"I didn't know until half an hour ago that I could come," said the man in the wheel chair with such evident disappointment that Jimmy's sympathy was enlisted. "Isn't there some place you can put me? It's—it's like a day out of my life if I miss this train to San Augustine!"
That was more than Jimmy could endure.
"Give this man my berth," said Jimmy to the conductor. "No. 12 in this car. I can stick it through the night in the smoker. I've done it heaps of times!"
And with that he brushed the porter aside, bent forward, lifted the wreck from the chair and with his sturdy strength carried him up the steps and to the relinquished section.
"There," he said cheerfully, as the porter came bearing the cushions with which to make the invalid comfortable. "Now you'll be right as a top."
The train took on motion and Jimmy was starting to carry his suitcase forward when the Pullman conductor, proving that kindliness commands kindliness, came hurrying forward and said, "Here! Let the porter find a seat for you. It's pretty crowded out there now. Or, if the gentleman has no objections, you might sit here with him until it's time to make the berths down. The day coaches and smokers usually get thinned out a little by ten o'clock at night."
And thus it was that Jimmy made a new friend.
"You see," explained the man he had befriended, "this race meeting down there means a lot to a chap smashed up as I am. It's about the only thrill I ever get since—since—I had to live in a chair. My name is Carver. Dan Carver. What's yours?"
"Jim Gollop," said Jimmy, puzzling his excellent memory to recall why it was that the name Dan Carver suggested something, and then, after an interval, blurting, "Carver? Are you the man who used to be a famous race driver two or three years ago? The man who wrecked himself in the Vanderbilt Cup races rather than take a chance on throwing his machine into the crowd at a turn?"
"The same—what's left of him," Carver admitted.