The tenderfoots

by Francis Lynde

In a little time he saw that this man was trying to make the girl talk; also, that she was seeking, ineffectually, to ignore him. Philip had had little to do with women other than those of his own family, and he hailed from a civilization in which the primitive passions were decently held in leash by the conventions. Yet he could feel his pulses quickening and a most unaccustomed prompting to violence taking possession of him when he realized that a call for some manly intervention was urging itself upon him.

In a fit of perturbation that was almost boyish, and with a prescriptive experience that offered no precedent, he was still hesitating when he saw the girl lean forward and speak to her father. The sick man twisted himself in his seat and there was a low-toned colloquy between him and the offender. Philip could not hear what was said, but he could easily imagine that the father was protesting, and that the offender was probably adding insult to injury, noting, as a coward would, that he had nothing to fear from a sick man. In the midst of things the invalid made as if he would rise to exchange seats with his daughter, but the girl, with a hand on his shoulder, made him sit down again.

After this, nothing happened for a few minutes. Then Philip saw the man slide an arm along the seat behind the girl’s shoulders so that she could not lean back without yielding to a half embrace, and again his blood boiled and his temples began to throb. Clearly, something ought to be done ... if he only knew how to go about it. He was half rising when he saw the crowning insult offered. The man had drawn a flat bottle, whiskey-filled, from his pocket and was offering it to the girl.

Quite beside himself now, Philip struggled to his feet; but another was before him. Across the aisle one of the poker players, a bearded giant in a flannel shirt and with his belted trousers tucked into his boot-tops, faced his cards down upon the board that served as a gaming table and rose up with a roar that brought an instant craning of necks all over the car.

“Say! I been keepin’ cases on yuh, yuh dern’ son of a sea cook!” he bellowed, laying a pair of ham-like hands upon the man in the opposite seat and jerking him to his feet in the aisle. Then: “Oh—yuh would, would yuh!”

Philip, half-dazed by this sudden ebullition of violence, caught his breath in a gasp when he saw the flash of a bowie-knife in the hand of the smaller man. There was a momentary struggle in which the knife was sent flying through an open window, harsh oaths from the onlookers, cries of “Pitch him out after his toad-sticker!” and then a Gargantuan burst of laughter as the giant pinned both hands of his antagonist in one of his own and cuffed him into whimpering subjection with the other. The next thing Philip knew, the big man, still with his captive hand-manacled and helpless, was singling him out and bawling at him.

“Here, you young feller; climb out o’ that and make room fer this yere skunk! Yuh look like you might sit alongside of a perfect lady without makin’ a dern’ hyena o’ yerself. Step it!”

More to forestall further horrors of embarrassment than for any other reason, Philip stumbled out over the knees of his sleeping partner and slipped into the indicated seat beside the girl. Whereupon the giant shoved his subdued quarry into the place thus made vacant and went back to his seat to take up his hand of cards quite as if the late encounter were a mere incident in the day’s faring.

Scarcely less embarrassed by having been singled out as a model of decency than he had been by his inability to think quickly enough in the crisis, Philip sat in bottled-up silence for the space of the clicking of many rail-lengths under the drumming wheels, carefully refraining from venturing even a sidelong glance at his new seatmate. Not that the glance was needful. The day was no longer young, and he had had ample time in which to visualize the piquantly attractive face of the girl beside him. Its perfect oval was of a type with which he was not familiar, and at first he had thought it must be foreign. But there was no suggestion of the alien in the other members of the family. In sharp contrast to the clear olive skin and jet-black hair and eyes of the eldest sister, the two younger girls were fair, and so was the mother. As for the father, there was little save the cut of his beard to distinguish him. In a period when the few were clean shaven and the many let the beard grow as it would, the invalid reminded Philip of the pictures he had seen of the third Napoleon, though, to be sure, the likeness was chiefly in the heavy graying mustaches and goatee.

Philip thought it must have been somewhere about the hundredth rail-click that he heard a low voice beside him say, in a soft drawl that was as far as possible removed from the clipped speech of his homeland: “Ought I to say, ‘Thank you, kindly, sir’?”