For the moment I was desperately panic-stricken. It seemed blankly impossible that Cummings should not see and recognize me at once. I could have sworn that he was looking straight at me while the steward kept him waiting. My terror must have shown itself in my face, since Barton spoke up quickly.
"Why, say—what's struck you, Bert?—are you sick?" he demanded; and then he supplied an answer to his own query: "I ought to be kicked around the block for loading you up with a big dining-car breakfast when you had just told me that you were off your feed. Cut it short and we'll trot up ahead and smoke a cigar. That'll help you get away with it."
The steward had found Cummings a seat at the forward end of the car, and how to pass him without detection was a problem that made me dizzy with the nausea of fear. Barton, with the lordly manner of the American salesman away from home, made it possible. Snapping his fingers for a waiter he paid for the breakfasts before we left our seats, and then quickly led the way forward. At the pause in the vestibule, while Barton was answering the steward's query as to how we had been served, I could have reached out and touched Cummings's shoulder. But the deputy warden was running an investigative finger down the menu card and he did not see me.
It may say itself that I was in no condition to enjoy the after-breakfast cigar burned in the smoking-room of Barton's Pullman, where the wagon salesman's tips, or his good-natured insistence, again made me welcome. Every moment I expected to see the door curtain flung aside to admit the burly figure of William Cummings. True, there were a number of Pullmans in the train, and it was possible that I might not be in the smoking-room of his car. But it was enough, and more than enough, to know that we were fellow-travelers on the same train.
There is little use piling on the agony by trying to tell what I suffered during this forenoon of nerve-racking torture and suspense. Let it be sufficient to say that the torments ended for me at Decatur, Illinois, when, at the train stop, I saw Cummings cross the platform to a street-car followed by a station porter carrying his grip. Barton marked the change in me at once.
"By George, Bert, what did you see in that platform jumble to make you look as if you had suddenly taken on a new lease of life?" he inquired jestingly. Then he passed the ever-ready cigarcase. "Smoke up, and after a bit we'll go and try it on the dog—see if a second meal in the diner will come as near to upsetting you as the first one did. Say, don't you know, I'm bully glad we met up in the smoker this morning? I was rawhiding myself to beat the everlasting band at the prospect of having to make this long, tiresome day jump alone, and it's done me a heap of good to talk you to frazzles. And that reminds me: you haven't told me yet where you are heading for."
I had not; and what was more, I did not mean to. There were distant relatives on my mother's side of the family living somewhere in central Missouri, and I spoke of them.
"Sedalla, you say?" he commented. "Well, if that's the how of it, I may see you again in a day or so, and here's hoping. I have a horrible suspicion that our St. Louis general agent wants me to chase out with him and dig up some of his dead-alive country dealers. We sell a raft of wagons in Missouri."
It was just here that it occurred to me that Barton was carrying it off pretty toppingly for a mere traveling salesman; also that he dressed better, smoked better cigars, and seemed a good bit freer with his money than such a job warranted.
"You were selling Whiteley Wagons by yourself, when I dropped out," I said. "Have I been doing you an injustice by not allowing for a promotion in the three years and a half?"