“So you’re acquainted with him! He’s got mines. I’ve seen ’em. If you represent any Eastern parties, tell ’em not to drop their dollars down old Adams’s hole in the ground. He ain’t the inexperienced juniper he looks. Him and me’s been acquainted these thirty years. People claim it was Cyclone Bill held up the Ehrenberg stage. Well, I guess I’ll be seeing how the boys are getting along.”
With that he moved away. A loud disturbance of chairs and broken glass had set up in the house across the railroad, and I watched the proprietor shamble from me with his deliberate gait towards the establishment that paid him best. He had left me possessor of much incomplete knowledge, and I waited for him, pacing the platform; but he did not return, and as I judged it inexpedient to follow him, I went to my bed on the tourist side of the track.
In the morning the stage went early, and as our road seemed to promise but little variety—I could see nothing but an empty plain—I was glad to find my single fellow-passenger a man inclined to talk. I did not like his mustache, which was too large for his face, nor his too careful civility and arrangement of words; but he was genial to excess, and thoughtful of my comfort.
“I beg you will not allow my valise to incommode you,” was one of his first remarks; and I liked this consideration better than any Mr. Mowry had shown me. “I fear you will detect much initial primitiveness in our methods of transportation,” he said.
This again called for gracious assurances on my part, and for a while our polite phrases balanced to corners until I was mentally winded keeping up such a pace of manners. The train had just brought him from Tucson, he told me, and would I indulge? On this we shared and complimented each other’s whiskey.
“From your flask I take it that you are a Gentile,” said he, smiling.
“If you mean tenderfoot,” said I, “let me confess at once that flask and owner are from the East, and brand-new in Arizona.”
“I mean you’re not a Mormon. Most strangers to me up this way are. But they carry their liquor in a plain flat bottle like this.”