XVIII—THE ECCENTRICITIES OF ROYAL CITY
I’LL confess that it took me a little while to screw up my resolution to the point where I could tell myself that I was entirely ready and willing to meet Ike Dawlin in the circle of his associates.
We had left behind us brown fields where wheat grew, and had passed through the Idaho prune-orchards—a brakeman told me they were prune-orchards. We had come into the hill country and the railroad wriggled its way along the foot of the canon.
I took it for granted that Mr. Dragg proposed to stay with me. Every little while he came and set his nose against the glass of the car’s forward door and glared at me. When we stopped at a station I stuck my head out of the window and made sure that he did not leave the train. The two of us were playing a sort of “even Stephen” game—silent peek-a-boo. I kept carefully away from Judge Kingsley, for I did not care to have Dragg report that I was in the company of an elderly man with a roll of chin-whiskers; Mr. Dawlin might recognize the description and take alarm.
The judge sat close to the window, wrapped in his cloak, and scowled up at the canon’s walls closing in behind as the railroad wound along. He looked as if he felt like a man headed for the innermost chambers of tophet, with the doors slamming behind him. As the hills shut in to the north, my feelings were of that sort, anyway!
And so night came!
I had been asking a lot of questions of that obliging brakeman. My folder named a terminus of the road and I had paid to that point, but I learned that the railroad had been stretched along six or eight miles farther down the canon so as to serve a mushroom town which was the depot for a freshly discovered mining section.
When the train stopped at the old terminus, both Mr. Dragg and I found ourselves very curious in regard to each other; had it not been for the glass in the car door we would have bumped noses when we hurried to make mutual inspection. But he stayed on the train—and so did I.