“Very well, then; I’ll walk along the line.”
“Hell, Kid,” the man said, “it’s a hundred and seven miles, desert all the way; and anyone seeing you on the silver line would shoot you sure as hell.”
“What am I to do then?”
“You could get a job in the Chicuna mine, sinking the new shaft. But I guess you’d have to stay a fortnight, before you touched your wad: they always hold back the first week. After that you could go in on the cars to Las Palomas. No, you couldn’t neither. You’d have to stay another week, or six days. They ain’t only but one train a week. They call her the Flying Fornicator or the Hop to Whoredom. I guess she’s about rightly christened.”
“I can’t wait,” Sard said, “I must start back right away. I’ll walk it. If I can’t walk along the line, I’ll shape a course of my own across the desert.”
“Watcha going to eat? Watcha going to drink? Kid, you can’t do it. Besides there’s snakes in the desert. Even the Jackarillers didn’t cross the desert from here. No, Kid; cut it right out; and go up to the Chicuna to-morrow before the whistle. It will be the quickest in the end. Here’s the boss; he’ll tell you the same.”
The boss came in with a demijohn and funnel; he had been doctoring cider with red pepper to serve as whisky for the later drinks of the evening. He was a very tall, fair-haired, sandy-moustached man, with a cold and evil blue eye. He carried a gun in front as well as one in a hip pocket. He nodded at the train-hand and cast an eye over Sard. He was in the business which brings men much into touch with the broken. He summed up Sard at once as being “on his uppers,” or penniless.
“Pitch,” the train-hand called. “ ’Low me to introduce my friend. What did you say your name was, Kid?”
“Harker.”
“Mr. Harker. Mr. Pitch Hanssen.”