“I’ve left all my jewelry behind, except my watch,” she said, “and that I hide every night. So I really hope we’ll be held up, it would be such an adventure.”
“There isn’t any chance of it, Miss Cullen,” I told her; “and if we were, you probably wouldn’t even know that it was happening, but would sleep right through it.”
“Wouldn’t they try to get our money and our watches?” she demanded.
I told her no, and explained that the express- and mail-cars were the only ones to which the road agents paid any attention. She wanted to know the way it was done: so I described to her how sometimes the train was flagged by a danger signal, and when it had slowed down the runner found himself covered by armed men; or how a gang would board the train, one by one, at way stations, and then, when the time came, steal forward, secure the express agent and postal clerk, climb over the tender, and compel the runner to stop the train at some lonely spot on the road. She made me tell her all the details of such robberies as I knew about, and, though I had never been concerned in any, I was able to describe several, which, as they were monotonously alike, I confess I colored up a bit here and there, in an attempt to make them interesting to her. I seemed to succeed, for she kept the subject going even after we had left the table and were smoking our cigars in the observation saloon. Lord Ralles had a lot to say about the American lack of courage in letting trains containing twenty and thirty men be held up by half a dozen robbers.
“Why,” he ejaculated, “my brother and I each have a double express with us, and do you think we’d sit still in our seats? No. Hang me if we wouldn’t pot something.”
“You might,” I laughed, a little nettled, I confess, by his speech, “but I’m afraid it would be yourselves.”
“Aw, you fancy resistance impossible?” drawled Albert Cullen.
“It has been tried,” I answered, “and without success. You can see it’s like all surprises. One side is prepared before the other side knows there is danger. Without regard to relative numbers, the odds are all in favor of the road agents.”
“But I wouldn’t sit still, whatever the odds,” asserted his lordship. “And no Englishman would.”
“Well, Lord Ralles,” I said, “I hope for your sake, then, that you’ll never be in a hold-up, for I should feel about you as the runner of a locomotive did when the old lady asked him if it wasn’t very painful to him to run over people. ‘Yes, madam,’ he sadly replied: ‘there is nothing musses an engine up so.’”