Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/119

 and bright, and not at all the sort she had seemed in the night. And she came up to him and said:

"Remember what I told you. That's the stuff!"

He never saw her again; she played her small part in his life and disappeared. Later on he was to know others like her, girls pouring out their youth like wine to satisfy the thirsts of men, but he never saw her again.

At noon that day he sat in the day coach of a through train, on his way East.

No poker now to distract his mind, no girls to wave gayly at the caboose windows. No one even to talk to, save a woman with two children on her way to hunt up a husband who had deserted them.

"I should think you'd let him go, if that's the way he's acted."

"Let him go! And me with these kids to bring up! He's got to see to them. He brought them into this world."

Tom considered this last statement with a certain humor.

"Must be a queer sort of fellow!"

"He's all that and then some."

But she got off toward night of the first day. He missed the children. He had not known many children, and the feeling of their little bodies crawling over him was new and warming. Even when he found that his new blue clothes were undeniably spotted from these contacts, he smiled at the thought of them.

"Funny little fellers," he muttered. He was saying "feller" again.

He slept in his seat that night, and emerged at noon the next day from the train considerably disreputable as to clothing and unhappy in his mind. Suppose he did see Kay? What could he say to her?

"Here I am! The Sheriff's after me, back home, and I'm engaged to a girl there. Also what I have in my pocket is all I have in the world. But aside from that I'm all right, so if you'll just step around to the preacher's with me!"

He stopped in the middle of a street when that struck him, and narrowly escaped being run over by a taxicab.