CHAPTER XI
IN THE LALLA ROOKH
The car in itself was in no way remarkable. A twelve-section and drawing-room, mahogany-finish, wide-vestibule sleeper, done in cream brown, hangings shading into Indian reds—a type of the Pullman car so popular some years ago for transcontinental travel; neither too heavy for the mountains nor too light for the pace across the plains.
There were many features added to the passenger schedule on the West End the year Henry S. Brock and his friends took hold of the road, but none made more stir than the new Number One, run then as a crack passenger train, a strictly limited, vestibuled string, with barbers, baths, grill rooms, and five-o'clock tea. In and out Number One was the finest train that crossed the Rockies, and bar nobody's.
It was October, with the Colorado travel almost entirely eastbound and the California travel beginning, westbound, and the Lalla Rookh sleeper being deadheaded to the coast on a special charter for an O. and O. steamer party; at least, that was all the porter knew about its destination, and he knew more than anyone else.
At McCloud, where the St. Louis connection is made, Number One sets out a diner and picks up a Portland sleeper—so it happened that the Lalla Rookh, hind car to McCloud, afterward lay ahead of the St. Louis car, and the trainmen passed, as occasion required, through it—lighted down the gloomy aisle by a single Pintsch burner, choked to an all-night dimness.
But on the night of October 3d, which was a sloppy night in the mountains, there was not a great deal to take anybody back through the Lalla Rookh. Even the porter of the dead car deserted his official corpse, and after Number One pulled out of Medicine Bend and stuck her slim, aristocratic nose fairly into the big ranges the Lalla Rookh was left as dead as a stringer to herself and her reflections—reflections of brilliant aisles and staterooms inviting with softened lights, shed on couples that resented intrusion; of sections bright with lovely faces and decks ringing with talk and laughter; of ventilators singing of sunshine within, and of night and stars and waste without—for the Lalla Rookh carried only the best people, and after the overland voyage on her tempered springs and her yielding cushions they felt an affection for her. When the Lalla Rookh lived she lived; but to-night she was dead.
This night the pretty car sped over the range a Cinderella deserted, her linen stored and checked in her closets, her pillows bunked in her seats, and her curtains folded in her uppers, save and except in one single instance—Section Eleven, to conform to certain deeply held ideas of the porter, Raz Brown, as to what might and might not constitute a hoodoo, was made up. Raz Brown did not play much: he could not and hold his job; but when he did play he played eleven always whether it fell between seven, twenty-seven, or four, forty-four. And whenever Raz Brown deadheaded a car through, he always made up section eleven, and laid the hoodoo struggling but helpless under the chilly linen sheets of the lower berth.
Glover had spent the day without incident or excitement on the Wind River branches, and the evening had gone, while waiting to take a train west to Medicine Bend, in figuring estimates at the agent's desk in Wind River station. He was working night and day to finish the report that the new board was waiting for on the rebuilding of the system.