Part 48 (2/2)
She rose and, twisting her arm from his grasp, confronted him with bewildered anger. Mallory cast toward Marjorie a look of surrender and despair. Marjorie laid her hand on her throat and in pantomime suggested that Mallory should throttle Kathleen, as he had promised.
But Mallory was incapable of further violence; and when Kathleen, with all her coquetry, bent down and murmured: ”You are a very naughty boy, but come to breakfast and we'll talk it over,” he was so addled that he answered: ”Thanks, but I never eat breakfast.”
CHAPTER x.x.xVII
DOWN BRAKES!
Just as Kathleen flung her head in baffled vexation, and Mallory started to slink back to Marjorie, with another defeat, there came an abrupt shock as if that gigantic child to whom our railroad trains are toys, had reached down and laid violent hold on the Trans-American in full career.
Its smooth, swift flight became suddenly such a spasm of jars, s.h.i.+vers and thuds that Mallory cried:
”We're off the track.”
He was sent flopping down the aisle like a bolster hurled through the car. He brought up with a sickening slam across the seat into which Marjorie had been jounced back with a breath-taking slam. And then Kathleen came flying backwards and landed in a heap on both of them.
Several of the other pa.s.sengers were just returning from breakfast and they were shot and scattered all over the car as if a great chain of human beads had burst.
Women screamed, men yelled, and then while they were still struggling against the seats and one another, the train came to a halt.
”Thank G.o.d, we stopped in time!” Mallory gasped, as he tried to disengage himself and Marjorie from Kathleen.
The pa.s.sengers began to regain their courage with their equilibrium.
Little Jimmie Wellington had flown the whole length of the car, clinging to his wife as if she were Francesca da Rimini, and he Paolo, flitting through Inferno. The flight ended at the stateroom door with such a thump that Mrs. Fosd.i.c.k was sure a detective had come for her at last, and with a battering ram.
But when Jimmie got back breath enough to talk, he remembered the train-stopping excitement of the day before and called out:
”Has Mrs. Mallory lost that pup again?”
Everybody laughed uproariously at this. People will laugh at anything or nothing when they have been frightened almost to death and suddenly relieved of anxiety.
Everybody was cracking a joke at Marjorie's expense. Everybody felt a good-natured grudge against her for being such a mystery. The car was ringing with hilarity, when the porter came stumbling in and paused at the door, with eyes all white, hands waving frantically, and lips flapping like flannel, in a vain effort to speak.
The pa.s.sengers stopped laughing at Marjorie, to laugh at the porter.
Ashton sang out:
”What's the matter with you, Porter? Are you trying to crow?”
Everybody roared at this, till the porter finally managed to articulate:
”T-t-t-train rob-rob-robbers!”
Silence shut down as if the whole crowd had been smitten with paralysis. From somewhere outside and ahead came a pop-popping as of firecrackers. Everybody thought, ”Revolvers!” The reports were mingled with barbaric yells that turned the marrow in every bone to snow.
These regions are full of historic terror. All along the Nevada route the conductor, the brakemen and old travelers had pointed out scene after scene where the Indians had slaked the thirst of the arid land with white man's blood. Ashton, who had traveled this way many times, had made himself fascinatingly horrifying the evening before and ruined several breakfasts that morning in the dining-car, by regaling the pa.s.sengers with stories of pioneer ordeals, men and women ma.s.sacred in burning wagons, or dragged away to fiendish cruelty and obscene torture, staked out supine on burning wastes with eyelids cut off, bound down within reach of rattlesnakes, subjected to every misery that human deviltry could devise.
<script>