the conductor stolidly. 'It's only ten miles from here straight across.'