“Here, you young feller; climb out o’ that and make room fer this yere skunk! Yuh look like _you_ might sit alongside of a perfect lady without makin’ a dern’ hyena o’ yerself. Step it!” More to forestall further horrors of embarrassment than for any other reason, Philip stumbled out over the knees of his sleeping partner and slipped into the indicated seat beside the girl. Whereupon the giant shoved his subdued quarry into the place thus made vacant and went back to his seat to take up his hand of cards quite as if the late encounter were a mere incident in the day’s faring. Scarcely less embarrassed by having been singled out as a model of decency than he had been by his inability to think quickly enough in the crisis, Philip sat in bottled-up silence for the space of the clicking of many rail-lengths under the drumming wheels, carefully refraining from venturing even a sidelong glance at his new seatmate. Not that the glance was needful. The day was no longer young, and he had had ample time in which to visualize the piquantly attractive face of the girl beside him. Its perfect oval was of a type with which he was not familiar, and at first he had thought it must be foreign. But there was no suggestion of the alien in the other members of the family. In sharp contrast to the clear olive skin and jet-black hair and eyes of the eldest sister, the two younger girls were fair, and so was the mother. As for the father, there was little save the cut of his beard to distinguish him. In a period when the few were clean shaven and the many let the beard grow as it would, the invalid reminded Philip of the pictures he had seen of the third Napoleon, though, to be sure, the likeness was chiefly in the heavy graying mustaches and goatee. Philip thought it must have been somewhere about the hundredth rail-click that he heard a low voice beside him say, in a soft drawl that was as far as possible removed from the clipped speech of his homeland: “Ought I to say, ‘Thank you, kindly, sir’?” Philip put his foot resolutely through the crust of New England reserve, as one breaks the ice of set purpose. “I guess I’m the one to be thankful,” he returned, “since I’ve been sitting all day with a drunken man. But you’d better not make me talk. I don’t want to be dragged out by the collar and have my ears boxed.” His reply brought the smile that he hoped it would, and he thought he had never seen a set of prettier, whiter, evener teeth. “Oh, I don’t reckon the big gentleman would hurt you.” “Gentleman?” said Philip. “Yes; don’t you think he earned the name?” Philip nodded slowly. But he qualified his assent. “He might have done it a little more quietly, don’t you think?” This time the smile grew into a silvery laugh. “You mean he made you too conspicuous?” “No,” said Philip; “I wasn’t thinking of myself.” Then: “You are from the South?” “We are from Mississippi, yes. But how could you tell?” “You said, ‘I don’t reckon.’”