"Yes, well, it must have gone on to Albany."
"But it went away on that track," says Crene.
"Couldn't have gone on that track. Of course they wouldn't have carried
it away over there just to make it go wrong."
For me, I am easily persuaded and dissuaded. If he had told me that
it must have gone in such a direction, that it was a moral and mental
impossibility it should have gone in any other, and have said it times
enough, with a certain confidence and contempt of any other contingency,
I should gradually have lost faith in my own eyes, and said, "Well, I
suppose it did." But Crene is not to be asserted into yielding one inch,
and insists that the trunk went to Vermont and not to New York, and is
thoroughly unmanageable. Then the baggage-master, in anguish of soul,
trots out his subordinates, one after another,--
"Is this the man that wheeled the trunk away? Is this? Is this?"
The brawny-armed fellows hang back, and scowl, and muffle words in a
very suspicious manner, and protest they won't be got into a scrape. But
Crene has no scrape for them. She cannot swear to their identity. She
had eyes only for the trunk.
"Well," says Baggager, at his wits' end, "you let me take your check,
and I'll send the trunk on by express, when it comes."