Page:Chetyates00yateiala.pdf/304

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I hired a man to take it to the station. The baggage man refused to check it. 'If it was in a square trunk, I could check it, Miss,' he said.

"'But what's the difference?' I asked.

"'They wouldn't know what was in it.'

"'But wouldn't it get handled like other trunks then?' I asked, '—all banged around?'

"'Yes'm.'

"I hired a porter to carry it out to the train, and as soon as the Pullman porter came into the car, I gave him fifty cents real quick. It was a parlor car, and he took a lot of pains to set the case back, close to the window, and I draped myself over it, and when the conductor came in, he never guessed that there was anything so ferocious within a thousand miles of him;—and everything was lovely all the way to East Aurora. I thought that I had solved the problem.

"The train pulled in at about nine o'clock at night, and my car stopped something like a block from the baggage room; and of course there weren't any porters around a little place like that. The station was clear across the street from where I was, and I stood there beside the incubus ('incubus' is a perfectly good word,—I looked