Jack and Susan in 1913

by Michael McDowell

  He returned to the station, found a quiet bench in the corner, and prepared to wait for the train that was carrying the Cosmic Film Company—and, he hoped, Susan—toward St. Louis.

  His own mother would not have known him. He wore a three-piece checked suit—large, square checks in blue and green, in fact—a dented plug hat, discolored spats over muddy shoes, and thick round eyeglasses that magnified and distorted the contours of his face. Above his upper lip he had pasted a heavy yellow mustache that matched the color of his hair as the barber had dyed it. He smoked a long, thick, cheap cigar, and was now a personification of that well-known American figure, the drummer. He was disguised as a traveling salesman.

  The train from Washington arrived, and Jack had the electrifying satisfaction of seeing Ida Conquest—on the arm of Junius Fane—emerge through the doors from the platforms.

  Then came the less exalted members of the company, other passengers, and—finally—Susan Bright and Hosmer Collamore. They were the last, Jack reckoned, by certain needs of Tripod, who trotted along—pad pad pad tap—at Susan’s heel.

  Jack sank back against the bench and peered at the couple over the top of his spectacles.

  Neither of them noticed him, but Tripod stopped dead in his tracks in the middle of the marble flooring of the station, sniffed the air, growled, and turned his canine head slowly in Jack’s direction.

  Susan turned and called, “Tripod, come.”

  Tripod would not. He continued to growl.

  Susan put down her bags and reached down to scoop up the dog in her arms. Tripod evaded her grasp and headed straight for Jack.

  Jack was prepared. “Here, boy,” he cried in a loud, fluting voice that was nothing like his own—and which he had practiced in the streets of St. Louis for several hours, to the astonishment of the natives.

  Ready in his hand was a soggy biscuit, and he tossed it toward the dog.

  Pad pad pad tap. Pad pad—

  Tripod sniffed at the biscuit. Tripod looked up at Jack. Tripod looked down at the biscuit again, and gobbled it up. Then he lunged at Jack.

  Just then Hosmer arrived on the scene and grabbed up the dog, muttering a brief apology, just as Tripod’s jaws opened with malicious intent focused on Jack’s checkered trousers. He carried Tripod back across the waiting room to Susan.

  Susan took the dog, and glanced across to Jack. Jack grinned a wide grin at her beneath his thick mustache. He’d blacked out two of his teeth.

  Susan smiled tentatively back. She obviously hadn’t recognized him.

  Tripod was already looking a bit drowsy in her arms, and after what Jack had put in the biscuit, he’d sleep for almost ten hours.

  Susan stared at the suddenly oddly laconic dog in her arms, and then she and Hosmer joined the others lined up in a corner of the station to receive tickets from Mr. Fane’s assistant.

  A few minutes later, Jack went to the ticket window, and said quite straightforwardly, “Give me a ticket on the same train as that group over there, please.”

  “Slowest train on the continent,” the ticket seller warned. “Stops for every cow and tick between here and the Pacific Ocean.”

  “Exactly what I wanted,” said Jack.

  “Track seven, leaving eight o’clock tonight.”

  Four trains a day left St. Louis headed for California, two to San Francisco and two to Los Angeles. Most people traveling to Los Angeles took the morning train. This late night train had nothing to recommend it but cheapness. It had a great number of baggage cars, mail cars, and transport cars of other sorts besides the two small, rather dilapidated sleepers. The Cosmic Film Company had taken over nearly all of one of these sleepers, the last car of the train. In lieu of a caboose, the conductor had a small compartment at the back of this car.

  Jack was given a seat in the forward car, where his fellow passengers were an assortment of types: real drummers with their battered sample cases, East Coast bankrupts headed for West Coast opportunities, sad-looking widows with orphaned children who were going toward who-knew-what, and a couple of frowsy young women who looked as if they knew their way around.

  The berths were already made up when the passengers got on board the train. It was frustrating for Jack to know that Susan was right there in the next coach, a sleeping dog draped across her feet like a lumpy hot-water bottle, and Hosmer Collamore who knows how close by. Nevertheless, he knew there was no way to approach her tonight and that he’d have two whole days and more in which to work his way back into her heart—and he’d do it, despite Hosmer Collamore, despite Tripod, despite Susan herself.

  The train lulled him to sleep with its rhythmic clickety-clack—and woke him up again every half hour or so with lurchings and squealings of brakes, as it made yet another milk-run stop.

  Next morning the train was in Kansas somewhere, and slowly the passengers roused themselves. A porter turned the berths back into seats, and another porter came through selling coffee and rolls. The railroad had spared every expense on this particular train, including that of a dining car; perhaps they reckoned that the train made more than enough stops to satisfy the passengers’ gustatory demands.

  Jack stared out the window at the passing prairie, newly green and yellow in the spring sunshine, and wondered when he should make his move. It would be best if he could get Susan out of the other coach and into this one, but that might not prove easy or even possible. His ingenuity wasn’t up to it. Probably he was just going to have to walk in, drop to his knees, tear off his false mustache, announce culpability and plead forgiveness, and apologize for having administered a sleeping potion to Tripod.

  Of course, that would mean that the entire Cosmic Film Company would be witness to the scene, but Jack hadn’t come halfway across country to back out now on account of possible embarrassment.

  Maybe it would be better to throw off the costume beforehand. There was something melodramatic and improbable about false mustaches to begin with, and besides, it was partly deceit that had got him into this trouble with Susan in the first place, so perhaps it would be best to appear before her in his true identity.

  The door at the back of the coach opened just then and Jack saw the conductor there, in conference with Junius Fane. Jack did not want to take the chance of being recognized by the owner of the film company, so he took down one of his bags and carried it with him into the gentlemen’s lavatory at the front end of the car. There he proceeded to reconstruct Jack Beaumont.

  He removed the checked suit, and stood in his garters and shirtsleeves. He gingerly stripped away the fake yellow mustache, the spirit gum—and a decent-sized patch of skin. He put away the eyeglasses, and ruined one of the railroad’s towels in attempting to rub some of the yellow dye from his hair.

  He threw away the spats and shined the shoes. He put on a good—though not his best—suit of clothes, even going so far as to attach a watch and chain to his vest. He tied, untied, and retied a four-in-hand foulard, then peered at his face in the mirror and applied a dab of alcohol to his upper lip.

  Outside the window, the prairie continued to roll by endlessly. At a town called Kiowa, the train stopped, for no apparent reason, since there was no one at the station that Jack could see, no one got off, and the train took off again almost immediately. For a few moments, Jack thought he heard Mr. Fane’s voice in the passenger section of the coach, which was curious, but Jack had other things on his mind, and certainly did not want to be seen by Junius Fane.

  After the train was on its way again, making the slight incline into the Smoky Hills in the western part of the state, Jack emerged from the gentlemen’s lavatory with his suitcase. The two blowsy young women saw him, leaned their heads together, whispered, giggled, and then turned in their seats to stare at him as he moved down the aisle to his seat.

  Others in the car stared also. The traveling salesman who had gone into the men’s lavatory half an hour before had emerged as a Wall Street broker.

  The time had come. He blushed, but did not
hesitate.

  He placed his bag in the small compartment above his seat next to his other valise, grasped the points of his vest, and pulled them down—modern man’s gesture of readiness to do battle—and strode the rest of the way down the aisle toward the rear door of the coach.

  He reached for the door handle.

  At that moment, with a grinding of brakes and shrill protests from the wheels, the train ground to a sudden stop.

  Jack fell backward and sideways into a nearby seat, bumping up against a man who was holding a burning cigar. The stogie singed a hole through Jack’s trousers, causing considerable discomfort against the flesh of Jack’s thigh.

  “Oh, God!” cried Jack, dancing away in pain.

  Ladies were startled, a couple of children had been thrown from their seats and were now crying, but apart from the little round burn of flesh on Jack’s thigh and the hole in his trousers, little damage had been caused by the clumsy application of the brakes.

  “Where are we?” asked Jack, peering out of the window, but seeing nothing but the same endless vista. “We stopped only ten minutes ago.”

  The other occupants in the car looked at one another, a little tensely Jack thought, and the gentleman with the cigar laughed suddenly and said, “Well, maybe it’s a desperate gang of train thieves, come on board to rob us all—”

  Then everybody in the car laughed as well, except for Jack, who wondered if he ought now to change his trousers before presenting himself to Susan.

  He decided against this, and once more reached for the handle of the door. But the door opened of its own accord. There, blocking his way, stood a short man, wearing blue jeans and a checked shirt. A red bandanna masked the lower portion of the man’s face, and he carried a revolver, pointed directly at Jack’s belly.

  “Lively now,” he said briskly. “Tumble out, everybody, and keep your hands above your head! ’Cause I’ll drill you if you don’t!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  BECAUSE HE WAS standing in the aisle, Jack was the first of the passengers to be hustled off the next to the last car of the train. Susan was the first passenger herded off the last car.

  They met at the bottom of the steps, and for a moment stood staring at each other.

  “You?” Susan said, in a tone that expressed no particular emotion.

  But before Jack could say anything, they were both prodded forward with gun barrels. In another few minutes, everyone on the train had been arranged in a ragged circle in the short grass by the side of the track.

  The short man in jeans and another accomplice, also with a bandanna over his mouth, covered the passengers with revolvers—unnecessarily large weapons, Jack considered. A third member of the gang held the reins of five horses at the rear of the train, while a fourth guarded the engineer and the fireman at the head of the train. The locomotive blew off a great deal of frustrated steam; the sun was bright and hot above, and Jack had never realized that so large a stretch of land could be treeless.

  Susan stood next to him, but she resolutely refused to notice his presence. They held their hands above their heads, in approved victim fashion, and Jack tried to grasp Susan’s in his own. She jerked away.

  “Stop it,” she hissed. “Whatever you have to say to me—whoever you are, and whatever your name is today—now is not the time to say it.”

  Jack thought that Susan might be right.

  The thieves began to work from the outside in, searching the gentlemen of the party for valuables. To Jack’s surprise, there seemed to be no panic in the crowd of perhaps thirty passengers, not even among the widowed mothers. The children seemed to think the whole thing was some kind of adventuresome lark, and leered grinning at the thieves from behind their mothers’ skirts. Jack was relieved. In well-conducted robberies, innocent people didn’t get shot and die. If everything continued as easily as this, Jack might have the chance to speak to Susan without the worry of an inconvenient bullet hole in his body or hers.

  “As Ma couldn’t come along today to act as matron,” said the gunman who had appeared in Jack’s car, and who was evidently the leader of the gang, “we’re going to trust the ladies to search theirselves. Diamonds and jewels and money in the hat as we pass it along.”

  Immediately to Susan’s left, there was a sudden commotion. “No!” screamed Ida Conquest, “I’m not going to give up my diamonds! You’ll have to shoot me first!”

  With that dreadful resolve, the actress broke ranks and fled toward the train. The decorum of the robbery had been instantly—and dangerously—destroyed, thought Jack. It was unclear to Jack what advantage Ida thought she would gain by reboarding the train, since there were few places to hide in a passenger car at rest in the middle of the most desolate part of the desolation that was the state of Kansas. The train would never move forward till the thieves released the engineer and the fireman. Nevertheless, Ida ran; and the leader of the bandits turned his gun in her direction and shouted, “Stop!”

  Unthinkingly, Jack raced toward the desperado and flung himself against his back. There was a dreadful blast in the morning stillness as the gun went off, but the bullet went wild, and Ida turned with a look of astonishment on her face.

  “Run, Ida!” Jack shouted.

  The thief regained his balance, and his eyes were wide with surprise for a moment as he stared at Jack.

  Jack kicked the revolver out of the bandit’s hand. Cringing, he expected every moment to feel the sharp sting of a bullet in his breast from the revolver of the second robber, who was standing just behind the first gunman, but no bullet stung, so Jack pushed the leader into his henchman, and they tumbled to the ground. Then he cracked each in the jaw with his fist, as hard as he could, which was hard enough to bruise his own knuckles, and hard enough to send the bandits roiling in pain. The bandit at the back of the train abandoned his horses and rushed to the assistance of his comrades. From the front of the train, the fourth man abandoned the engineer and the fireman, and ran to investigate. Quickly Jack grabbed up the two revolvers that had fallen to the ground and backed up against the train, one revolver pointed to the right, the other to the left.

  “I’m sure nobody wants to die, so put down your guns,” Jack said.

  The third and fourth bandits did not. Jack wasn’t certain what to do. He glanced at the circle of passengers, who stood stock-still in astonishment.

  “Put down your guns or I’ll shoot,” Jack cried. He stood alone, an armed bandit on either side, holding a revolver trained on each, trying to remember the last time he had fired a gun.

  “Put down your guns,” he repeated, in a tone of voice which he hoped suggested that he would do something if they didn’t.

  Junius Fane gave a nod, though why he should be nodding to Jack, Jack had no idea, unless it was to give silent approval to Jack’s bravery. In any case, the bandits—to Jack’s amazement—dropped their weapons.

  Jack breathed a sigh of relief, but at that moment, two strong arms were thrown about his neck. The arms of Ida Conquest.

  “My hero!” she screamed, right in his ear. “You saved my life, my virtue—and my diamonds!”

  The diamonds—if indeed they were diamonds—that she wore were sharply faceted, and dug little holes into Jack’s neck and cheeks as she kissed him on the mouth.

  “Ida,” said Jack, trying to push her away without using one of the revolvers to do it. It was still necessary to hold the two thieves at bay. Their weapons lay nearby them on the ground.

  Finally, someone else did something. Manfred Mixon, who had stood throughout the ordeal with comically quaking knees, grabbed up one of the guns, and pointed it at the head of one of the bandits. One of the children picked up the other surrendered weapon, and swung it round and round in a circle, and all the passengers began to laugh.

  “Wonderful! But I guess that’s enough,” Junius Fane shouted, waving at someone inside the train. “Stop the cameras.”

  “How was I to know?” Jack asked Susan. He’d begged five minutes�
� conversation with her. She’d assented with a dour nod.

  “Mr. Fane made an announcement that there was to be a mock holdup.”

  “That must have been when I was changing my clothes. And it looked real. The bandits looked real. Their horses were real. Their guns were real.”

  “But, thank heaven, loaded with blanks,” said Susan. “As it was, those blows you landed were real. Didn’t you recognize Mr. Perks and Mr. Westermeade? You’d seen them often enough at the studio.”

  “They were wearing masks, remember?” Jack protested. “I was sure that the holdup was real. And I was certain that the bandit leader was going to shoot Ida in the back.”

  “You must have thought you were saving her life,” said Susan thoughtfully. “You were very stupid, but very brave.” She didn’t speak in a tone of voice that Jack could construe as admiration.

  The passengers had returned to the train, laughing and excited by the staged robbery and by Jack’s unplanned part in the moving picture adventure. The two actors, with bruised jaws and loosened teeth, were being tended to in the conductor’s little cabin at the rear of the train. Jack and Susan sat at the back of the second to last car and talked in whispers, uncomfortably aware that everyone else in the car was making no secret of their interest in their exchange.

  After a few moments’ pause, Jack tried to think of a way to bring the conversation around to the subject of their engagement. He admitted to himself that Susan probably didn’t consider it still on. The same subject was evidently on Susan’s mind, because she also didn’t seem to know how to begin.

  “Hosmer told me about your most recent pack of lies,” she began.

  “Every word was true,” Jack protested.

  “I’m to believe that you are, in reality, a Wall Street broker, and that you gave up your family, your home, your position, and your friends, in order to impersonate a penniless inventor so that you could be near me? This is what I’m to believe? And find endearing? And to look upon as proof of your affection for me? You ask me to think of months of daily deception, high-handedness, and prevarication as a sign of your regard and respect? I’m to thank you for allowing me to believe that Mr. Fane was paying me thirty-five dollars for every script I wrote, when in reality, it was you who was placing five-dollar bills in those envelopes? I’m to think it was merely a beau’s clever stratagem to advance me five hundred dollars so that I would have the opportunity of lending it to you again?”