“You bet I did!” was the enthusiastic reply. “Sadie ain’t got done talking yet about that set of knives and forks you sent her from Philadelphia.”
Again the big-muscled man was looking the despatcher over critically, this time with a quizzical twinkle in his gray eyes.
“Tell me how you did it, Dan,” he urged soberly. “You’re fatter than I ever dared to be. How did you manage to make a girl believe that there might be a man inside of a big body as well as in a medium-sized one?”
The night despatcher laughed until his moon-like face was purple; until the car-record clerk in the distant corner of the room looked up from his type-writer to see if he, too, might not share the joke.
“Gi-give me a little time,” wheezed Connolly; and he was presumably going to tell how it had been done when Maxwell got up from the glass-topped table and broke in.
“Twenty-six is asking for orders, Dan,” he said; and when Connolly had resumed his chair and his key: “That’s all, Calvin. We’ll go across to my office, if you like.”
It was behind the closed door of the superintendent’s room, after Sprague had chosen the easiest of the three chairs and settled himself for a smoke, that Maxwell said:
“I’m going to miss you like the devil, Calvin; I’m missing you right now.”
Sprague blew a series of smoke rings toward the disused gas-fixture hanging from the centre of the ceiling.
“Something that Chief Engineer Benson has been telling you over the wire from Copah?” he suggested.