It was scarcely better when they reached the Red Sea, where, however, they were able to move at better speed. They had nearly completed this Biblical transit, when a mirage of white-capped mountains floating aerially upside down appeared over the red desert in the south, and all the passengers crowded to the starboard rail to look at it. Elliott had moved to the bow, and was staring idly at the strangely coloured low coast, red and pink and orange, spotted with crags of basalt as black as iron.
“It would remind a man of Arizona, wouldn’t it?” a voice drawled languidly at his elbow.
Elliott wheeled, a little startled. Leaning on the rail beside him was a young man whom he remembered as having come aboard at Port Said with the globe-trotters. He was attired in white flannels and wore a peaked cap, but the voice was unmistakably American, and Elliott felt certain that it had been developed south of the Ohio River.
“I never was in Arizona, but I’ve seen the same kind of thing in New Mexico,” he answered. “How did you know that I had been in the Southwest?”
“There’s nothing but the Bad Lands that’ll give a man that far-away pucker about the eyes,” said the other. “And anybody could pick you out for an American among all these Britishers. We’re the only Yankees on board, I reckon. I don’t mind calling myself a Yankee here, but I wouldn’t at home. I’m from Alabama, sir.”
“I thought you were from the South. I’m a Marylander myself,” replied Elliott.
“Is that so? I’m mighty glad to hear it. We’ll have to moisten that—two Southerners so far from home. My name is Sevier.”
Elliott gave his name in return, and permitted himself to be led aft. He looked more closely at his new acquaintance as they sat down at a table in the stuffy cubby-hole that passes for a smoking-room on the Indian mail-steamers. Sevier was a boyish-looking fellow of perhaps thirty, short, slight, and dark, with a small dark moustache, and a manner that was inexpressibly candid and ingratiating. In time it might come to seem smooth to the point of nausea; at present it appeared offhand enough, and yet courteous—a manner of which the South alone has preserved the secret—and Elliott in his growing loneliness was delighted to find so agreeable a fellow traveller.
The talk naturally fell upon Southern matters, drifted to the West and South again to Mexico and the Gulf. Sevier seemed to display an unusual knowledge of these localities, though Elliott was unable to check his statements, and he explained that he had been a newspaper correspondent in Central America for a New Orleans daily, the Globe.
“The Globe?” exclaimed Elliott, recollecting almost forgotten names. “Then you must know Jackson, the night editor. I used to work with him in Denver.”