“But you know,” gravely observed one of the inspectors, as they took their places about the plain board table in the dining-car, “some of these tramps are dangerous fellows. They’d just as soon pull a gun on you as borrow a dime. So there’s nothing like being prepared. Particularly when one carries about such evidence of wealth and rank as friend Elder, here.”
At the chuckles which followed the clerk bridled angrily.
“Well, anyway, Ryan,” he retorted, “I am ready to fight if one of them interferes with me. I’ll not stick up my hands and let him go through me, as you did once.”
“No, I wouldn’t. In fact, I’d like to see anyone make me throw up my hands, even if I didn’t have a revolver,” Elder went on emphatically. “I’d rather be shot—yes, sir, I’d rather be shot than have to think afterward that I’d been such a weak-kneed coward. And that’s what I think of any man who would permit a low-down tramp to go through his pockets.”
Loud applause greeted these remarks, clapping, banging of plates, and cries of “Hear, hear!”
“Go it, Elder!”
“Show him up!”
“It’s on me. He has me labelled, OK,” admitted Ryan with marked humility. “But then, gentlemen, I protest it is hardly fair to compare an ordinary mortal to so remarkably courageous a man as Elder. I claim it is not given many men to be that fearless. Why, ‘with half an eye,’ as the old grammars say, you can see courage sticking out all over him.”
“All right, laugh. But I never showed the white feather to a hobo,” Elder repeated scathingly.