And I handed him over one of my two remaining olives. He was as innocent as I, but not quite so self-controlled. Even as I had done, he too plumped the olive into his mouth, bit into it—and forthwith exploded. I shall not repeat here the appeal to Heaven that issued from his lips along with the offending olive itself. Suffice it to say that although there were several ladies present it was verbally adequate. And then out of the depths of the car, from a physical giant lolling at ease in a plush-covered arm chair, came a deep, basso-profundo voice.
"I'd kill any man who did that to me!" it said, with a vicious aspirate at the beginning of the word kill.
But there was no murder done, and before night as our train rolled over into Nevada we were as happy a family as one will be likely to find under any kind of roof in the far-off days of the millennium.
It is not often that we look for fine literary and other distinctions in the minds of men engaged in the humbler pursuits of life, and yet from two of my chance acquaintances en route, both barbers, I have gathered subtleties of line that have remained with me impressively ever since. The first of these worthy toilers and subconscious philosophers I discovered in a Chicago hotel in 1905. I was on my way into Iowa for a week of one-night stands, having come almost directly from one of the most delightful of my literary opportunities—Colonel George Harvey's dinner in honor of Mark Twain's seventieth birthday.
The stains of travel needed to be removed, and I sought the aid of the hero of my tale, a stocky little chap, whose face suggested an ancestry part Spanish and part East Side New York. I will say that judged externally I should not have cared to meet him in a dark alley after midnight; but inwardly he turned out to be a pretty good sort of fellow. His speech was pure vernacular.
As he was cutting my hair I glanced over the supplement to that week's issue of "Harper's Weekly," at that time under Harvey's control, devoted to a full account of the Mark Twain dinner both in picture and in text. In turning over the leaves to see what kind of melon-shaped head the flashlight photographer had given me I came upon the counterfeit presentment of the group of which I had been a member, and was relieved to find that the print had treated me fairly well, and that instead of looking like a cross between a professional gambler and a train robber, as most of my published portraits have made me appear, the thing was recognizable, and in certain unsuspecting quarters might enable me to pass as a reputable citizen. The snipping of the scissors back of my ear suddenly ceased as I gazed upon my alleged "liniments"—as an old friend of mine used to call them—and the barber's voice broke the stillness.
"Say," he said, pointing with the scissors point to the portrait of myself, "that guy looks sump'n like you, don't he?"
"He ought to," said I. "Me and him's the same guy."
"Well whaddyer know about that!" he ejaculated. "Really?"
"Yep," said I.