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"Ma’am?"
by
This phrase did not shock Saterlee. He was amazed by the power of memory which it proved. For three hours earlier he had read a close paraphrase of it in a copy of the Tomb City Picayune which he had bought at that city.
The train ran slower and slower, and out on to a shallow embankment.
“Do you think we shall ever get anywhere?” queried the lady.
“Not when we expect to, Ma’am,” said Saterlee. He began to scrub his strong mouth with his napkin, lest he should return to the smoker with stains of boiled eggs upon him.
The train gave a jolt. And then, very quietly, the dining-car rolled over on its side down the embankment. There was a subdued smashing of china and glass. A clergyman at one of the rear tables quietly remarked, “Washout,” and Saterlee, who had not forgotten the days when he had learned to fall from a bucking bronco, relaxed his great muscles and swore roundly, sonorously, and at great length. The car came to rest at the bottom of the embankment, less on its side than on its top. For a moment–or so it seemed–all was perfectly quiet. Then (at one and the same moment) a lady in the extreme front of the diner was heard exclaiming faintly: “You’re pinching me,” and out of the tail of his eye Saterlee saw the showy lady across the aisle descending upon him through the air. She was accompanied by the hook and leg table upon which she had made her delicate meal, and all its appurtenances, including ice-water and a wide open jar of very thin mustard.
“Thank you,” she murmured, as her impact drove most of the breath out of Saterlee’s bull body. “How strong you are!”
“When you are rested, Ma’am,” said he, with extreme punctiliousness, “I think we may leave the car by climbing over the sides of the seats on this side. Perhaps you can manage to let me pass you in case the door is jammed. I could open it.”
He preceded her over and over the sides of the seats, opened the car door, which was not jammed, and helped her to the ground. And then, his heart of a parent having wakened to the situation, he forgot her and forsook her. He pulled a time-table from his pocket; he consulted a mile-post, which had had the good sense to stop opposite the end of the car from which he had alighted. It was forty miles to Carcasonne–and only two to Grub City–a lovely city of the plain, consisting of one corrugated-iron saloon. He remembered to have seen it–with its great misleading sign, upon which were emblazoned the noble words: “Life-Saving Station.”
“Grub City–hire buggy–drive Carcasonne,” he muttered, and without a glance at the train which had betrayed him, or at the lady who had fallen upon him, so to speak, out of the skies, he moved forward with great strides, leaped a puddle, regained the embankment, and hastened along the ties, skipping every other one.
II
Progress is wonderful in the Far West. Since he had last seen it only a year had passed, and yet the lovely city of Grub had doubled its size. It now consisted of two saloons: the old “Life-Saving Station” and the new “Like Father Used to Take.” The proprietor of the new saloon was the old saloon-keeper’s son-in-law, and these, with their flourishing and, no doubt, amiable families, were socially gathered on the shady side of the Life-Saving Station. The shade was much the same sort that is furnished by trees in more favored localities, and the population of Grub City was enjoying itself. The rival wives, mother and daughter, ample, rosy women, were busy stitching baby clothes. Children already arrived were playing with a soap-box and choice pebbles and a tin mug at keeping saloon. A sunburned-haired, flaming maiden of sixteen was at work upon a dress of white muslin, and a young man of eighteen, brother by his looks to the younger saloon-keeper, heartily feasted a pair of honest blue eyes upon her plump hands as they came and went with the needle. It looked as if another year might see a third saloon in Grub City.