Chapter V

Night had come. It got in on the evening train, and was late, as usual. The drowsy bat was on the wing; or rather, the wing was on the drowsy bat. Both wings, in fact, were on the d. b. Down in the mossy glade, where deepening shadows mock the starlight’s gleam, she waits. Her Italian marble brow is clouded with a weight of sorrow. Her finely-chiseled chin is still; the plastic chewing gum, pasted on the trunk of a rugged oak, cools and hardens in the evening air. The firm tread of a manly No. 9 comes crashing through the woodland.

’Tis he.

“Bertrande!”

“Margueritte!”

They said no more. They could not. They had forgotten the rest of each other’s names. They sat in the deeping shadows of the gloaming, holding each other’s hands, and trying to think of something nice to say.

Suddenly his delicate nostrils quivered and trembled with a startled light.

“Margueritte!” he exclaimed, “we must fly! I hear the sound of native applejack upon the evening air! M’ff! m’ff!”

“Oh, hevings!” she cried, “it is, it is me long lost fathyer!”

“Then,” he exclaimed, drawing a United States regulation cavalry saber from his bosom, “I am lost!”

“Oh, no, not lost;” she said in earnest tones, “go straight ahead till you come to the Hawkeye office, then turn up Market Street two blocks and follow the street car track south until you smell beer. Then you will know where you are. Fe-ly! Fe-ly! Me fathyer comes.”

“Methought,” he said, pausing in his flight, and speaking sternly, “Methought thou haddedest not a father.”

“I haive, I haive,” she shrieked, “and it is he!”

And as she spake a fatherly looking man parted the bushes and stood by her side. He was clad in a dark blue cut-away coat, with a button-hole bouquet, white vest, lilac kids, lavender pants, a pink necktie, waxed mustache, and a high hat. His boots were four and a half; his snowy handkerchief was perfumed with jockey club, and his breath with whisky sour. He was twenty-one years of old.

Bertrande regarded him sadly, and said to her he loved:

“It seems to me your father is rather juvenile.”

“Dear Bertrande,” she said, laying her head upon her father’s shoulder, “he married awful young.”

“Ah,” said Bertrande, bitterly, “I thought may be you had adopted him.”

And turning on his heel he was gone.