The best man

by Grace Livingston Hill

“It is not. Look!”

He took out his fountain pen, and, holding the letter on the arm of her chair, he wrote rapidly in his natural hand her own name and address beneath the address on the envelope, then held it up to her.

“Do they look alike?”

The two writings were as utterly unlike as possible, the letter being addressed in an almost unreadable scrawl, and the fresh writing standing fine and clear, in a script that spoke of character and business ability. Even a child could see at a glance that the two were not written by the same hand—and yet of course, it might have been practised for the purpose of deception. This thought flashed through the minds of both even as he held it out for her to look.

She looked from the envelope to his eyes and back to the letter, startled, not knowing what to think.

But before either of them had time for another word the conductor, the porter, and several people from the car behind came hurriedly through, and they realized that while they talked the train had come to a halt, amid the blazing electric lights of a great city station.

“Why,” said Gordon, startled, “we must have reached Pittsburgh. Is this Pittsburgh?” he called out to the vanishing porter.

“Yas sah!” yelled the porter, putting his head around the curve of the passageway. “You bettah hurry sah, foh dis train goes on to Cincinnati pretty quick. We’s late gittin’ in you see.”

Neither of them had noticed a man in rough clothes with slouch hat and hands in his pockets who had boarded the train a few miles back and walked through the car several times eyeing them keenly. He stuck his head in at the door now furtively and drew back quickly again out of sight.

Gordon hurriedly gathered up the baggage, and they went out of the car, the porter rushing back as they reached the door, to assist them and get a last tip. There was no opportunity to say anything more, as they mingled with the crowd, until the porter landed their baggage in the great station and hurried back to his train. The man with the slouch hat followed and stood unobtrusively behind them.