Your father thought he might have been employed on some
of the horse-breeding ranches below Auburn as a trainer of young stock. He
even wondered if he could have stolen the animals.
"But as the train moved out it appeared he had appropriated something of
greater value--a young girl, also a thoroughbred.
"It did not need the gossip of the train-hands to suggest that this was an
elopement of a highly sensational kind. Father was indignant at the jokes.
You know it is a saying with the common sort of people that in California
elopements become epidemic at certain seasons of the year--like earthquake
shocks or malaria. The man was handsome in a primitive way--worlds beneath
the girl, who was simply and tragically a lady. Father sat in the same car
with them, opposite their section. It grew upon him by degrees that she was
slowly awakening, as one who has been drugged, to a stupefied consciousness
of her situation. He thought there might still be room for help at the
crisis of her return to reason (I mean all this in a spiritual sense), and
so he kept near them. They talked but little together. The girl seemed
stunned, as I say, by physical exhaustion or that dawning comprehension
in which your father fancied he recognized the tragic element of the
situation.
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