The girl in the fruitful hat quickly seized her companion by the arm and whispered in his ear. That young man exhibited proof of ability to act promptly. Crouching low, he slid over the edge of the car, hung lightly for an instant, and then disappeared. Half a dozen of the top-riders observed his feat, wonderingly, but made no comment, deeming it prudent not to express surprise at what might be the conventional manner of alighting in this bewildering city. The truant passenger dodged a hansom and then floated past, like a leaf on a stream between a furniture van and a florist’s delivery wagon.
The girl in the tan jacket turned again, and looked in the eyes of Mrs. James Williams. Then she faced about and sat still while the Rubberneck auto stopped at the flash of the badge under the coat of the plainclothes man.
“What’s eatin’ you?” demanded the megaphonist, abandoning his professional discourse for pure English.
“Keep her at anchor for a minute,” ordered the officer. “There’s a man on board we want – a Philadelphia burglar called ‘Pinky’ McGuire. There he is on the back seat. Look out for the side, Donovan.”
Donovan went to the hind wheel and looked up at James Williams.
“Come down, old sport,” he said, pleasantly. “We’ve got you. Back to Sleepytown of yours. It ain’t a bad idea, hidin’ on a Rubberneck, though. I’ll remember that.”
Softly through the megaphone came the advice of the conductor:
“Better step off, sir, and explain. The car must proceed on its tour.”
James Williams belonged among the level heads. With necessary slowness he picked his way through the passengers down to the steps at the front of the car. His wife followed, but she first turned her eyes and saw the escaped tourist glide from behind the furniture van and slip behind a tree on the edge of the little park, not fifty feet away.
Descended to the ground, James Williams faced his captors with a smile. He was thinking what a good story he would have to tell in Cloverdale about having been mistaken for a burglar. The Rubberneck coach lingered, out of respect for its patrons. What could be a more interesting sight than this?
“My name is James Williams, of Cloverdale, Missouri,” he said kindly, so that they would not be too greatly mortified. “I have letters here that will show – ”
“You’ll come with us, please,” announced the plainclothes man. “‘Pinky’ McGuire’s description fits you like flannel washed in hot suds. A detective saw you on the Rubberneck up at Central Park and ’phoned down to take you in. Do your explaining at the station-house.”
James Williams’s wife – his bride of two weeks – looked him in the face with a strange, soft radiance in her eyes and a flush on her cheeks, looked him in the face and said:
“Go with ’em quietly, ‘Pinky,’ and maybe it’ll be in your favour.”
And then as the Glaring-at-Gotham car rolled away she turned and threw a kiss – his wife threw a kiss – at someone high up on the seats of the Rubberneck.
“Your girl gives you good advice, McGuire,” said Donovan. “Come on, now.”
And then madness descended upon and occupied James Williams. He pushed his hat far upon the back of his head.
“My wife seems to think I am a burglar,” he said, recklessly. “I never heard of her being crazy; therefore I must be. And if I’m crazy, they can’t do anything to me for killing you two fools in my madness.”
Whereupon he resisted arrest so cheerfully and industriously that cops had to be whistled for, and afterwards the reserves, to disperse a few thousand delighted spectators.
At the station-house the desk sergeant asked for his name.
“McDoodle, the Pink, or Pinky the Brute, I forget which,” was James Williams’s answer. “But you can bet I’m a burglar; don’t leave that out. And you might add that it took five of ’em to pluck the Pink. I’d especially like to have that in the records.”
In an hour came Mrs. James Williams, with Uncle Thomas, of Madison Avenue, in a respect-compelling motor car and proofs of the hero’s innocence – for all the world like the third act of a drama backed by an automobile mfg. co.[39]
After the police had sternly reprimanded James Williams for imitating a copyrighted burglar and given him as honourable a discharge as the department was capable of, Mrs. Williams rearrested him and swept him into an angle of the station-house. James Williams regarded her with one eye. He always said that Donovan closed the other while somebody was holding his good right hand. Never before had he given her a word of reproach or of reproof.
“If you can explain,” he began rather stiffly, “why you – ”
“Dear,” she interrupted, “listen. It was an hour’s pain and trial to you. I did it for her – I mean the girl who spoke to me on the coach. I was so happy, Jim – so happy with you that I didn’t dare to refuse that happiness to another. Jim, they were married only this morning – those two; and I wanted him to get away. While they were struggling with you I saw him slip from behind his tree and hurry across the park. That’s all of it, dear – I had to do it.”
Thus does one sister of the plain gold band know another who stands in the enchanted light that shines but once and briefly for each one. By rice and satin bows does mere man become aware of weddings. But bride knoweth bride at the glance of an eye. And between them swiftly passes comfort and meaning in a language that man and widows wot[40] not of.
The Handbook of Hymen
’Tis the opinion of myself, Sanderson Pratt, who sets this down, that the educational system of the United States should be in the hands of the weather bureau. I can give you good reasons for it; and you can’t tell me why our college professors shouldn’t be transferred to the meteorological department. They have been learned to read; and they could very easily glance at the morning papers and then wire in to the main office what kind of weather to expect. But there’s the other side of the proposition. I am going on to tell you how the weather furnished me and Idaho Green with an elegant education.
We was up in the Bitter Root Mountains over the Montana line[41] prospecting for gold. A chin-whiskered man in Walla-Walla, carrying a line of hope as excess baggage, had grubstaked us; and there we was in the foothills pecking away, with enough grub on hand to last an army through a peace conference.
Along one day comes a mail-rider over the mountains from Carlos, and stops to eat three cans of greengages, and leave us a newspaper of modern date. This paper prints a system of premonitions of the weather, and the card it dealt Bitter Root Mountains from the bottom of the deck was “warmer and fair, with light westerly breezes.”
That evening it began to snow, with the wind strong in the east. Me and Idaho moved camp into an old empty cabin higher up the mountain, thinking it was only a November flurry. But after falling three foot on a level it went to work in earnest; and we knew we was snowed in. We got in plenty of firewood before it got deep, and we had grub enough for two months, so we let the elements rage and cut up all they thought proper.
If you want to instigate the art of manslaughter just shut two men up in a eighteen by twenty-foot cabin for a month. Human nature won’t stand it.
When the first snowflakes fell me and Idaho Green laughed at each other’s jokes and praised the stuff we turned out of a skillet[42] and called bread. At the end of three weeks Idaho makes this kind of a edict to me. Says he:
“I never exactly heard sour milk dropping out of a balloon on the bottom of a tin pan, but I have an idea it would be music of the spears compared to this attenuated stream of asphyxiated thought that emanates out of your organs of conversation. The kind of half-masticated noises that you emit every day puts me in mind of a cow’s cud, only she’s lady enough to keep hers to herself, and you ain’t.”