The solicitous traveler secured a seat at table opposite Miss Garnet and
put more majestic gentility into his breakfasting than he had ever done
before. Once he pushed the sugar most courteously to the lady she was
with, and once, with polished deference, he was asking the gentleman if
he could reach the butter, when a tardy comer was shown in and given the
chair next him. As this person, a young man as stalwart as he was
handsome, was about to sit down, he started with surprise and exclaimed
to Miss Garnet,
"Why! You've begun----Why, are we on the same train?"
And she grew visibly prettier as she replied smilingly,
"You must be Number Eleven, are you not?"
Coming out of the place the young lady's admirer heard her introduce
Number Eleven to "Mr. and Mrs. Fair," and Mr. Fair, looking highly
pleased, say,
"I don't think I ever should have recognized you!"
Something kept the train, and as he was joined by his large-eared
friend--who had breakfasted at the sandwich counter--he said,
"See that young fellow talking to Mr. Fair? That's the famous John
Marsh, owner of the Widewood lands. He's one of the richest young men in
Dixie. Whenever he wants cash all he's got to do is to go out and cut a
few more telegraph-poles--O laugh if you feel like it, but I heard Miss
Garnet tell her friends so just now, and I'll bet my head on anything
that girl says." The firm believer relighted his cigar, adding
digressively, "I've just discovered she's a sister-in-law"--puff,
puff--"of my old friend, General Halliday"--puff, puff--"president of
Rosemont College. Well, away we go."
The train swept on, the smoking-room filled. The drummer with the large
ears let his companion introduce "Mr. Marsh" to him, and was presently
so pleased with the easy, open, and thoroughly informed way in which
this wealthy young man discussed cigars and horses that he put aside his
own reserve, told a risky story, and manfully complimented the cleanness
of the one with which Mr. March followed suit.
A traveling man's life, he further said, was a rough one and got a
fellow into bad ways. There wasn't a blank bit of real good excuse for
it, but it was so.
No, there wasn't! responded his fellow-craftsman. For his part he liked
to go to church once in a while and wasn't ashamed to say so. His mother
was a good Baptist. Some men objected to the renting of pews, but, in
church or out of it, he didn't see why a rich man shouldn't have what he
was willing to pay for, as well as a poor man. Whereupon a smoker,
hitherto silent, said, with an oratorical gesture,
"Lift up your heads, O ye gates, the rich and the poor meet together,
yet the Lord is the maker of them all!"
March left them deep in theology. He found Mr. and Mrs. Fair half hid in
newspapers, and Miss Garnet with a volume of poems.
"How beautiful the country is," she said as she made room for him at her
side. "I can neither write my diary nor read my book."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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