“H’m?” inquired Regan solicitously, bending forward.
“Yes; she says she does,” repeated Spitzer in thin tones.
“Yes; well then, when you know women, and as much about ‘em as I do, you’ll know that nothing else counts—nothing but the love, I mean. It’s their nature, and they’re all alike. That’s the way it is with all of ‘em”—Regan waved his hand expansively.
“It’ll be all right. You’ll see. She won’t hold out on that line.”
Some men profit much by little experience, others profit little by much experience. Spitzer, possibly, had had little, very little, but the dejected droop of his shoulders, as he started back for the roundhouse, intimated that in the matter of knowledge as applied to the eternal feminine he was perhaps, in so far as it lay between himself and the master mechanic, the better qualified of the two to speak. And that, certainly, when concretely applied, which is to say applied to Merla Swenson.
Regan couldn’t have kept the story back to save his life, and it didn’t take long for the division to get it. They all got it—train crews and engine crews on way freights, stray freights, locals, extras and regulars, the staff, the shop hands, the track-walkers and the section gangs down to the last car-tink. At first the division looked incredulous, then it grinned, and then it howled, and its howl was the one word “Spitzer!” with seventeen exclamation points after it to make the tempo and rhythm hang out in a manner befitting and commensurate with the occasion.
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good. Dutchy Damrosch did the business of his life—he did more business than he had ever dreamed of doing in his wildest flights of imagination, for Dutchy had the lunch counter rights at Big Cloud. What’s that got to do with Spitzer and his marital ambition? Well, a whole lot! Merla Swenson was second girl in Dutchy’s establishment, and Merla was the “fee-ancy” of Spitzer—which was a rotten bad pun of Spider Kelly’s, the conductor, and due more to the brogue-like twist of his tongue than to any malice aforethought.
To see any girl that was in love with Spitzer was worth the price of coffee and sinkers any old time. The lunch counter took on the air of a dime museum, and the visitors questioned Merla anxiously, a little suspicious that after all there might be a nigger in the woodpile somewhere in the shape of a “frame-up” with the hoax on themselves.
Merla settled all doubts on that score. Unruffled, calmly, stoically, dispassionately she answered the same question fifty times a day, and each time in the same way.
“Yah, I ban love Spitzer,” was her infallible reply, in a tone that made the bare possibility that she could have done anything else seem the very acme of absurdity. Merla’s inflexion struck deep at the root of things inevitable.