"I hope you won't hold me guilty of being the intruder," he said, coldly.
"Not if you move your brogans over to some seat where there is more room for them," she returned, with a click of her white teeth that showed mild savagery. This young man who was in love with some one else, and who had scowled at her, was decidedly not to her liking, she thought, in spite of his regular features, his firm chin, his clean-cut mouth unhidden by beard, and his brown eyes.
Wade flushed, rose, bowed with hat lifted to a rather ironical height, and took his seat alone, well to the front of the car. He saw MacLeod's baleful face framed in the little window of the smoking-car's door. For mile after mile, as the train jangled on, it remained there.
The menace of the expression, the challenge in the attitude, and this insolent espionage, all following the insults of his gossiping tongue, wrought upon the young man's feelings like a file on metal. As his resentment gnawed, it was in his mind to go and smash his fist through the little window into the middle of that lowering countenance.
To him came the Honorable Pulaski, bristling and bustling.
"They're telling me back there, young man, that you and Colin came near to having some sort of rumpus a little while ago. Now, I can't have anything of that sort going on among my men. You mind _your_ business. I'll make _him_ mind _his_. But what's it all about, anyway? Why were you going to fight like roosters at sight?"
Wade looked at his pompous red face and into his eyes with their yellowish sclerotic, and choked back the recrimination he had intended. The thought of opening his heart's poor secret by bandying words with this man made him quiver.
"As well to talk to a Durham bull," he reflected.
"Why, you poor college dude," went on his employer, scornfully, "Colin MacLeod would break you in two and use you to taller his boots, a piece in each hand. You're hired to keep books and peddle wangan stuff according to the prices marked! Keep your place, where you belong. Don't go to stacking muscle against the boss of the Busters."
The former centre of Burton College's football eleven stiffened his muscles and set his nails into his palms to keep from hot retort. What was the use? What did college training avail if it didn't help a gentleman to hold his tongue at the right time?