Austen laughed.
"I shouldn't worry about that," he said. "If Mr. Flint sent his daughter with fruit to everybody his railroad injures, she wouldn't have time to do anything else. I doubt if Mr. Flint ever heard of your case."
Mr. Meader considered this, and calculated there was something in it.
"She was a nice, common young lady, and cussed if she didn't make me laugh, she has such a funny way of talkin'. She wanted to know all about you."
"What did she want to know?" Austen exclaimed, not unnaturally.
"Well, she wanted to know about the accident, and I told her how you druv up and screwed that thing around my leg and backed the train down. She was a good deal took with that."
"I think you are inclined to make too much of it," said Austen.
Three days later, as he was about to enter the ward, Mr. Meader being now the only invalid there, he heard a sound which made him pause in the doorway. The sound was feminine laughter of a musical quality that struck pleasantly on Austen's ear. Miss Victoria Flint was sated beside Mr. Meader's bed, and qualified friendship had evidently been replaced by intimacy since Austen's last visit, for Mr. Meader was laughing, too.
"And now I'm quite sure you have missed your vocation, Mr. Meader," said
Victoria. "You would have made a fortune on the stage."
"Me a play-actor!" exclaimed the invalid. "How much wages do they git?"