Our shadow was an alert, dapper young man who wore glasses, and I remembered having seen him, both at the ticket window and in the women's room. Outside of the gates he confirmed my suspicion by trailing us to the steps of the sleeping-car.
Even then I didn't suspect what was going on. While the sleeping-car conductor was examining the tickets and taking the section number I saw the young man with the spectacles making a hurried reconnaissance of the car by walking back and forth beside it and peering curiously in through the lighted windows. Then I missed him for a minute or two until he came running from the gates with a railroad ticket in his hand.
"I'm going to Cheyenne, and I want a berth in this car," he told the Pullman conductor, "They said they couldn't sell me one at the office—that you had the diagram."
The conductor looked over his list. "Nothing doing," he returned. "All sold out."
"That's all right," snapped the young man; "I'll take my chance sitting up." With that, he climbed aboard and disappeared in the car.
All this time we had been waiting for the conductor to return my companion's tickets. When he did so, I helped her up the steps. The air-brakes were sighing the starting signal, and she turned in the lighted vestibule and blew me a kiss.
"Good-by, Bertie, dear," I heard her say. "Be a good boy, and give my love to Little Brown-Eyes." Then, as if to prove the immortal saying that there is no such thing as ultimate total depravity in the human atom, she leaned over to whisper the parting word: "Make good with her if you can, and want to, Bertie: I didn't mean it when I said I'd spoil your chances. Good-night and good-by." And with that the train moved off and she was gone.
I slept late in my room at the hotel the next morning, waking with a vague sense of inexpressible relief, which was quickly followed by the emotions which may come to a man regaining consciousness after he has been sandbagged and robbed. At table in the breakfast-room the boy brought me a morning paper. On the first page, in screaming headlines, I saw the complete explanation of the mysteries of the previous evening. Agatha Geddis had eloped with a married man notably prominent in social and business circles. The newspaper had two reliable sources of information. The deserted wife had been interviewed, and the guilty pair had been followed on the train by a reporter.
I laid the paper aside and stared out of the breakfast-room window like a man awakening from a horrid dream. Once again the submerging wave of realization and relief rushed over me. Truly, I had been held up and robbed; had in fact innocently financed this city-shaking elopement. But, so far as Agatha Geddis's banishment from Denver and Colorado could accomplish it, I was once more a free man.