The dimple appeared suddenly in Peggy's cheek. There came an echo from without of many footsteps.
"And so," she took up the tale quickly, "having nicely planned it all out you shook me rudely to wake me up, told me the door was locked, and that it was midnight when it was only four in the afternoon. And it wasn't at all necessary to shake me so hard," she continued, "because I woke up when you came in."
"Peggy you knew!" the voice cried with a sudden realization, "you knew and you stayed!" He caught her hand, and in the darkness she could feel his nearness. Then suddenly the door opened letting into the chapel a flood of bright sunlight. "Ladies and gentlemen," the sonorous voice of the old guard came to them, "this, in the words of Macaulay, is the saddest spot on earth," continued the mournful recital, even as, in happy contradiction, Peggy and her American, secure in their little recess, looked blissfully into each other's eyes.
VII
SANKEY'S DOUBLE-HEADER
A Winter's Tale
By FRANK H. SPEARMAN
The oldest man in the train service didn't pretend to say how long Sankey had worked for the company. Pat Francis was a very old conductor; but old man Sankey was a veteran when Pat Francis began braking. Sankey ran a passenger train when Jimmie Brady was running—and Jimmie afterward enlisted and was killed in the Custer fight.
There was an odd tradition about Sankey's name. He was a tall, swarthy fellow, and carried the blood of a Sioux chief in his veins. It was in the time of the Black Hills excitement, when railroad men, struck by the gold fever, were abandoning their trains even at way-stations and striking across the divide for Clark's Crossing. Men to run the trains were hard to get, and Tom Porter, trainmaster, was putting in every man he could pick up without reference to age or color. Porter (he died at Julesburg afterward) was a great "jollier," and he wasn't afraid of anybody on earth. One day a war party of Sioux clattered into town and tore around like a storm. They threatened to scalp everything, even to the local tickets. They dashed in on Tom Porter, sitting in the despatcher's office upstairs, while the despatcher was hiding below, under a loose plank in the baggage-room floor. Tom, being bald as a sand-hill, considered himself exempt from scalping parties anyway. He was working a game of solitaire when they bore down on him, and got them interested in it. That led to a parley, which ended by Porter's hiring the whole band to brake on freight trains. Old man Sankey was said to have been one of that original war party.