“So I see.”
“Well, say now, how’d you know I was Amur’can?”
“By your accent; one would scarcely make the mistake of taking you for anything else.”
“Well, say, you’re smart enough to be an Amur’can, too, at that rate. Anyhow, I’m mighty glad to see you, for since I parted with my friend, who went to Port Arthur, I ain’t had a chance of hearin’ a language that anyone could understand. I’m out to beat the record round the world for the New York ——, and if I only make it in Japan I’ll beat the previous best by exactly twelve days.”
He then related to me how he had left New York and travelled viâ Liverpool, London, Dover, Ostend, Berlin, Moscow, and the Trans-Siberian Railway to Dalny; and here he was, bound for Nagasaki, Japan, where he would take the train for Yokohama, and thence travel by the Empress of India to Vancouver, by the Canadian Pacific Railway to Quebec, and from there back to New York.
“I’m going to publish a book on the trip, and I’ve got about enough information to fill it already. Say, though, my wife’ll be glad to see me back again in New York. She’s a beautiful woman, my wife. She’s tall and dark, and has a straight-front figure—a woman can’t be fashionable without a straight-front figure—and when she walks she leans forward like a kangaroo and does the glide. Ever seen it? I tell you, sir, there’s nuthin’ like it; and it takes a New York girl to do it properly, and there ain’t many girls in New York as can lick my wife at walkin’. I’ll introduce you to her sometime if I ever see you in New York, an’ if you don’t say she’s about the slickest thing you ever saw in skirts, well, you ain’t much of a judge o’ weather.
“Say, now that I come to look at you, I’ve seen you before, I guess,” he rattled on. “Wasn’t you the chap that come rushin’ on to the platform at Mukden just as our train was movin’ out of the station?”
I acknowledged that I was. Owing to the impossibility of obtaining any reliable information in the town, several miles away, as to the time of departure of the trains, I had reached the station, to my great chagrin, just in time to see the train de luxe move away from the platform. I had thus been compelled to take a slow and very dirty train three hours later, and hence the reason of my nearly missing the boat at Dalny.
“Looks as if cuttin’ things fine was rather in your line, eh? Say, though, you couldn’t take risks like that if you was doin’ a record round the world. You nearly missed this boat. I was watchin’ you, and if you’d been on my job you’d have perspired like a pig as you was drivin’ up to the wharf, with that woolly-faced pirate yellin’ and thrashin’ them horses to soapsuds, and the steamer whistle blowin’ and the whole durned push hollerin’ and monkeyin’ with the ropes of the gangway. You’d have had your heart in your boots, young feller, if you’d been on my lay-out and seen how near you came to botchin’ up the whole job.
“And talkin’ of botchin’ jobs, if this steamer doesn’t arrive in Nagasaki in time to catch the eight o’clock train on Thursday, I’m done. That train’ll just give me time to catch the Empress at Yokohama. If I miss it there ain’t another boat until the Gaelic for San Francisco, nine days later, and as that’s a slower route I’ll be fourteen days longer than if I catch the Empress. Gee whiz, though, it’ll break my wife’s heart if I don’t clip that twelve days off the record. She and I figured this whole thing out together months before I started.