Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 240, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 October 1912 — EXCUSE ME! [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

EXCUSE ME!

By Rupert Hughes

Nwdhtd from the Comedy of ILLUSTRATED Tram rWMraAi of tko PtaFMPijfaerf By Hoary W. SovaA*

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SYNOPSIS. Hunt Harry Mallory is ordered to the Philippines. He and Marjorie Newton decide to elope, but wreck of taxicab prevails their seel ng minister on the way to the train. Transcontinental train is taking on passengers. Porter has a lively time with an Englishman and Ira Lathrop. a Yankee business man. The alopers have an exciting time getting to the train. “Little Jimmie" Wellington, bound . for Reno to get a divorce, boards train In maudlin condition. Later Mrs. Jimmie •spears. She is also bound for Reno with same object. Likewise Mrs. Sammy Whitcomb. Latter blames Mrs. Jimmie for her marltAi troubles. Classmates of Mallory decorate bridal berth. CHAPTER Vl—(Continued). Then Ashton intervened like a dog In the manger and dragged her off to bar seat, leaving the young man to •xcl aim: “Some tamarind, that!” Another young man. behind him growled: “Cut out the tamarinds and get to business. Mallory will be here any minute." “I hate to think what he’ll do to us when he sees what we’ve done to him.” “Oh, he won’t dare to fight In the presence of his little brtdey-widey. Do you see the porter in there?” "Yes, suppose he objects.” “Well, we have the tickets. We’ll claim it’s our section till Mallory and Mrs. Mallory come.” They moved on Into the car, where the porter confronted them. When he saw that they were loaded with bundles of aU shapes and sizes, he waved them away with scorn: “The emigrant sleepk runs only Toosdays and Thuzzdays.” Prom behind the first mass of packages came a brisk military answer : "You black hound! About sac forward march! Section number one.” The porter retreated down the aisle, apologizing glibly. "’Scuse me for questioning’ you, but you-all’s baggage looked kind o’ eccentric at first” The two young men dumped their parcels on the seats and began to unwrap them hastily. "H Mallory catches us, he’ll kill us,” said Lieutenant Shaw. Lieutenant Hudson only laughed and drew out a long streamer of white satin ribbon. Its glimmer, and the glimmering eyes of the young man excited Mrs. Whitcomb so much that after a little hesi,. tance she moved forward, followed by the jealous Ashton. "Oh, what’s up?” she ventured. “It looks like something bridal.” "Talk about womanly intuition!” said Lieutenant Hudson, with an ingratiating salaam. f And then they explained to her that their classmate at West Point, being ordered suddenly to the Philippines, had arranged to elope with his beloved Marjorie Newton; had asked them to get the tickets and check the baggage while he stopped at a minister's to "get spliced and hike for Manila by this train.” Having recounted this plan in the fell hflltwf that it was even at that moment being carried out successfully, Lieutenant Hudson, with a ghoulish smile, explained: "Being old friends of the bride and groom, l ire want to fix their section up In style and make them truly comfortable.” "Delicious!” gushed Mrs. Whitcomb. “But you ought to have some rice and old shoes.” "Here’s the rioe,” said Hudson. “Here's the old shoes,” said Shaw. “Lovely!” cried Mrs. Whitcomb, but then she grew soberer. “I should think, though, that they—the young couple—would have preferred a stateroom.” “Of course," said Hudson, almost blushing, "but it was taken. This was the best we could do for them.” "That’s why we want to make it nice and brlde-like,” said Shaw. “Perhaps yon could help us—a woman’s touch—" “Oh, I’d love to,” she glowed, hastening into the section among the young men and the bundles. The unusual stir attracted the porter’s suspicions. He came forward with a look of authority: , “'Scuse me, but wha —what’s all tbisr “Vanish —get out,” said Hudson, ■m. As he turned omb checked him could you get us blanched: “Good t allowin’ to drive >fk, is you?;’ That im what the altar Jfting to heroic ng, say nothing.” It and chuckled:

Anxiously the porter pleaded: "I jnst want to ast one question. Is you all fixin* up for a bridal couple?” "Foolish question, number eight million, forty-three,” said Shaw. “Answer, no, we are.” The porter’s faoe glistened like fresh stove polish as he gloated over the prospect. “I tell you, it’ll be m&hty ref reshin’ to have a bridal couple on bode! This dog-on Reno train don’t carry nothin’ much but divoroees. I’m just nachally hongry for a bridal couple.” "Brile coup-hic-le?” came a voice, like an echo that had somehow become intoxicated In transit It was Little Jimmie Wellington looking for more sympathy. “Whasß zis about brile couple?”^ “Why, here’s Little Buttercup!” sang out young Hudson, looking at him in amazed amusement “Did I un’stan’ somebody say you’re preparing for brile coupl’?” Lieutenant Shaw grinned. “I don’t know what you understood, but that’s what we’re doing.” Immediately Wellington’s great face began to chum and work like a big eddy in a river. Suddenly he was weeping. "Excuse these tears, zhenttlemen, but I once—l was once a b-b-bride myself." “He looks like a whole wedding party,” was Ashton’s only comment on the copious grief. It was poor Wellington’s fate to hunt as vainly for sympathy as Diogenes for honesty. The decorators either ignored him or shunted him aside. They were interested in a strange contrivance of ribbons and a box that Shaw produced. “That,” Hudson explained, “is a little rice trap. We hang that up there and when the bridal couple sit down —biff! a shower of rice all over them. It’s bad. eh?” Everybody agreed that it was il happy thought, and even Jimmie Wellington, like a great baby, bounding from tears to laughter bn the instant, was chortling: “A rishe trap? That’s abslootly splendid—greates’ invensh’ modern times. I must stick around and see her when she flops.” And thep he lurched forward like a tooobliging elephant. "Let me help you.” Mrs. Whitcomb, who had now mounted a step ladder and poised herself as gracefully as possible, shrieked with alarm, as she saw Wellington’s bulk rolling toward her frail support. If Hudson and Shaw had not been football veterans at West Point and had not known just what to do when the center rush comes bucking the line, they could never have blocked that flying wedge. But they checked him and impelled him backward through his own curtains into his own berth. , Finding himself on his back, he decided to remain there. And there he remained, oblivious of the carnival preparations going on just outside his canopy.

CHAPTER VII. The Masked Minister. Being an angel must have this great advantage at least, that one may sit in the grandstand overlooking the earth and- enjoy the ludicrous blunder of that great blind man’s buff we call life. This night, if any angels were watching Chicago, the Mallory mix-up

must have given them a good laugh, or a good cry—according to their natures. Here were Mallory and Marjorie, still merely engaged, bitterly regretting their inability to get married and to continue their journey together. There in the car were the giggling conspirators preparing a bridal mockery for their sweet confusion. Then the angels might have nudged one another and said: “Oh, it’s all right now. There goes the minister hurrying to their very car. Mallory has the license in his pocket, and here comes the parson. Hooray!” \ And then the angelic cheer must have died out as the one great buna* of a crowded ball-ground is quenched in air, when the home team’s vitally needed home run swerves outside the line and drops useless as a stupid foul ball. . ' In a shabby old hack, wars two of

the happiest runaways that eve* sought a train. They were not miserable like the,young couple in the taxicab. They were white-haired both. They had been married for thirty years. Yet this was their real honeymoon, their real elopement The little woman In the timid gray bonnet clapped her hands and tittered like a schoolgirl. “Oh, Walter, I can’t believe we’re really gblng to leave Ypsilanti for a while. Oh, but you’ve earned it after thirty years of being a preacher.” "Hush. Don’t let me hear you say the awful word," said the little old man in the little black hat and the close-fitting black bib. “I’m so tired of it, Sally, I don’t want anybody on the train to know ft" “They can’t help guessing it, with your collar buttoned behind." And then the amazing minister actually dared to say, “Here’s where I change it around.” What’s more, he actually did it. Actually took off his collar and buttoned it to the front. The old carriage seemed almost to rock with the earthquake of the deed. “Why, Walter Temple!” his wife exclaimed. “What would they say in Ypsilanti?” “They’ll never know,” he answered, defiantly. “But your bib?” she said. “I’ve thought of that, too,” he cried, as he whipped it off and stuffed it into a handbag. “Look, what I’ve bought.” And he dangled before her startled eyes a long affair which the sudden light from a passing lamp-post revealed to be nothing less than a flaring red tie. The old lady touched It to make sure she was not dreaming it Then, omitting further parley with fate, she snatched it away, put it round his neck, and, since her arms were embracing him, kissed him twice before she knotted the ribbon into a flaming bow. She sat back and regarded the vision a moment, then flung her arms round him and hugged him till he gasped: “Watch out —watch out. Don’t crush my cigars.” “Cigars! Cigars!” she echoed, in a daze. And then the astounding husband produced them in proof. “Genuine Lillian Russells —five cents straight/” “But I never saw you smoke.” % “Haven’t taken a puff since I wai a young fellow,” he grinned, wagging his head. “But now it’s my vacation, and I’m going to smoke up.” She squeezed his hand with an earlier ardor: “Now you’re the old Walter Temple I used to know.” “Sally,” he said, “I’ve been traveling through life on a half-fare ticket. Now I’m going to have my little fling. And you brace up, too, and be the old mischievous Sally I used to know. Aren’t you glad to be away from those sewing circles and gossip-bees, and —” “Ugh! Don’t ever mention them,” she shuddered. Then she, too, felt a tinge of recurring springtide. “If you start t<J smoking, I think I’ll take up flirting once more.” He pinched her cheek and. laugh “As the saying is, go as far as you desire and I’ll leave the coast clear." lie kept his promise, too, for they were no sooner on the train and snugly bestowed in section five, than he was up and off> “Where are you going?” she asked. “To the smoking-room,” he swaggered, brandishing a dangerous looking cigar. “Oh, Walter,” she snickered, “I feel like a young runaway.” “You look like one. Be careful not to let anybody know that you’re a”— he lowered his voice—“an old preacher’s wife.” "I’m as ashamed of it as you are,” she whispered. Then he threw her a kiss and a wink. She threw him a kiss and winked too. And he went along the aisle eyeing his cigar gloatingly. As he entered the smoking-room, lighted the weed and blew out a great puff with a sigh of rapture, who eould have taken him, with his feet cocked up, and his red tie rakishly askew, for a minister? And Sally herself was busy disguising herself, loosening up her hair coquettlshly, smiling the primness out of the set corners of her mouth and even—let the truth be told at all costs —even passing a pink-rowdered puff over her pale cheeks with guilty surreptition. Thus arrayed she was soon joining the, conspirators bedecking the bower for the expected bride and groom. She was the youngest and most mischievous of the lot. She felt herself a bride again, and vowed to protect this timid little wife to come from too much hilarity at the hands of the conspirators. (TO BE CONTINUED.)

Mrs. Walter Temple.