over the car.

"Gee," yawned the youngest of the three, stretching out lazily. "Isn't it
nearly twelve o'clock? I wonder when that dusky gentleman will come along
with the call to dinner."

"Always hungry," laughed one of the others. "The rest of us eat to live,
but Tom lives to eat."

"You've struck it there, Dick," assented the third. "You know they say
that no one has ever been able to eat a quail a day for thirty days hand
running, but I'd be willing to back Tom to do it."

"Well, I wouldn't quail at the prospect," began Tom complacently, and
then ducked as Dick made a pass at him.

"Even at that, I haven't got anything on you fellows," he went on, in an
aggrieved tone. "When you disciples of 'plain living and high thinking'
get at the dinner table, I notice that it soon becomes a case of high
living and plain thinking."

"Such low-brow insinuations deserve no answer," said Dick severely.
"Anyway," consulting his watch, "it's only half-past eleven, so you'll
have to curb the promptings of your grosser nature."

"No later than that?" groaned Tom. "I don't know when a morning has
seemed so long in passing."

"It _is_ a little slow. I suppose it's this blistering heat and the long
distance between stations. It's about time something happened to break
the monotony."

"Don't raise false hopes, Bert," said Tom, cynically. "Nothing ever
happens nowadays."

"Oh, I don't know," laughed Bert. "How about the Mexican bandits and the
Chinese pirates? Something certainly happened when we ran up against
those rascals."

"They were lively scraps, all right," admitted Tom, "but we had to go
out of the country to get them. In the little old United States, we've
got too much civilization. Everything is cut and dried and pared and
polished, until there are no rough edges left. Think of the fellows that
made this trip across the continent sixty years ago in their prairie
schooners, getting cross-eyed from looking for buffalo with one eye and
Indians with the other, feeling their scalp every five minutes to make
sure they still had it. That was life."

"Or death," put in Dick skeptically.

"Then look at us," went on Tom, not deigning to notice the interruption,
"rolling along smoothly at fifty miles an hour in a car that's like a
palace, with its cushioned seats and electric lights and library and
bath and soft beds and rich food and servants to wait upon us. We're
pampered children of luxury, all right, but I'm willing