The agent gaped, and then, with a gesture of comic feebleness before the spectacle presented by this young lady, he sat down on the edge of the berth labeled, “T. Jump,” and grinned.
“The paint’s nearly dry up here,” urged Miss Mar, as one meeting the only possible objection.
It must be because she was on a “noospaper.” Nothing else could give a woman a nerve like this. Well, it was positively refreshin’! Out of pure gaiety of heart the agent added a little new tobacco to the store already accumulated in his cheek. “’Tain’t a bad idear,” he said. “More’n you’d like to try it on. But it wouldn’t hardly do.”
“Why?”
“Make a nawful rumpus.” As still she seemed not to understand the enormity of her proposal. “’Twouldn’t be fair to let some and not let others.”
She could see that. “But why not let them all?”
“Oh, haw! haw!” The thing was somehow deliciously comic. But a compromise might be possible—“fur a noos—” Luckily the purser happened to be on deck. Hildegarde, to her stark astonishment, heard the agent reply confidentially to some question, “Well, y’ wouldn’t think so, but from one or two things she let drop, I guess she’s one o’ ——’s hustlers, an’ special correspondent fur the ‘New York Herald,’ I guess, an’ Gawd knows what else.” She was forthwith presented to Mr. Brown, and it was arranged that the “noospaper” woman should send her baggage down to the purser’s care, and herself be allowed to come on board a couple of hours before the mob—say at seven o’clock in the evening.
At a quarter before that hour the street near the wharf where the Los Angeles lay was dense with packed humanity. So much time and tact it took to worm one’s way through the mass, that Madeleine, who had come down to see her friend off, began to despair. Already she had been longer away from her invalid than she had meant. Hildegarde urged her to turn back now. Madeleine looked about with anxious eyes. “It’s worse even than I imagined. It’s terrible to leave you here.”