I’LL confess that it took me a little while to screw up my resolution
to the point where I could tell myself that I was entirely ready and
willing to meet Ike Dawlin in the circle of his associates.
We had left behind us brown fields where wheat grew, and had passed
through the Idaho prune-orchards--a brakeman told me they were
prune-orchards. We had come into the hill country and the railroad
wriggled its way along the foot of the canon.
I took it for granted that Mr. Dragg proposed to stay with me. Every
little while he came and set his nose against the glass of the car’s
forward door and glared at me. When we stopped at a station I stuck my
head out of the window and made sure that he did not leave the train.
The two of us were playing a sort of “even Stephen” game--silent
peek-a-boo. I kept carefully away from Judge Kingsley, for I did not
care to have Dragg report that I was in the company of an elderly man
with a roll of chin-whiskers; Mr. Dawlin might recognize the description
and take alarm.
The judge sat close to the window, wrapped in his cloak, and scowled up
at the canon’s walls closing in behind as the railroad wound along. He
looked as if he felt like a man headed for the innermost chambers of
tophet, with the doors slamming behind him. As the hills shut in to the
north, my feelings were of that sort, anyway!
And so night came!
I had been asking a lot of questions of that obliging brakeman. My
folder named a terminus of the road and I had paid to that point, but
I learned that the railroad had been stretched along six or eight miles
farther down the canon so as to serve a mushroom town which was the
depot for a freshly discovered mining section.
When the train stopped at the old terminus, both Mr. Dragg and I found
ourselves very curious in regard to each other; had it not been for the
glass in the car door we would have bumped noses when we hurried to make
mutual inspection. But he stayed on the train--and so did I.
It was a young, a very young railroad, that last bit. The train crawled
like a caterpillar--and that’s a good description, for the cars went
bumping up slowly over the bulges in the track. Every now and then we
got a side-slat which made me think we were going into the creek.
I was too busy worrying about that train to give much thought to what
was going to happen to me when I landed in “Royal City” along with
Mr. Dragg. Such, I was informed, was the name of the new town. They
certainly do pick good names to build up to in the West, just as Seth
Dorsey, of Carmel, built a house on to the brass doorknob he found in
the road.
Judge Kingsley was not affording me much encouragement; he sat and hung
on to the arm of his seat and glared unutterable reproach at me.