The engine driver, one arm extended to the throttle, a blue-smoking cigarette between his lips, leaned far out the cab and looked down at the uplifted hand of Jacinto Quesada. In that significantly uplifted hand of Jacinto Quesada was an unlighted cigarette.
Now, an American engineer would have passed unheeding by, with perhaps a curse for Jacinto Quesada as an arrant fool. Again, a French engineer might have called back: "It is a pleasure!" and thrown down a paper of matches. For, as it was plain to see, Jacinto Quesada was requesting, in pantomime, a spark to ignite his hopelessly dead slim cylinder of tobacco.
But the Spanish engine driver did neither of those two things. It is not that the Iberians are not as polite as the French; they are more polite and altogether more ceremonious. Know you that in Spain, and also in Mexico, it is considered something of an insult to proffer a man matches when he requests a light of you and you yourself are smoking. It is as though you consider him socially beneath you, when you proffer him matches.
The locomotive lumbered by. But the engine driver crowded forward on his seat; his arms worked; the whistle shrieked. And the train groaned and jolted, roared and banged to a full stop.
Passengers telescoped themselves out of windows, some knocked all a-scramble by the sudden halt, others pale and frightened. Those heads that protruded from fortunate windows saw the engine driver clamber down from his high turret, a lighted cigarette in his hand. And they saw spur forward to meet him, the dusty vaquero, in his mouth a cigarette that was dead.
The vaquero flung himself from his pony. He and the engine driver drew together. A hand of each met, became entwined. Their heads leaned close, the cigarettes between their teeth touching ends.
Suddenly the engine driver staggered away from the vaquero, his jaw dropping, his cigarette falling unheeded to the ground. A huge long-barrelled revolver in the hand of the vaquero was nuzzling his umbilicus.
"Aupa!" shouted the vaquero harshly. "Up!"
Prodding his belly persistently, the vaquero followed him back, step by step. The engine driver was suddenly enlightened. It was all a piece of herdsmen's buffoonery, a monstrous practical joke!
"Benito!" he roared, addressing his stoker in the cab above. "Benito, look down! Here is a vaquero who thinks himself a salteador de camino, a bandolero like the poor dead Pernales or that new man, Jacinto Quesada! Por los Clavos de Cristo! what a fool's idea!"