第75章 CHAPTER XI(7)

"Now how in thunder did that get into my right-hand pocket? I always keep it in my vest," he exclaimed; and the matter continued to disturb him after they were in the automobile. "It's my lucky piece. I guess I was so excited at the prospect of seeing you when I dressed this morning I put it into my change. Just see what you do to me!"

"Does it bring you luck?" she inquired smilingly.

"How about you! I call you the biggest piece of luck I ever had."

"You'd better not be too sure," she warned him.

"Oh, I'm not worrying. I has that piece in my pocket the day I went down to see old Stephen Chippering, when he made me agent, and I've kept it ever since. And I'll tell you a funny thing--it's enough to make any man believe in luck. Do you remember that day last summer I was tinkering with the car by the canal and you came along?"

"The day you pretended to be tinkering," she corrected him.

He laughed. "So you were on to me?" he said. "You're a foxy one!"

"Anyone could see you were only pretending. It made me angry, when I thought of it afterwards."

"I just had to do it--I wanted to talk to you. But listen to what I'm going to tell you! It's a miracle, all right,--happening just at that time--that very morning. I was coming back to Boston from New York on the midnight, and when the train ran into Back Bay and I was putting on my trousers the piece rolled out among the bed clothes. I didn't know I'd lost it until I sat down in the Parker House to eat my breakfast, and I suddenly felt in my pocket. It made me sick to think it was gone.

Well, I started to telephone the Pullman office, and then I made up my mind I'd take a taxi and go down to the South Station myself, and just as I got out of the cab there was the nigger porter, all dressed up in his glad rags, coming out of the station! I knew him, I'd been on his car lots of times. `Say, George,' I said, `I didn't forget you this morning, did I?'

"`No, suh,' said George, 'you done give me a quarter.'

"`I guess you're mistaken, George,' says I, and I fished out a ten dollar bill. You ought to have seen that nigger's eyes."

"`What's this for, Mister Ditmar?' says he.

"`For that lucky gold piece you found in lower seven,' I told him.

`We'll trade.'

"`Was you in lower seven? --so you was!' says George. Well, he had it all right--you bet he had it. Now wasn't that queer? The very day you and I began to know each other!"

"Wonderful!" Janet agreed. "Why don't you put it on your watch chain?"

"Well, I've thought of that," he replied, with the air of having considered all sides of the matter. "But I've got that charm of the secret order I belong to--that's on my chain. I guess I'll keep it in my vest pocket."

"I didn't know you were so superstitious," she mocked.

"Pretty nearly everybody's superstitious," he declared. And she thought of Lise.

"I'm not. I believe if things are going to happen well, they're going to happen. Nothing can prevent it."

"By thunder" he exclaimed, struck by her remark. "You are like that You're different from any person I ever knew...."

From such anecdotes she pieced together her new Ditmar. He spoke of a large world she had never seen, of New York and Washington and Chicago, where he intended to take her. In the future he would never travel alone. And he told her of his having been a delegate to the last National Republican Convention, explaining what a delegate was. He gloried in her innocence, and it was pleasant to dazzle her with impressions of his cosmopolitanism. In this, perhaps, he was not quite so successful as he imagined, but her eyes shone. She had never even been in a sleeping car! For her delectation he launched into an enthusiastic description of these vehicles, of palatial compartment cars, of limited, transcontinental trains, where one had a stenographer and a barber at one's disposal.

"Neither of them would do me any good," she complained.

"You could go to the manicure," he said.

There had been in Ditmar's life certain events which, in his anecdotal moods, were magnified into matters of climacteric importance; high, festal occasions on which it was sweet to reminisce, such as his visit as Delegate at Large to that Chicago Convention. He had travelled on a special train stocked with cigars and White Seal champagne, in the company of senators and congressmen and ex-governors, state treasurers, collectors of the port, mill owners, and bankers to whom he referred, as the French say, in terms of their "little" names. He dwelt on the magnificence of the huge hotel set on the borders of a lake like an inland sea, and related such portions of the festivities incidental to "the seeing of Chicago" as would bear repetition. No women belonged to this realm; no women, at least, who were to be regarded as persons.

Ditmar did not mention them, but no doubt they existed, along with the cigars and the White Seal champagne, contributing to the amenities. And the excursion, to Janet, took on the complexion of a sort of glorified picnic in the course of which, incidentally, a President of the United States had been chosen. In her innocence she had believed the voters to perform this function. Ditmar laughed.

"Do you suppose we're going to let the mob run this country?" he inquired. "Once in a while we can't get away with it as we'd like, we have to take the best we can."

Thus was brought home to her more and more clearly that what men strove and fought for were the joys of prominence, privilege, and power.

Everywhere, in the great world, they demanded and received consideration.