Deserted | Page 4

and
shrinkingly and deprecatingly that it might be supposed she were the
rejected party. It is bad enough to be refused when she expresses the
hope that you will always be friends, and shows a disposition to make
profuse amends in general agreeableness for the consummate favor

which she is forced to decline you. Not to put too fine a point upon it, it
is bad enough to be refused anyhow you can arrange the circumstances,
but to be refused as Lombard had been, with a petulance as wounding
to his dignity as was the refusal itself to his affections, is to take a bitter
pill with an asafotida coating.
In the limp and demoralized condition in which he was left, the only
clear sentiment in his mind was that he did not want to meet her again
just at present. So he sat for an hour or more longer out on the platform,
and had become as thoroughly chilled without as he was within when at
dusk the train stopped at a little three-house station for supper. Then he
went into one of the forward day-cars, not intending to return to the
sleeping-car till Miss Dwyer should have retired. When the train
reached Ogden the next morning, instead of going on East he would
take the same train back to San Francisco, and that would be the end of
his romance. His engagement in New York had been a myth, and with
Miss Dwyer's "No, sir," the only business with the East that had
brought him on this trip was at an end.
About an hour after leaving the supper-station, the train suddenly
stopped in the midst of the desert. Something about the engine had
become disarranged, which it would take some time to put right. Glad
to improve an opportunity to stretch their legs, many of the passengers
left the cars and were strolling about, curiously examining the
sagebrush and the alkali, and admiring the ghostly plain as it spread,
bare, level, and white as an icebound polar sea, to the feet of the far-off
mountains.
Lombard had also left the car, and was walking about, his hands in his
overcoat pockets, trying to clear his mind of the wreckage that
obstructed its working; for Miss Dwyer's refusal had come upon him as
a sudden squall that carries away the masts and sails of a vessel and
transforms it in a moment from a gallant bounding ship to a mere hulk
drifting in an entangled mass of débris. Of course she had a perfect
right to suit herself about the kind of a man she took for a husband, but
he certainly had not thought she was such an utter coquette. If ever a
woman gave a man reason to think himself as good as engaged, she had

given him that reason, and yet she refused him as coolly as she would
have declined a second plate of soup. There must be some truth, after
all, in the rant of the poets about the heartlessness and fickleness of
women, although he had always been used to consider it the merest
bosh. Suddenly he heard the train moving. He was perhaps fifty yards
off, and, grumbling anathemas at the stupidity of the conductor, started
to run for the last car. He was not quite desperate enough to fancy being
left alone on the Nevada desert with night coming on. He would have
caught the train without difficulty, if his foot had not happened to catch
in a tough clump of sage, throwing him violently to the ground. As he
gathered himself up, the train was a hundred yards off, and moving
rapidly. To overtake it was out of the question.
"Stop! ho! stop!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. But there was no one
on the rear platform to see him, and the closed windows and the rattle
of the wheels were sufficient to render a much louder noise than he
could make inaudible to the dozing passengers. And now the engineer
pulled out the throttle-valve to make up for lost time, and the clatter of
the train faded into a distant roar, and its lights began to twinkle into
indistinctness.
"Damnation!"
A voice fell like a falling star: "Gentlemen do not use profane language
in ladies' company."
He first looked up in the air, as on the whole the likeliest quarter for a
voice to come from in this desert, then around. Just on the other side of
the track stood Miss Dwyer, smiling, with a somewhat constrained
attempt at self-possession. Lombard was a good deal taken aback, but
in his surprise he did not forget that this was the young lady who had
refused him that afternoon.
"I beg your pardon," he replied, with a stiff bow;