“A girl rushed out and called me Mr. Murray, and I tried to beat it, but it was all dark behind me, and my eyes were blinded looking at the lighted room, so I only got deeper in behind the bushes, and ran against more church wall; and the girl followed me laughing, and said she would show me the way, and that they were waiting for me. She said they had been so afraid I was caught in the wreck. She tried to pull me into the church, but I held back and said I was too dirty to go in, that my clothes were all torn and soiled. I said I had lost my baggage in the wreck. It seemed to me providential, that wreck, and I used it for all it was worth, for you see at first I thought I must have met that girl at a dance somewhere, and she recognized me and hadn’t heard yet that I was in disgrace. So I wanted to get away before she found out.
“But she said my trunk had come, and somebody named Summers was expecting me, and I could go right over to my room and get dressed, but I must hurry, because it was late. I tried to get directions, but she would walk over there with me. I couldn’t shake her. She seemed to think she had some special connection with me because her mother, she said, had known my mother.
“When we got to Mrs. Summers’ house she opened the door herself and pulled me right in before I could slide away in the darkness. Of course I could have broken away, but that would have roused suspicion, and anything I didn’t want was an outcry and the police on me; so I went in, and she took me up to the room she had got ready for you, and she actually smashed the lock on your trunk, and went the length of pressing a pair of your trousers for me to put on, while I was taking a bath!”
By this time Allan Murray’s eyes were dancing, and there was actually a little pucker of a smile in one corner of his mouth.
Murray hurried on with his story.
“There was nothing for it but to get into some clothes and pretend to please the lady, for she was so insistent. You better believe I was glad of that hot bath too, and I was still hungry as a bear. I hadn’t eaten much for two days, and there didn’t seem any way to get rid of her, so I helped her carry the scalloped oysters to the church, thinking I could slide out easily there. Boy! Those oysters had some delicious odor! I couldn’t resist them. I almost took the pan and bolted before I got in, only there were too many people around watching.”
The minister was smiling broadly now in the background, and Allan Murray was all attention. He had lost his sinister glare.
“Well, I got in there and I couldn’t get out. They introduced me right and left as Allan Murray, and I didn’t dare deny it. I never realized before what a coward I was till I got into that fix, and then the Doctor here asked me to ‘ask a blessing,’ and I didn’t know what he meant. I never hailed with a gang like that before, and I hadn’t been used to blessings.”
The patient suddenly threw his head back and laughed.
“I found out I was a great Christian worker, and that I was the new teller in the Marlborough Bank, and that everybody was grateful that I hadn’t been killed in the wreck,” went on Murray with a flitting smile, “but I was mighty uncomfortable. There didn’t come any good opportunity of getting out of there, however, and so I stuck it out, to my surprise, and got away with it! Even when Mr. Harper, the President of the bank, came to me and began to say how glad he was, I got away with it! Am I tiring you?”