WHILE HE BOUGHT
WINE, WIFE SKIPPED
BIG BRAKEMAN'S SPOUSE AT
UNION DEPOT.
He Stood, Bottle in Hand, for Five
Hours Looking for Her, but
She Didn't Appear.
Where Is She?
George Robinson, a brakeman, who stands about six feet six inches in his sock feet, stood in the center of the Union depot last night for five and one-half hours and cast anxious glances over the throng. He carried a bottle of wine, and shifted it so often from one hand to the other that at midnight the paper was all off and the bottle exposed.
Robinson, accompanied by his wife, Mrs. Alice Robinson, 27 years old, and Mabel McBride, a negro maid, arrived in the city on the Santa Fe from Ottawa, Kas., at 6:30 p. m., and were all to have left for Seattle, his home, on the Burlington at 9:40 p. m. About thirty minutes after their arrival, Mrs. Robinson asked her spouse to procure a bottle of wine in case of snake bite on the trip. Then she and the maid disappeared.
"She said her feet hurt her," said Robinson as he craned his neck to see both ends of the depot at the same time, "and suggested that she would go up stairs and change her shoes while I got the wine. When I came back I couldn't get the least trace of her or the girl. I've got the durned wine here. Wish I'd never gone for it now."
"NEVER A CROSS WORD."
Robinson, who is the same age as his wife, said they had been married one year, "and we've never had a cross word." It his his opinion that his wife and her maid took the wrong train by mistake. If that is the case, however, he says he can't explain why she sent him for the wine and why she disappeared when no trains for the West were leaving the city. He also has another theory that the agent at Ottawa, in error, gave his wife and the girl tickets over another road and that they are now speeding westward, "wondering where in the thunder I am."
One of the circumstances that puzzle the depot officials is the appearance on the scene, after his wife dropped out, of a negro man who has known Robinson all his life, and who also claims to know the negro girl. He said the girl had a brother in the city, and Robinson then clung to the faint hope that "maybe they went to visit Mable's brother and got lost."
TOO GOOD TO A WOMAN.
"Was there any reason that you can think of why your wife should want to leave you?" Robinson was asked.
"None on top of earth," he replied fervently. "I'm too derned good to a woman. Ain't I hiring that girl to go along and take care of my wife -- carry the grips and things like that? Got her in Ottawa just for that. And, by gum, they've got all the grips with him, too."
The distracted man could not be induced to notify the police, to wire ahead to some of the trains he thought she had taken by mistake, or to do anything reasonable. He just wandered about, held on to his bottle of wine and groaned every time he looked at it. About midnight he was induced to go to bed in a hotel across from the depot. He said he had hopes of hearing form the missing pair by this morning.
"Not much use in me going to bed," he said as he left the depot. Then his eye caught sight of the bottle of wine, which he says is the curse of all his troubles. "I've a derned good notion to bust the danged thing," he said between his grated teeth.
