"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?"