“All right, Bobby! Meet me at the Pennsylvania Station. I’ll take the 12.45—I am not going to let Kent come. He must be with his mother one more day,—his mother and Molly. So long! Be sure and meet me!”
Then such a scrambling ensued! Kent must be persuaded he was neither wanted nor needed, a few things hurled into a bag, her sketch book tucked in her jacket pocket, and Judy was off like a whirlwind. She and Kent ran all the way to the station only to see the train pulling out as they stepped upon the platform.
“I can get it! Keep the old bag!” cried that young woman as she sprinted down the track, her young husband running lightly by her side, laughing in spite of himself. If you have never run after a train and caught it you cannot realize the triumphant feeling Judy had as she grasped the rail and swung herself up on the rear coach. Fortunately it was not a vestibule train or she would have been shut out. Kent slung the bag up after her and then stood in the middle of the track until his Judy was lost in the darkness.
“What a girl she is!” he laughed to himself. “What a dear girl!”
The dear girl was rescued by a rather indignant brakeman and led through the empty coach that happened to be hitched on to the train and finally installed in the chair car, after many explanations and excuses had been made to train conductor and then Pullman conductor.
Young women have no business on night trains with no tickets—certainly no business in boarding those trains from the rear, thereby risking their own necks and making the railroads liable to damage suits.
“But you see my father telephoned me from New York,” she confided to the train conductor, a grizzled looking old fellow with a decidedly military bearing. “He is going to France next week and he simply had to see me.—Perhaps you know my father,” she added with a certain assurance that everybody connected with railroads ought to know Bobby.
“More than likely!” was the grim reply. The conductor had no idea of being cajoled into good humor by this daring girl.
“He is Mr. Robert Kean,—Bobby!”
The conductor was suddenly a changed creature.