“Matter of taste,” observed the Second Officer, blowing blue rings.
“I guess so; and I’ve a taste for knowing how you came,” said the young Pressman, “to part with that twenty foot of rail.”
“Carried away,” said the Second Officer.
“I kin see that,” retorted the visitor.
“It was carried away,” said the Second Officer, “by an elephant.”
“A pet you had running about aboard?” queried the Pressman, with imperturbable coolness.
“A passenger,” returned the Second Officer, with equal calm.
There was a snap, and the Pressman’s notebook was open on his knee. The pencil vibrated over the virgin page, when a curious utterance, between a wail, a cough, and a roar, made the hand that held it start.
“Yarr-rr! Ohowgh! Yarr!” The melancholy sound came from without, borne on the cool breeze of a late afternoon in March, through the open ventilators.
“Might that,” queried the young gentleman of the Press, “be an expression of opinion on the part of the elephant?”