“Of course I am. Right from the desert—Desert City, in fact,” he said, with a quiet smile.
“Oh!” gasped Tavia, turning her big eyes on her chum. “Did you hear that, Doro? Desert City!”
For the girls, during their visit to the West had, as Tavia often claimed in true Western slang, helped “put Desert City on the map.”
Dorothy, however, did not propose to let this conversation with a strange man become at all personal. She ignored her chum’s observation and, as the city-bound tube train came sliding in beside the platform, she reached for her own bag and insisted upon taking it from the Westerner’s hand.
“Thank you so much,” she said, with just the right degree of firmness as well as of gratitude.
Perforce he had to give up the bag, and Tavia’s, too, for there was the red-capped, smiling negro expectant of the “two-bits.”
“You are so kind,” breathed Tavia, with one of her wonderful “man-killing” glances at the considerate G. K., as Dorothy’s cousin, Nat White, would have termed her expression of countenance.
G. K. was polite and not brusk; but he was not flirtatious. Dorothy entered the Hudson tube train with a feeling of considerable satisfaction. G. K. did not even enter the car by the same door as themselves nor did he take the empty seat opposite the girls, as he might have done.
“There! he is one young man who will not flirt with you, Tavia,” she said, admonishingly.
“Pooh! I didn’t half try,” declared her chum, lightly.