The man champed with his teeth, bit and worried his thumb as though he were a dog and it a bone, and as it were jerked the worry at Sard. It is a passionate gesture which looks more effective than it sounds. Sard smiled at him. Sard was slightly to windward of the man and could speak to him without effort with the certainty of being heard.
“You will get blood-poisoning,” he said, “if you bite your thumb with those teeth.”
The man seemed to focus into a pair of flaming eyes; the balls of the eyes rolled upwards so as to leave nothing but glaring yellow, then they rolled down in a frenzy. He opened his mouth, grinned with clenched teeth, hissed like a snake and howled like a hyæna. He spat thrice at Sard, nodded at him, and then retreated along the freight-car top out of sight. Sard noticed then that another train-hand was watching him from the nearest freight-car to the rear of him. This man did not speak, and did not meet his eyes. When Sard looked at him the man dropped his eyelids and seemed to be looking at the ground, but in another instant he was watching again and making a motion that Sard should leave the cars. Sard could not see him so clearly as he had seen the other man, but he made out a look of shiftiness and hardness, a mixture of prison and the boxing-ring, yet tanned, as it were, or coloured with the fineness of endurance. A sort of glimmer of high quality showed in the pitiless evil mug, as in the faces of old soldiers, with bad records, who have been through great campaigns. Sard judged that this man was not an Occidental. There was a look of English or American about him. Then he did not speak nor threaten: he used neither curse nor club, only watched. Presently he caught Sard’s eyes and undoubtedly made the motion that Sard should leave the cars.
“Beat it, kid,” the man cried.
This seemed so unreasonable that Sard paid no heed to him: he looked the other way.
“Beat it,” the man cried. “Pasea.”
Sard looked at him; then looked away.
“Hell and Maria,” the man said, “if you ain’t got a gall!”
Perhaps in normal runs the train-hands on that freighter foregathered for talk, drink or cards in the after-car. Perhaps the three trucks in the middle of the train made the journey impossible on this occasion, or it may be that Sard, the unknown man sitting in the truck, with the look of one able to guard himself, made them think the norther not worth the facing. They did not attempt the journey. The train pounded and jangled on across the desert, in the ceaseless pelting and pitting of the sand. The train presently reached a part of the desert where the wind for some reason had more scope. Perhaps the line there crossed the mouth of some great gut in the distant Sierra. The wind suddenly rose in strength and voice, lifting the sand so that it looked like a smoke into which the train had to butt. “Ai, ai!” it cried, just as it cries in rigging, while the sand came over like sprays. Sard kept well ducked down under a tarpaulin. When he looked up from his place towards his left, he sometimes saw the train-hand watching him. Whenever their eyes met, the train-hand motioned to him to leave the cars. Presently the train-hand grew weary of such foolishness: he shouted something which Sard could not hear, and then beat his way aft, out of sight.
Sard knew enough about the train-hands on these freighters to be sure of evil from them. Hoboes had killed so many train-hands that now the train crews always carried clubs, which they used on any hoboes who were unable to pay their way or to defend themselves. Sard had no doubts about being able to defend himself, but that evil face abaft-all made him wonder how he was to get back across the desert to Las Palomas. How would he fare, he wondered, if the train-hands on the returning train were that sort of men? He realised that he was not now Sard Harker, the mate of a crack ship, but a ragged-looking rough-neck, dirty and unshaven, who would get “the hoboes’ deal, a bat on the head and six months’ road-gang.” He began to have misgivings about his future.