“I’ll take your time from now on.”
“Look here! I propose to go on and mind my own business!”
“Then you’re spoken for! I’ll tend to you before you get a chance to butt in on my business.”
He leaned back in his seat and pushed his coat aside, inviting my attention by a downward glance.
He was packing a gun on each hip’.
“I’ll give you about ten minutes’ recess to think the thing over,” he stated. “If you try to leave this train I’ll be after you!”
He went down the car, turned over a scat, and faced me.
I was in a fine way to attend to the business of Judge Kingsley and myself! Whether I went into that fellow’s scheme or did not go in, it seemed all the same. In those days, according to what I had read, they were very careless about handling firearms in some parts of the West, and it looked to me as if I had dropped into one of those sections. He took another pull from his flask. The uncertainty of what that intoxicated gentleman might feel impelled to do to me next, in the confusion of his fuddlement, made the shivers run up and down my back. In the ten anxious minutes that passed he pulled that flask four times, and every time he reached for it I made a motion to dodge under the seat. The damnable part of it was that nobody in the car was paying the least attention to us.
Then he came tottering up the aisle and lurched into the seat in front of me. Between two hiccups he sandwiched a threatening, “Well?” Plainly, he was well “pickled” and accordingly dangerous. And, on the other hand, there was a hope for me in his condition. I concluded I might as well be shot as scared to death. I couldn’t draw a deep breath as long as those guns were on him.
“Well, what say?” he repeated.