been cussin' things for keeps, thinking it was
knotted or caught. It was just you had hold of it. Don't you know
better'n that? Ain't you ever travelled before?"

The man addressed was stowing something away inside the breast of his
shirt. He did it with almost ostentatious deliberation, quietly eying
the brakeman before replying. Then, slowly readjusting the knot of a
fine black-silk necktie, so that its broad, flapping ends spread over
the coarser material of the garment, he slowly looked the justly
exasperated brakeman over from head to foot and as slowly and placidly
answered:

"Not more than about half around the world. As for your bell-cord, it
was knotted; it caught in that ring. I saw that someone was tugging and
trying to get it loose, so I swung up there and straightened it. Just
what you'd have done under the circumstances, I fancy."

The brakeman turned redder under the ruddy brown of his sun-tanned skin.
This was no raw "rookie" after all. In his own vernacular, as afterwards
expressed to the conductor, "I seen I was up ag'in' the real t'ing dis
time," but it was hard to admit it at the moment. Vexation had to have a
vent. The bell-cord no longer served. The supposed meddler had proved a
help. Something or somebody had to be the victim of the honest
brakeman's spleen, so, somewhat unluckily, as events determined, he took
it out on the company and that decrepit car, now buzzing along with much
complaint of axle and of bearing.

"Damn this old shake-down, anyhow!" said he. "The company ought to know
'nough not to have such things lyin' round loose. Some night it'll fall
to pieces and kill folks." And with this implied apology for his
aspersions of Recruit Foster, the brakeman bustled away.

But what he said was heard by more than one, and remembered when perhaps
he would have wished it forgotten. The delay at Ogden was supplemented
by a long halt before the setting of that blazing sun, necessitated by
the firing of the waste in the boxes of those long-neglected trucks. Far
back as the rearmost sleeper the sickening smell of burning, oil-steeped
packing drove feminine occupants to their satchels in search of
scent-bottles, and the men to such comfort as could be found in flasks
of bulkier make.

In the heart of the desert, with dust and desolation spreading far on
every hand, the long train had stopped to douse those foul-smelling
fires, and, while train-hands pried off the red-hot caps and dumped
buck