"Well, the worst I can say of him is, he's the kind of man that doesn't lift the plug out when he's through with the basin."
He liked this so well that he wished he had thought of it in time to crack it over Ashton's head. He decided to hand it to him anyway. He forgot that the cardinal rule for repartee, is "Better never than late."
As he swung out of the men's room he was buttonholed by an individual new to the little Trans-American colony. One of the camp-followers and sutlers who prosper round the edges of all great enterprises had waylaid him on the way to the battleground of marital freedom.
The stranger had got on at an earlier stop and worked his way through the train to the car named "Snowdrop." Wellington was his first victim here. His pushing manner, the almost vulture-like rapacity of his gleaming eyes, and the very vulturine contour of his profile, his palmy gestures, his thick lisp, and everything about him gave Wellington his immediate pedigree.
It ill behooves Christendom to need reminding that the Jewish race has adorned and still adorns humanity with some of its noblest specimens; but this interloper was of the type that must have irritated Voltaire into answering the platitude that the Jews are God's chosen people with that other platitude, "Tastes differ."
Little Jimmie Wellington, hot in pursuit of Ashton, found himself checked in spite of himself; in spite of himself deposited somehow into a seat, and in spite of himself confronted with a curvilinear person, who said:
"Excoose, pleass! but are you gettink off at R-r-reno?"
"I am," Wellington answered, curtly, essaying to rise, only to be delicately restored to his place with a gesture and a phrase:
"Then you neet me."