Sagged down in his seat beside the Hindoo, the Wildcat reviewed a tolerably measly past.
"How come?"
There was no accounting for what white men would do to a boy, but somewhere in the jumble the Wildcat sensed that he had been the victim of a mistake.
"Mebbe I's headed fo' jail 'count o' runnin' past de man at de gates."
After a thirty-minute delay at Granger the Wildcat saw a train leave the yards. On the platform of the observation car, surrounded by half a dozen Blue Fezant Nobles of the Mysterious Mecca, he saw Lily speeding away into an isolated future.
"Lily, you hoodoo, good-bye. Lady Luck, here I is."
CHAPTER X
1.
In the early days of detachable cuffs and ten-cent whisky there had been a difference of opinion manifest in the railroad surveying party at Granger.
Part of the gang headed northward to the salmon country; the rest of them blazed a trail to the southwest, where the sand fleas live on artichokes.