CHAPTER XI
A CHANCE RENCOUNTER
While Mrs. Temple was confiding to her husband that the agitatedcouple in the next seat had just come from a wedding-factory, and hadgot on while he was lost in tobacco land, the people in the seat onthe other side of them were engaged in a little drama of their own.
Ira Lathrop, known to all who knew him as a woman-hatingsnapping-turtle, was so busily engaged trying to drag the farthestinvading rice grains out of the back of his neck, that he was late inrealizing his whereabouts. When he raised his head, he found that hehad crowded into a seat with an uncomfortable looking woman, whocrowded against the window with old-maidenly timidity.
He felt some apology to be necessary, and he snarled: "Disgustingthings, these weddings!" After he heard this, it did not soundentirely felicitous, so he grudgingly ventured: "Excuse me--youmarried?"
She denied the soft impeachment so heartily that he softened alittle:
"You're a sensible woman. I guess you and I are the only sensiblepeople on this train."
"It--seems--so," she giggled. It was the first time her spinstershiphad been taken as material for a compliment. Something in the girlishgiggle and the strangely young smile that swept twenty years from herface and belied the silver lines in her hair, seemed to catch the oldbachelor's attention. He stared at her so fiercely that she lookedabout for a way of escape. Then a curiously anxious, almost a hungry,look softened his leonine jowls into a boyish eagerness, and his growlbecame a sort of gruff purr:
"Say, you look something like an old sweetheart--er--friend--of mine.Were you ever in Brattleboro, Vermont?"
A flush warmed her cheek, and a sense of home warmed her prim speech,as she confessed:
"I came from there originally."
"So did I," said Ira Lathrop, leaning closer, and beaming like a bigsun: "I don't suppose you remember Ira Lathrop?"
The old maid stared at the bachelor as if she were trying to see theboy she had known, through the mask that time had modeled on his face.And then she was a girl again, and her voice chimed as she cried:
"Why, Ira!--Mr. Lathrop!--is it you?"
She gave him her hand--both her hands, and he smothered them in onebig paw and laid the other on for extra warmth, as he nodded hissavage head and roared as gentle as a sucking dove:
"Well, well! Annie--Anne--Miss Gattle! What do you think of that?"
They gossiped across the chasm of years about people and things, andknew nothing of the excitement so close to them, saw nothing ofChicago slipping back into the distance, with its many lights shootingacross the windows like hurled torches.
Suddenly a twinge of ancient jealousy shot through the man's heart,recurring to old emotions.
"So you're not married, Annie. Whatever became of that fellow who usedto hang round you all the time?"
"Charlie Selby?" She blushed at the name, and thrilled at the luxuryof meeting jealousy. "Oh, he entered the church. He's a minister outin Ogden, Utah."
"I always knew he'd never amount to much," was Lathrop's epitaph onhis old rival. Then he started with a new twinge: "You bound forOgden, too?"
"Oh, no," she smiled, enraptured at the new sensation of making a mananxious, and understanding all in a flash the motives that makecoquettes. Then she told him her destination. "I'm on my way toChina."
"China!" he exclaimed. "So'm I!"
She stared at him with a new thought, and gushed: "Oh, Ira--are you amissionary, too?"
"Missionary? Hell, no!" he roared. "Excuse me--I'm an importer--Anne,I--I----"
But the sonorous swear reverberated in their ears like a smitten bell,and he blushed for it, but could not recall it.