IT was a warm night for altitude five thousand feet, and the last few lingerers in the dining-car on the eastbound “Flying Plainsman” had their windows open. Midway of the car a quartette of light-hearted young people were exchanging guesses as to the proper classification of a big man with laughing eyes and a fighting jaw who was dining alone at one of the end tables.
“He looks like money—nice, large, ready money—to me,” commented the prettiest of the three young women; but her seat-mate, a handsome young fellow with the badge of his college athletic association worn conspicuously in his button-hole, thought differently. “You’ve fumbled the ball this time, Kitty,” he dissented. “If he isn’t the champion of all the amateur heavy-weights, you can put him down as a ’varsity coach out scouting for talent. Jehu! what a ‘back’ he’d make under the new rules!”
“Vaudeville is my guess,” chimed in the next-to-the-prettiest girl mockingly; “the strong man who puts up the dumb-bells, and all that, you know. If you could break into his luggage, I’d wager a box of chocolates that you’d find a perfectly beautiful suit of pink tights with spangled trunks and resined slippers.”
A little later the big man in the far corner took his change from the waiter and left the car. As he passed the joyous party at the double table there was a good-natured twinkle in his gray eyes and he dropped a neatly engraved card at the collegian’s plate.
“Heavens and earth!—he heard us!” gasped the prettiest girl. And then, feminine curiosity overcoming shame, “What does it say, Tommy?”
The young man held the card so that all could see, and admitted himself a loser in the classification game.
Calvin W. Sprague,
Washington, D. C.
Chemist, Dept. of Agriculture
was what they read; and the fourth member of the group, a young woman with fine eyes and an adorable chin, who was neither pretty nor prettier, but something far more transcendent, took the card and studied it thoughtfully.
“You’ve all missed the most astonishing thing—how he contrived to overhear us at this distance,” she commented musingly. And then, addressing the vanished card-owner through his bit of pasteboard: “So you’re a chemist, are you, Mr. Sprague? You don’t look it, not the least little bit, and I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I say that I doubt it; doubt it very much indeed.”
While the young people were debating among themselves as to whether or no there might not be an apology due, the big man who had dined alone passed quite through the string of vestibuled Pullmans and went to light his cigar on the rear platform of the combination buffet and observation car.