And the man himself was one of those who are marked up and down the Pullman trails. An unwritten code was being transmitted between the black brethren of the sleeping cars as to his whims and peculiarities. It was well that every brother in service in the Cleveland district should know the code. When Mr. X entered his drawing-room—he never rides elsewhere in the car—shades were to be drawn, a pillow beaten and ready by the window, and matches on the window sill. X would never ask for these things; but God help the poor porter who forgot them!
So you yourself can imagine the emotions of Whittlesey Warren, porter of the car Thanatopsis, bound east on Number Six on the snowy February night when X came through the portals of that scarabic antique, the Union Depot at Cleveland, a redcap with his grips in the wake. Warren recognized his man. The code took good care as to that. He followed the banker down the aisle, tucked away the bags, pulled down the shades, fixed the pillow and placed the matches on the window sill.
The banker merely grunted approval, lighted a big black cigar and went into the smoker, while Warren gave some passing attention to the other patrons of his car. It was passing attention at the best; for after a time the little bell annunciator began to sing merrily and persistently at him—and invariably its commanding needle pointed to D.R. And on the drawing-room Whittlesey Warren danced a constant attention.
"Here, you nigger!" X shouted at the first response. "How many times have I got to tell all of you to put the head of my bed toward the engine?"
Whittlesey Warren looked at the bed. He knew the make-up of the train. The code had been met. The banker's pillows were toward the locomotive. But his job was not to argue and dispute. He merely said:
"Yas-suh. Scuse me!" And he remade the bed while X lit a stogy and went back to the smoker.
That was at Erie—Erie, and the snow was falling more briskly than at Cleveland. Slowing into Dunkirk, the banker returned and glanced through the car window. He could see by the snow against the street lamps that the train was apparently running in the opposite direction. His chubby finger went against the push button. Whittlesey Warren appeared at the door. The language that followed cannot be reproduced in THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. Suffice it to say that the porter remembered who he was and what he was, and merely remade the bed.
The banker bit off the end of another cigar and retired once again to the club car. When he returned, the train was backing into the Buffalo station. At that unfortunate moment he raised his car shade—and Porter Whittlesey Warren again reversed the bed, to the accompaniment of the most violent abuse that had ever been heaped on his defenseless head.
Yet not once did he complain—he remembered that a servant a servant always is. And in the morning X must have remembered; for a folded bill went into Warren's palm—a bill of a denomination large enough to buy that fancy vest which hung in a haberdasher's shop over on San Juan Hill.
If you have been asking yourself all this while just what a fat run is, here is your answer: Tips; a fine train filled with fine ladies and fine gentlemen, not all of them so cranky as X, of Cleveland—thank heaven for that!—though a good many of them have their peculiarities and are willing to pay generously for the privilege of indulging those peculiarities.