Rest of it; and
they piled those things in the luggage racks until both the racks
were chock-full; so the rest of us had to hold our baggage in our
laps or sit on it. One of them was facing me not more than five
or six feet distant. He never saw me though. He just gazed
steadily through me, studying the pattern of the upholstery on the
seat behind me; and I could tell by his look that he did not care
for the upholstering - as very naturally he would not, it being
French.
We had traveled together thus for some hours when one of them began
to cloud up for a sneeze. He tried to sidetrack it, but it would
not be sidetracked. The rest of us, looking on, seemed to hear
that sneeze coming from a long way off. It reminded me of a
musical-sketch team giving an imitation of a brass band marching
down Main Street playing the Turkish Patrol - dim and faint at
first, you know, and then growing louder and stronger, and gathering
volume until it bursts right in your face.
Fascinated, we watched his struggles. Would he master it or would
it master him? But he lost, and it was probably a good thing he
did. If he had swallowed that sneeze it would have drowned him.
His nose jibed and went about; his head tilted back farther and
farther; his countenance expressed deep agony, and then the log
jam at the bend in his nose went out with a roar and he let loose
the moistest, loudest kerswoosh! that ever was, I reckon.
He sneezed eight times. The first sneeze unbuttoned his waistcoat,
the second unparted his hair, and the third one almost pulled his
shoes off; and after that they grew really violent, until the last
sneeze shifted his cargo and left him with a list to port and his
lee scuppers awash. It made a ruin of him - the Prophet Isaiah
could not have remained dignified wrestling with a sneezing bee
of those dimensions - but oh, how it did gladden the rest of us to
behold him at the mercy of the elements and to note what a sodden,
waterlogged wreck they made of him!
It was not long after that before we had another streak of luck.
The train jolted over something and a hat fell down from the topmost
pinnacle of the mountain of luggage above and hit his friend on
the nose. We should have felt better satisfied if it had been a
coal scuttle; but it was a reasonably hard and heavy hat and it
hit him brim first on the tenderest part of his nose and made his
eyes water, and we were grateful enough for small blessings.
