A CONSPIRACY IN SATIN
The tall man emptied one hand of its suitcase to clasp the hand the
newcomer granted him. He held it fast as he exclaimed: "Don't tell me
that you are bound for Reno!" She whimpered: "I'm afraid so, Mr.
Ashton."
He put down everything to take her other hand, and tuned his voice to
condolence: "Why, I thought you and Sam Whitcomb were--"
"Oh, we were until that shameless Mrs. Wellington----"
"Mrs. Wellington? Don't believe I know her."
"I thought everybody had heard of Mrs. Jimmie Wellington."
"Mrs. Jimmie--oh, yes, I've heard of her!" Everybody seemed to have
heard of Mrs. Jimmie Wellington.
"What a dance she has led her poor husband!" Mrs. Whitcomb said. "And
my poor Sammy fell into her trap, too."
Ashton, zealous comforter, took a wrathful tone: "I always thought
your husband was the most unmitigated----" But Mrs. Whitcomb bridled
at once. "How dare you criticize Sammy! He's the nicest boy in the
world."
Ashton recovered quickly. "That's what I started to say. Will he
contest the--divorce?"
"Of course not," she beamed. "The dear fellow would never deny me
anything. Sammy offered to get it himself, but I told him he'd better
stay in Chicago and stick to business. I shall need such a lot of
alimony."
"Too bad he couldn't have come along," Ashton insinuated.
But the irony was wasted, for she sighed: "Yes, I shall miss him
terribly. But we feared that if he were with me it might hamper me in
getting a divorce on the ground of desertion."
She was trying to look earnest and thoughtful and heartbroken, but the
result was hardly plausible, for Mrs. Sammy Whitcomb could not
possibly have been really earnest or really thoughtful; and her heart
was quite too elastic to break. She proved it instantly, for when she
heard behind her the voice of a young man asking her to let him pass,
she turned to protest, but seeing that he was a handsome young man,
her starch was instantly changed to sugar. And she rewarded his good
looks with a smile, as he rewarded hers with another.
Then Ashton intervened like a dog in the manger and dragged her off to
her seat, leaving the young man to exclaim:
"Some tamarind, that!"
Another young man behind him growled: "Cut out the tamarinds and get
to business. Mallory will be here any minute."
"I hate to think what he'll do to us when he sees what we've done to
him."
"Oh, he won't dare to fight in the presence of his little
bridey-widey. Do you see the porter in there?"
"Yes, suppose he objects."
"Well, we have the tickets. We'll claim it's our section till Mallory
and Mrs. Mallory come."
They moved on into the car, where the porter confronted them. When he
saw that they were loaded with bundles of all shapes and sizes, he
waved them away with scorn:
"The emigrant sleepa runs only Toosdays and Thuzzdays."
From behind the first mass of packages came a brisk military answer:
"You black hound! About face--forward march! Section number one."
The porter retreated down the aisle, apologizing glibly. "'Scuse me
for questionin' you, but you-all's baggage looked kind o' eccentric at
first."
The two young men dumped their parcels on the seats and began to
unwrap them hastily.
"If Mallory catches us, he'll kill us," said Lieutenant Shaw.
Lieutenant Hudson only laughed and drew out a long streamer of white
satin ribbon. Its glimmer, and the glimmering eyes of the young man
excited Mrs. Whitcomb so much that after a little hesitance she moved
forward, followed by the jealous Ashton.
"Oh, what's up?" she ventured. "It looks like something bridal."
"Talk about womanly intuition!" said Lieutenant Hudson, with an
ingratiating salaam.
And then they explained to her that their classmate at West Point,
being ordered suddenly to the Philippines, had arranged to elope with
his beloved Marjorie Newton; had asked them to get the tickets and
check the baggage while he stopped at a minister's to "get spliced and
hike for Manila by this train."
Having recounted this plan in the full belief that it was even at that
moment being carried out successfully, Lieutenant Hudson, with a
ghoulish smile, explained:
"Being old friends of the bride and groom, we want to fix their
section up in style and make them truly comfortable."
"Delicious!" gushed Mrs. Whitcomb. "But you ought to have some rice
and old shoes."
"Here's the rice," said Hudson.
"Here's the old shoes," said Shaw.
"Lovely!" cried Mrs. Whitcomb, but then she grew soberer. "I should
think, though, that they--the young couple--would have preferred a
stateroom."
"Of course," said Hudson, almost blushing, "but it was taken. This was
the best we could do for them."
"That's why we want to make it nice and bridelike," said Shaw.
"Perhaps you could help us--a woman's touch----"
"Oh, I'd love to," she glowed, hastening into the section among the
young men and the bundles. The unusual stir attracted the porter's
suspicions. He came forward with a look of authority:
"'Scuse me, but wha--what's all this?"
"Vanish--get out," said Hudson, poking a coin at him. As he turned to
obey, Mrs. Whitcomb checked him with: "Oh, Porter, could you get us a
hammer and some nails?"
The porter almost blanched: "Good Lawd, Miss, you ain't allowin' to
drive nails in that woodwork, is you?" That woodwork was to him what
the altar is to the priest.
But Hudson, resorting to heroic measures, hypnotized him with a
two-dollar bill: "Here, take this and see nothing, hear nothing, say
nothing." The porter caressed it and chuckled: "I'm blind, deaf and
speechless." He turned away, only to come back at once with a timid
"'Scuse me!"
"You here yet?" growled Hudson.
Anxiously the porter pleaded: "I just want to ast one question. Is
you all fixin' up for a bridal couple?"
"Foolish question, number eight million, forty-three," said Shaw.
"Answer, no, we are."
The porter's face glistened like fresh stove polish as he gloated over
the prospect. "I tell you, it'll be mahty refreshin' to have a bridal
couple on bode! This dog-on old Reno train don't carry nothin' much
but divorcees. I'm just nachally hongry for a bridal couple."
"Brile coup-hic-le?" came a voice, like an echo that had somehow
become intoxicated in transit. It was Little Jimmie Wellington looking
for more sympathy. "Whass zis about brile couple?"
"Why, here's Little Buttercup!" sang out young Hudson, looking at him
in amazed amusement.
"Did I un'stan' somebody say you're preparing for a brile coupl'?"
Lieutenant Shaw grinned. "I don't know what you understood, but that's
what we're doing."
Immediately Wellington's great face began to churn and work like a big
eddy in a river. Suddenly he was weeping. "Excuse these tears,
zhentlemen, but I was once--I was once a b-b-bride myself."
"He looks like a whole wedding party," was Ashton's only comment on
the copious grief. It was poor Wellington's fate to hunt as vainly for
sympathy as Diogenes for honesty. The decorators either ignored him or
shunted him aside. They were interested in a strange contrivance of
ribbons and a box that Shaw produced.
"That," Hudson explained, "is a little rice trap. We hang that up
there and when the bridal couple sit down--biff! a shower of rice all
over them. It's bad, eh?"
Everybody agreed that it was a happy thought and even Jimmie
Wellington, like a great baby, bounding from tears to laughter on the
instant, was chortling: "A rishe trap? That's abslootly
splendid--greates' invensh' modern times. I must stick around and see
her when she flops." And then he lurched forward like a too-obliging
elephant. "Let me help you."
Mrs. Whitcomb, who had now mounted a step ladder and poised herself as
gracefully as possible, shrieked with alarm, as she saw Wellington's
bulk rolling toward her frail support.
If Hudson and Shaw had not been football veterans at West Point and
had not known just what to do when the center rush comes bucking the
line, they could never have blocked that flying wedge. But they
checked him and impelled him backward through his own curtains into
his own berth.
Finding himself on his back, he decided to remain there. And there he
remained, oblivious of the carnival preparations going on just outside
his canopy.