"Can I be of service?" he suggested in an amused drawl.
Instinctively she gasped: "No, please—!" At the same time Bel tried to shoulder the other roughly out of his way; the gratuitous champion stood firm, merely counselling "Easy, old thing, easy!" Then Bel lost his head. Lucinda heard him damning the other. There was a slight scuffle, in which the two, locked in each other's arms, reeled to one side. The bellboy was shouting "Now, ma'm—now's your chance!" She stumbled into the taxi. Holding the door, the boy demanded: "Where to, ma'm—where to?" She gasped: "Anywhere—only, tell him, hurry!" The door crashed, gears meshed with a grinding screech, the cab leaped forward with such spirit that Lucinda was thrown heavily against the back of the seat.
When she recovered, the vehicle was turning a corner. Through its window she caught a glimpse of the sidewalk in front of the Blackstone, just a bare glimpse of two figures struggling, with several others running toward them. Then the corner blocked out the scene.
XVII
Darting and dodging through traffic-choked thoroughfares, the taxicab had travelled a mile and more before Lucinda felt able to give the next steps the careful consideration which this pinch of mischance imposed.
In the upshot, though street clocks advised that she had the best part of two hours to kill before she could board her train, she tapped on the window and directed her driver to proceed to the Santa Fé Station. She felt reasonably safe in assuming that Bel wouldn't look for her there. Since she had told him she was going to Reno, his natural inference would be that she meant to travel by the direct overland route, he would set himself to waylay her in the Union Pacific terminal if anywhere. Provided, of course, that he had succeeded in discouraging the attentions of the gallant busybody in fit shape to make himself a nuisance again that night.
She couldn't help giggling nervously over the picture painted by a superexcited imagination.
The remaining hours of the evening worked out as eventlessly as she had hoped. Bellamy didn't show up at the station, she dined after a fashion in its restaurant, with her nose in a newspaper none of whose intelligence meant anything to hers, as soon as the platform gates were opened she was conducted by a porter to her reservation in the last car of the train but one, the observation-car; and in the latter Lucinda waited till her berth had been made ready. Then she went to bed.
She had planned to read herself asleep, but the armful of books and magazines purchased at the station bookstall either purveyed only fiction of a peculiarly insipid sort or else life itself was just then too richly coloured, too swift of movement to admit of that self-surrender which is requisite if mere artistic effort is to take effect.