Laughing Gas Read Free

especially out in the Western districts, and once you get aboard a train for Los Angeles you just go on and on.
    Well, as I say, on the second morning of the journey I was sitting on the observation platform, observing, when I was stunned by the door opening.
    That's not quite right, of course, and when I fix and revise I must remember to polish up that sentence. Because I don't mean the thing got me on the head or anything like that. What stunned me was not the door opening, but what came through it. Viz., the loveliest girl I had ever seen in my life.
    The thing about her that hit the spectator like a bullet first crack out of the box was her sort of sweet, tender, wistful gentleness. Some species of negroid train-attendant had accompanied her through the door, carrying a cushion which he put down in the opposite chair, and she thanked him in a kind of cooing, crooning way that made my toes curl up inside my shoes. And when I tell you that with this wistful gentleness went a pair of large blue eyes, a perfectly modelled chassis, and a soft smile which brought out a dimple on the right cheek, you will readily understand why it was that two seconds after she had slid into the picture I was clutching my pipe till my knuckles stood out white under the strain and breathing through my nose in short, quick pants. With my disengaged hand I straightened my tie, and if my moustache had been long enough to twirl there is little question that I would have twirled it.
    The coloured brother popped off, no doubt to resume the duties for which he drew his weekly envelope, and she sat down, rather like a tired flower drooping. I dare say you've seen tired flowers droop. And there for a few moments the matter rested. She sniffed the air. I sniffed the air. She watched the countryside winding away. So did I. But for all practical purposes we might have been on different continents.
    And the sadness of this was just beginning to come over me like a fog, when I suddenly heard her utter a sharp yowl and saw that she was rubbing her eye. It was plain to the meanest intelligence that she had gone and got a cinder into it, of which there were several floating about.
    It solved the whole difficult problem of how I was ever going to break down the barriers, if you know what I mean, and get acquainted. It so happens that if there is one thing I am good at, it is taking things out of eyes -cinders, flies, gnats on picnics, or whatever it may be. To whip out my handkerchief was with me the work of a moment, and I don't suppose it was more than a couple of ticks later before she was thanking me brokenly and I was not-at-all-ing and shoving the handkerchief up my sleeve again. Yes, less than a minute after I had been practically despairing of ever starting anything in the nature of a beautiful friendship, there I was, fixed up solid.
    The odd thing was, I couldn't see any cinder, but it must have been there, because she said she was all right now and, as I say, started to thank me brokenly. She was all over me. If I had saved her from Manchurian bandits, she couldn't have been more grateful.
    'Thank you ever, ever so much,' she said.
    'Not at all,' said I.
    'It's so awful when you get a cinder in your eye.'
    'Yes. Or a fly.'
    'Yes. Or a gnat.'
    'Yes. Or a piece of dust.'
    'Yes. And I couldn't help rubbing it.' 'I noticed you were rubbing it.' 'And they say you ought not to rub it.' 'No, I believe you ought not to rub it.' 'And I always feel I've got to rub it.' 'Well, that's how it goes.' 'Is my eye red?' 'No. Blue.' 'It feels red.'
    'It looks blue,' I assured her, and might have gone on to add that it was the sort of blue you see in summer skies or languorous lagoons, had she not cut in.
    'You're Lord Havershot, aren't you?' she said.
    I was surprised. The old map is distinctive and individual, but not, I should have said, famous. And any supposition that we had met before and I had forgotten her was absurd.
    'Yes,' I said. 'But how —?'
    'I saw a