"My boy's girl's mother a painted actress," he muttered as he looked. "Not if I know it." And then he muttered: "_You'd_ look like an actress if you was painted." Though the words can not have been distinguished, the sounds were audible. "Sir?" said the lady, stiffly but courteously. "Nothing, Ma'am," muttered Mark Anthony, much abashed. "I'm surprised to see so much water in this arid corner of the world, where I have often suffered for want of it. I must have been talking to myself to that effect. I hope you will excuse me." The lady looked out of the window--not hers, but Saterlee's. "It does look," she said, "as if the waters had divorced themselves from the bed of ocean." She delivered this in a quick but telling voice. Saterlee was shocked at the comparison. "I suppose," she continued, "we may attribute those constant and tedious delays to which we have been subjected all day to the premature melting of snow in the fastnesses of the Sierras?" 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."