Loring took a deep pull at the flask.
“Hey, Chink, have some?” continued McKay.
Wah smiled and shook his head.
“Don’t drink, eh? Well, I’ll bet then that you are strong on dope,” said McKay, as he returned the flask to his pocket.
Night began to turn the color of the hills to a rich cobalt. Now and then the train crawled past shacks whose evening fires were beginning to twinkle in the dusk. Little camps scattered in the niches of the foothills showed gray and blurred. Jagged masses of rock, broken by cuts and hollows, now overshadowed the train. Giant cacti, growing at impossible angles from pinnacles and crevasses, loomed against the sky line. As the hills shut in, the roar of the train echoed of a sudden louder and louder where the desert runs flat as a board to the hills, and then with no transition becomes the hills.
“Only fifteen miles more now, boys,” sang out McKay; “but it may take two hours,” he added under his breath.
Cheered by this announcement, one of the Mexicans groped under his seat and produced a large nondescript bundle, which, after sundry cuttings of string, and unwrapping of paper, resolved itself into a guitar. Then, after fishing in his pockets, he produced a mouth-organ with two clamps attached. Loring, for want of better occupation, watched him. The man deftly fastened the harmonica to the edge of the guitar. Then slinging the dirty red guitar ribbon over his neck, he played a few warning chords. When the attention of all was fixed upon him, he bent his head over the mouth-organ, and strumming the guitar accompaniment with sweeping strokes, rendered a selection that had once been “A Georgia Camp-Meeting.” The applause being generous, the artist threw himself into the spirit of his performance.
“Thees time—with variations,” he exclaimed excitedly. And they were variations!
McKay regarded his flock with genial interest.
“Ain’t he the musical boy, though?” he observed to Loring.