“Oh, I’m so glad!” Darting into her room, she came running back with a fat roll of bills. “I felt dreadfully, yesterday, because you and Mr. Sliver and Mr. Jake had to wear your working-clothes. While you are in El Paso I want you to buy a nice suit apiece.”
Now fine raiment, even of the vogue of the Western cow towns, was the last thing in the world that Bull’s heart desired. But she looked so pretty in her earnestness, he found it hard to refuse. His laugh rumbled through the patio.
“Now that’s real nice of you. But back up at the mine we’ve all got store clothes to burn. One o’ these days, when the work ain’t so pressing, Sliver kin ride over an’ get ’em. Fifty’ll be all I’ll need.”
“Oh dear!” she gave in, with a little disappointed sigh. “I did want to do something; you’ve all been so kind.”
But she made up for the disappointment by busy preparations for his comfort. She packed her own suit-case with socks and clean shirts, then bossed the job while her criadas brushed and curried and sponged him. After tying one of her father’s cravats around his neck she turned him round and round like a mother inspecting a school-boy, finally dismissed him with a gentle pat.
On the Mexican Central, trains were running, as Bull put it, “be how an’ when,” but fortune favored him. Catching a mixed freight and passenger at the burned station that midnight, he camped down on the rear platform to avoid the fetor of unwashed bodies and tobacco smoke exhaled by the mixture of peones, revolutionary soldiers, and fat Mexican comerciantes that jammed the only first-class car. When he fell asleep he could make out the dim outlines of another form that evolved under the light of the following morning into an American war correspondent.
“’Morning, friend,” he greeted Bull, cordially. “My name is Naylor. Yours? Glad to meet you, Mr. Perrin. Now if you’ll tip this water-bottle for me, I’ll do the same by you, and we can take off at least one layer of dust and cinders.”
The operations placed them at once on terms that would have taken years to establish in civilization’s cultured circles. Before it was over, Bull had learned that his companion was “on a little pasear between revolutionary battles,” and had given, in return, some inkling of his own affairs. The young fellow’s lithe, spare figure, clean face, fearless gray eyes, impressed him strongly, and while the train ambled along through the scrubby desert of sand and cactus toward Juarez, he eyed and estimated and measured him with a care that attracted, at last, the other’s attention.
“Hey!” he demanded. “Is my nose out of plumb, or what?”
Bull warded off offense with the truth. “I happened to be looking for a man about your size. Any chance of your changing your job?”