The Man in the Lower Ten

Heaven knows, I am not psychological. Emotions have to be written large before I can read them. But a woman in trouble always appeals to me, and this woman was more than that. She was in deadly fear. If I had not been afraid of being ridiculous, I would have followed her. But I fancied the apparition of a man in a red and yellow bath-robe, with an unkempt thatch of hair, walking up to her and assuring he would protect her would probably put her into hysterics. I had done that once before, when burglars had tried to break into the house, and had startled the parlor maid into bed for a week. So I tried to assure myself that I had imagined the lady’s distress or caused it, perhaps and to dismiss her from my mind. Perhaps she was merely anxious about the unpleasant gentleman of the restaurant. I thought smugly I could have told her all about him: that he was sleeping the sleep of the just and the intoxicated in a berth that ought, by all that was fair and right, to have been mine, and if I were tied to a man who snored like that I should have him anesthetized and his soft palate put where it would never again flap like a loose sail in the wind. We passed Harrisburg as I stood there. It was starlight, and the great crests of the Alleghany had given way to low hills. At intervals we passed smudges of gray white, no doubt in daytime comfortable farms, which McKnight says is a good way of putting it, the farms being a lot more comfortable than the people on them.I was growing drowsy. The woman with the bronze hair and the horrified face was fading in retrospect. It was colder, too, and I turned with a shiver to go in. As I did so, a bit of paper fluttered into the air and settled on my sleeve, like a butterfly on a gorgeous red and yellow blossom. I picked it up curiously and glanced at it. It was part of a telegram that had been torn into bits. There were only parts of four words on the scrap, but it left me puzzled and thoughtful. It read, ‘lower ten, car seven’ “Lower ten, car seven," was my berth…the one I had bought and found preempted.