"You're not going?" she asked with much concern, passing the message back to him.
"Of course I am," he promptly told her. "Blackie's the only man I could depend upon to get me out of a similar scrape."
"But, Jim," she protested; "you just now said that you have barely over six thousand left."
"That's all right," he assured her. "I'd have to get out and hustle in less than a month anyhow, at the rate we're going. I'll just take Blackie's five thousand, and a couple of hundred over for expenses. You keep the balance of the money and we'll get out of these apartments at once. I'll get you nice accommodations at about twenty a week, and before I come back I'll have something stirred up."
Secretly, he was rather pleased with the turn affairs had taken. Inaction was beginning to pall upon him, and this message that called urgently upon him to take an immediate trip out of town was entirely to his liking. Within an hour he had transferred his wife into comfortable quarters and was on his way to the train. He had very little margin of time, but, slight as it was, the grinning Fate which presided over his destinies had opportunity to arrange a meeting for him. Even as he pointed out his luggage to a running porter, a fussy little German in very new-looking clothes which fitted almost like tailor-made, had rushed back to the gates of the train shed where the conductor stood with his eyes fixed intently on his watch, his left hand poised ready to raise.
"I left my umbrella," spluttered the passenger.
"No time," declared the autocrat, not gruffly or unkindly, but in a tone of virtuous devotion to duty.
The little German's eyes glared through his spectacles, his face puffed red, his gray mustache bristled.
"But it's my wife's umbrella!" he urged, as if that might make a difference.
The brass-buttoned slave to duty did not even smile. He raised his hand, and in a moment more the potent wave of his wrist would have sent Number Eighteen plunging on her westward way. In that moment, however, the Pullman conductor, waiting with him, clutched the blue arm of authority.