The man took a long pull at the depleted flask and returned it almost empty.
“Ach,” he grunted appreciatively. “That’s red eye! Bet you were drunk, boy, an’ thought ridin’ free was a picnic. Well, better come out o’ this and hustle up the track. They’s an empty box car about halfway up. You’ll see it ’cause one door’s open. An’ you’re God damn lucky, son. You’d just naturally a froze a lung off up here an’ maybe fell off an’ got winged. Shake a leg. Just time to make it. An’ hop off well outside the yards when we get to town in the mornin’. Understand? If you don’t you may see the judge.”
Before he had finished speaking Potter was stumbling frantically along the cinder track-side. In one end of the empty car was a little dirty straw and excelsior. Two minutes later he was asleep, jolting happily along the streets of paradise in a royal coach. An old man in a brakeman’s cap whom he took to be the king of the country sat beside him....
A sudden, wrenching jolt and the screaming of brakes woke him. Daylight filled the car, and in a moment he was out on his feet, recognizing the familiar outskirts of his native city. He plunged into the park, striding vigorously along over new-fallen crisp leaves, warming his body, which had been chilled through during his sleep, even in that protected corner. The woods were gay with the last of the autumn colour; the morning was dewy and mysterious under long corridors of trees. His day’s job seemed easy before him, such as it was, and beyond that he was too happy and thankful to speculate. Quite a trip, he thought, thoroughly surprised that he had attempted it and come through all right.
“If I hadn’t got potty, I wouldn’t be here,” he told himself, justifying thereby volumes of alcoholic adventures past and to come.
He looked down at his hands, his trousers, his shirt. He was filthy. It would never do to appear before Colonel Cobb with the grime of a hundred and forty miles of rough travel clinging to him. But this was the home town, good old home town! and he could get breakfast, new linen and a good wash without the outlay of a cent. He took the car downtown and went first to a store, then to a hotel. By ten o’clock he was breakfasting sumptuously and appeared fairly respectable.
Heretofore, Colonel Cobb had seemed in Potter’s mind a sort of complete symbol of good fellowship. The all-weather friend of his father for thirty years, Potter had heard everything there was to know about him that could with discretion be told. He was the old-fashioned type of publicity man, doing business largely through the medium of champagne and dinners. Open-handedness and good nature were traits which a half century of tradition had associated with his name.
A much older man than Potter’s father, Cobb wore a beard which was nearly white, but he was one of those veterans to whom a beard imparted an air of boldness and adventure rather than of piety or age. His costume was youngish, smart-looking, but deeply wrinkled by lounging ease. He greeted the young man cordially in his somewhat unpretentious and disorderly office and indicated an upholstered arm chair to him. Potter sank into it and the old man leaned back in his own to survey him.
“Well,” he said, “Johnny’s boys are growing up. Let’s see, are you the second or the third?”
“Third, Colonel.”