"Has a dark-faced thief in a plug hat with two holes in the top of it, gone out on the cars?" he shouted, and the spectators admitted that such a person boarded the train.
"Why didn't you come in two minutes earlier, Tom?" one of them inquired. "He lit out with two strangers. Has he been stealing something?"
"He's been doing worse, and I'd have been in on time, but that I stopped ten minutes to help freighter Louis cut loose the two live oxen left him," said the foreman, breathlessly. "One wheel came off his wagon going down the Clearwater Trail, and the whole blame outfit pitched over into a ravine. There's several thousand dollars' worth of our boring machines smashed up, and Louis, who has pretty well split his head, is cussing the man who took the cotter out of his wheel hub."
The two prospectors were heartily tired of their charge by the time they passed him off as the sick employé of an American firm, at the nearest station to the Washington border. When Black showed signs of waking up he was soothed with medicated liquor, and his guardians, who several times had high words with the conductor, at last unloaded him in a station hewn out of the forests encircling Puget Sound, where they managed to hoist him into a spring wagon. Black leaned against one of the men, for he was feeling distressfully ill. His head throbbed, his vision was hazy and his throat was dry. Blinking down at the rows of wooden houses among the firs, and the tall spars of vessels behind them, he said: "This isn't 'Frisco—not half big enough. Somebody made mistake somewhere. Say! Lemme out; I'm going back to the depot."
"You're coming along with us," was the decided answer. "Sit down at once before we make you."
Black slowly doubled up a still formidable fist, and grasping a rail, lurched to and fro unsteadily. "Lemme out 'fore I kill somebody. Claim rightsh of British citizensh," he said.
"You'll get them if you're not careful," was the threat, and the speaker jerked Black's feet from under him. "I was told to remind you if you made trouble that a sheriff on this side of the frontier had some papers describing you. There's one or two patrolmen yonder handy."
"It was an accident," temporized Black, endeavoring to pull his scattered wits together.
"Juss so!" was the answer, given with a gesture of indifference. "I was only told a name for the patrolmen, and to remind you that a man, who knows all about it, has got his eye on you."
Black leered upon him with drunken cunning, then his face grew stolid, and he said nothing further until the wagon drew up in a by-street, before a door, hung across with quaint signboards of Chinese characters. The door opened and closed behind him when his companions knocked, and Black, who recognized a curious sour smell, choked out, "Gimme long drink of ice watah!"