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Page 28
"I've got it cinched here," said Nevada, pulling it out from beneath
her opera-cloak.
Gilbert drew the letter from the envelope and looked it over
carefully. Then he looked at Nevada thoughtfully.
"Didn't you think it rather queer that I should ask you to come to my
studio at midnight?" he asked.
"Why, no," said Nevada, rounding her eyes. "Not if you needed me.
Out West, when a pal sends you a hurry call--ain't that what you say
here ?--we get there first and talk about it after the row is over.
And it's usually snowing there, too, when things happen. So I didn't
mind."
Gilbert rushed into another room, and came back burdened with
overcoats warranted to turn wind, rain, or snow.
"Put this raincoat on," he said, holding it for her. "We have a
quarter of a mile to go. Old Jack and his sister will be here in a
few minutes." He began to struggle into a heavy coat. "Oh, Nevada,"
he said, "just look at the head-lines on the front page of that
evening paper on the table, will you? It's about your section of the
West, and I know it will interest you."
He waited a full minute, pretending to find trouble in the getting on
of his overcoat, and then turned. Nevada had not moved. She was
looking at him with strange and pensive directness. Her cheeks had a
flush on them beyond the color that had been contributed by the wind
and snow; but her eyes were steady.
"I was going to tell you," she said, "anyhow, before you--before we--
before-well, before anything. Dad never gave me a day of schooling.
I never learned to read or write a darned word. Now if--"
Pounding their uncertain way up-stairs, the feet of Jack, the
somnolent, and Agnes, the grateful, were heard.
V
When Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert Warren were spinning softly homeward in a
closed carriage, after the ceremony, Gilbert s said:
"Nevada, would you really like to know what I wrote you in the letter
that you received to-night?"
"Fire away!" said his bride.
"Word for word," said Gilbert, "it was this: 'My dear Miss Warren-You
were right about the flower. It was a hydrangea, and not a lilac.'
"All right," said Nevada. "But let's forget it. The joke's on
Barbara, anyway!"
THIMBLE, THIMBLE
These are the directions for finding the I office of Carteret &
Carteret, Mill Supplies and Leather Belting:
You follow the Broadway trail down until you pass the Crosstown Line,
the Bread Line, and the Dead Line, and come to the Big Canons of the
Moneygrubber Tribe. Then you turn to the left, to the right, dodge a
push-cart and the tongue of a two-ton, four-horse dray and hop, skip,
and jump to a granite ledge on the side of a twenty-one-story
synthetic mountain of stone and iron. In the twelfth story is the
office of Carteret & Carteret. The factory where they make the mill
supplies and leather belting is in Brooklyn. Those commodities--to
say nothing of Brooklyn--not being of interest to you, let us hold the
incidents within the confines of a one-act, one-scene play, thereby
lessening the toil of the reader and the expenditure of the publisher.
So, if you have the courage to face four pages of type and Carteret &
Carteret's office boy, Percival, you shall sit on a varnished chair in
the inner office and peep at the little comedy of the Old Nigger Man,
the Hunting-Case Watch, and the Open-Faced Question--mostly borrowed
from the late Mr. Frank Stockton, as you will conclude.
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