Part 43 (2/2)

Mallory acknowledged the greeting, and asked offhandedly: ”By the way, how's she running?”

The conductor answered even more offhandedly: ”About two hours late--and losin'.”

Mallory was transfixed with a new fear: ”Good Lord, my transport sails at sunrise.”

”Oh, we ought to make 'Fris...o...b.. midnight, anyway.”

”Midnight, and sail at daylight!”

”Unless we lose a little more time.”

Mallory realized that every new day managed to create its own anxieties. With the regularity of a milkman, each morning left a fresh crisis on his doorstep.

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

THE COMPLETE DIVORCER

The other pa.s.sengers were growing nervous with their own troubles. The next stop was Reno, and in spite of all the wit that is heaped upon the town, it is a solemn place to those who must go there in purgatorial penance for matrimonial error.

Some honest souls regard such divorce-emporiums as dens of evil, where the wicked make a mockery of the sacrament and a.s.sail the foundations of society, by undermining the home. Other equally honest souls, believing that marriage is a human inst.i.tution whose mishaps and mistakes should be rectified as far as possible, regard the divorce courts as cities of refuge for ill-treated or ill-mated women and men whose lives may be saved from utter ruination by the intervention of high-minded judges.

But, whichever view is right, the ordeal by divorce is terrifying enough to the poor sinners or martyrs who must undergo it.

Little Jimmie Wellington turned pale, and stammered, as he tried to ask the conductor casually:

”What kind of a place is that Reno?”

The conductor, somewhat cynical from close a.s.sociation with the divorce-mill and its grist, grinned: ”That depends on what you're leaving behind. Most folks seem to get enough of it in about six months.”

Then he went his way, leaving Wellington red, agape and perplexed. The trouble with Wellington was that he had brought along what he was leaving behind. Or, as Ashton impudently observed: ”You ought to enjoy your residence there, Wellington, with your wife on hand.”

The only repartee that Wellington could think of was a rather uninspired: ”You go to ----.”

”So long as it isn't Reno,” Ashton laughed, and walked away.

Wedgewood laid a sympathetic hand on Little Jimmie's shoulder, and said:

”That Ashton is no end of a bounder, what?”

Wellington wrote his epitaph in these words:

”Well, the worst I can say of him is, he's the kind of man that doesn't lift the plug out when he's through with the basin.”

He liked this so well that he wished he had thought of it in time to crack it over Ashton's head. He decided to hand it to him anyway. He forgot that the cardinal rule for repartee, is ”Better never than late.”

<script>