"Breakfast, eh?—that fits me all the way down to the ground," was his welcoming of the waiter's sing-song call. "Come along, old man, and we'll go eat a few things. This is on me."
I tried to refuse. Apart from a frantic desire to be quit of him, I was in no condition to present myself in the dining-car. I showed him my grimy hands, and at that he made me forgive him in advance for all the harm he might eventually do me.
"That's perfectly all right," he laughed. "Fellow can't help getting that way on the road. My sleeper is the first one back, and the dining-car's coupled on behind. You come along into the Pullman with me and wash up. I've got a bunch of clean collars and a shirt, if you want them; and if the Pullman man makes a roar I'll tell him you're my long-lost brother and give him the best ten-cent cigar he ever smoked—I get 'em at a discount from a fellow who makes a little on the side by selling his samples." And when I still hung back—"Don't be an ass, Bertie. This old world isn't half as mean as you'd like to think it is."
I yielded, weakly, I was going to say; yet perhaps it wasn't altogether weakness. For the first time since leaving the penitentiary I was meeting a man from home; a man who knew, and apparently didn't care. I went to the Pullman with Barton and was lucky enough to meet the ticket-punching train conductor on the way. Barton was a step or two ahead of me and he did not see my ticket. In consequence, the Colorado destination was still my own secret.
In the Pullman wash-room Barton stood by me like a man, fetching his own clean linen and tipping the porter to make him turn his back while I had a wash and a shave and a change. One who has always marched in the ranks of the well-groomed may never realize the importance of soap and water in a civilized world. As a moral stimulus, the combination yields nothing to all the Uplift Foundations the multi-millionaires have ever laid. When I took my place at the table for two opposite Barton in the diner, I was able to look the world in the eye, and to forget, momentarily at least, in the luxury of clean hands and clean linen, that I was practically an outlaw with a price upon my head.
Yearning like a shipwrecked mariner for home news, I led Barton on to talk of Glendale and the various happenings in the little town during my long absence. Though I had quartered the home State in all directions for half a year he was, as I have said, the first Glendale man I had met.
He told me many things that I was eager to know; how my mother and sister were living quietly at the town place, which the income from the farm enabled them to retain. For several years after her majority my sister, older than I, had taught in the public school; she was now, so Barton said, conducting a small private school for backward little ones at home.
There were other news items, many of them. Old John Runnels was still chief of police; Tom Fitch, the hardware man, was the new mayor; Buck Severance, my one-time chum in the High School, was now chief of the fire department, having won his spurs—or rather, I should say, his red helmet and silver trumpet—at the fire which had destroyed the Blickerman Department Store.
"And the bank?" I asked.
"Which one? We've got three of them now, if you please, and one's a National."