"In she goes then, dod gast her!" muttered the captain.
"So much calmer in here under the sheltering lee of Yerba Buena," chirped Miss Gwendolyn Briggs, another quarter of an hour later.
"Why, to be sure," assented the hostess, as with a provident air she surveyed her contented and consuming guests who were ranged like a circling frieze upon the seat of Pullman plush which ran round the luxurious cabin, with James and his two assistants serving from the long table in the center.
It has been hinted that Mrs. Harrington was inclined to stoutness. She was also inclined to Russian caviar. Having seen her guests abundantly supplied, she lifted to her lips a triangle of toast, thickly spread with the Romanof confection. James stood before her, supporting a plate upon which were more triangles of toast and more caviar in a frilled and corrugated carton.
But quite abruptly Mrs. Harrington, who was proper as well as expert in all her food-taking manners, did an unaccountable thing. She turned the toast sidewise and smeared the caviar across her wide cheek almost from the corner of her mouth to her ear. At the same moment James himself did an even more unaccountable thing. He lurched forward, decorated his mistress's shoulders with the triangles of toast, like a new form of epaulette and upset the carton of caviar upon her expansive bosom, where the dark, oleaginous mass clung helplessly, quivered hesitantly, and then began to roll away in tiny, black spheres and to send out trickling exploratory streams, the general tendency of which was downward.
Nor was Mrs. Harrington alone in this sudden eccentricity of deportment. Over on the right Major Hassler, florid of person and extremely dignified of manner, was filling the wine glass of Mrs. Marston Conant, when abruptly he moved the mouth of the bottle a full twelve inches and began to pour its contents in a frothy gurgling stream down the back of the withered neck of John Ray, a rich, irascible, slightly deaf, and sinfully rich bachelor, who at the moment had leaned very low and forward to catch a remark that the lady next beyond was making. As if not content with the ruin thus wrought, Major Hassler next swept the bottle in a dizzy, cascading circle round him, sprinkling every toilet within a radius of three yards, and after dropping the bottle and flourishing his arms wildly, ended by plunging both hands to the bottom of the huge bowl of punch on the end of the table nearest him.
The only palliating feature of these amazing performances of Major Hassler, of James, and of Mrs. Harrington, was that nearly everybody else was executing the same sort of scrambling, lurching, colliding, capsizing, and smearing manoeuvres upon their own account. For a moment everybody glared at everybody else accusingly, and then Ernest Cartwright, sitting on the floor where he had been hurled, offered an interpretation of the phenomena.
"We struck something!" he suggested brightly.
"By Gad!" declared Major Hassler with sudden conviction, as he straightened up and viewed his dripping hands and cuffs with an expression quite indescribable. "By Gad! That's just what I think!"
"James!" murmured a voice almost entirely smothered by rage.