“What other?” I ast her.
“Kate,” said the wife. “You let me take her to New York and manage her and I’ll get her a husband that’ll think our eight thousand a year fell out of his vest.”
“Do you mean,” I said, “that you’d let a sister of yours marry for money?”
“Well,” she says, “I know a sister of hers that wouldn’t mind if she had.”
So I argued and tried to compromise on somewheres in America, but it was New York or nothing with her. You see, she hadn’t never been here, and all as she knew about it she’d read in books and magazines, and for some reason another when authors starts in on that subject it ain’t very long till they’ve got a weeping jag. Besides, what chance did I have when she kept reminding me that it was her stepfather, not mine, that had croaked and made us all rich?
When I had give up she called Kate in and told her, and Kate squealed and kissed us both, though God knows I didn’t deserve no remuneration or ask for none.
Ella had things all planned out. We was to sell our furniture and take a furnished apartment here, but we would stay in some hotel till we found a furnished apartment that was within reason.
“Our stay in some hotel will be lifelong,” I said.
The furniture, when we come to sell it, wasn’t worth nothing, and that’s what we got. We didn’t have nothing to ship, as Ella found room for our books in my collar box. I got two lowers and an upper in spite of the Government, and with two taxi drivers and the baggageman thronging the station platform we pulled out of South Bend and set forth to see Life.
The first four miles of the journey was marked by considerable sniveling on the part of the heiresses.
“If it’s so painful to leave the Bend let’s go back,” I said.
“It isn’t leaving the Bend,” said the Mrs., “but it makes a person sad to leave any place.”
“Then we’re going to have a muggy trip,” said I. “This train stops pretty near everywheres to either discharge passengers or employees.”
They were still sobbing when we left Mishawaka and I had to pull some of my comical stuff to get their minds off. My wife’s mighty easy to look at when she hasn’t got those watery blues, but I never did see a gal that knocked you for a goal when her nose was in full bloom.
Katie had brought a flock of magazines and started in on one of them at Elkhart, but it’s pretty tough trying to read with the Northern Indiana mountains to look out at, to say nothing about the birds of prey that kept prowling up and down the aisle in search of a little encouragement or a game of rhum.
I noticed a couple of them that would of give a lady an answer if she’d approached them in a nice way, but I’ve done some traveling myself and I know what kind of men it is that allows themselves to be drawed into a flirtation on trains. Most of them has made the mistake of getting married sometime, but they don’t tell you that. They tell you that you and a gal they use to be stuck on is as much alike as a pair of corsets, and if you ever come to Toledo to give them a ring, and they hand you a telephone number that’s even harder to get than the ones there are; and they ask you your name and address and write it down, and the next time they’re up at the Elks they show it to a couple of the brothers and tell what they’d of done if they’d only been going all the way through.
“Say, I hate to talk about myself! But say!”
Well, I didn’t see no sense in letting Katie waste her time on those kind of guys, so every time one of them looked our way I give him the fish eye and the nonstop signal. But this was my first long trip since the Government started to play train, and I didn’t know the new rules in regards to getting fed; otherwise I wouldn’t of never cleaned up in Wall Street.
In the old days we use to wait till the boy come through and announced that dinner was now being served in the dining car forward; then we’d saunter into the washroom and wash our hands if necessary, and ramble into the diner and set right down and enjoy as big a meal as we could afford. But the Government wants to be economical, so they’ve cut down the number of trains, to say nothing about the victuals; and they’s two or three times as many people traveling, because they can’t throw their money away fast enough at home. So the result is that the wise guys keeps an eye on their watch and when it’s about twenty minutes to dinner time they race to the diner and park against the door and get quick action; and after they’ve eat the first time they go out and stand in the vestibule and wait till it’s their turn again, as one Federal meal don’t do nothing to your appetite only whet it, you might say.
Well, anyway, I was playing the old rules and by the time I and the two gals started for the diner we run up against the outskirts of a crowd pretty near as big as the ones that waits outside restaurant windows to watch a pancake turn turtle. About eight o’clock we got to where we could see the wealthy dining car conductor in the distance, but it was only about once every quarter of an hour that he raised a hand, and then he seemed to of had all but one
