We droned along in one of those fits of despondency peculiar to trains that have an immensity of flat ground in which to pick up their lost time.
The night was a lovely one, hot, with a bright moon silvering the prairie, and trying vainly to throw shadows in a shadowless space. In a meditative mood, I lounged on the platform against the open door of the smoking car, and it seemed to me that I was taking a lesson in the comprehension of infinity. A rolling plain as far as the eye could reach—not a tree—not a house—as limitless and as empty as the sky itself.
A peculiar feeling of rest and freedom at first possessed me; I was, or thought I was, beginning to understand many things hitherto unrevealed, to have a sympathy with Simon Stylites, and an appreciation of ; but soon a wild desire to project myself indefinitely into space seized upon me. The moonlight and the vastness were getting into my brain—a little more, and I might have leapt from the train, and run until nature or prairie dog holes should assert their influence upon me;—and then with a saving grace, a couple of coyotes appeared from behind a hillock, and played with their tails in the moonlight—and the spell was broken.
I became conscious that my cigar was out, that the mosquitoes were annoyingly attentive. Better to be a limited being in a smoking car and not itch, than to be an unlimited being outside it and itch most 'demnibly.' I went back into the smoking-room.
Empty, thank heaven—no professionals from the Golden City to talk faro and rowdyism; no commercials to bombard one with down Eastern brag, the decline of Winnipeg, or the future of Vancouver and the C. P. R.; no globe-trotting sportsman to bewail his luck in the Rockies, or abuse the British Columbian for a liar.
'Empty, thank God.'
'Take a light, sir?' said a soft, rather high pitched, drawling voice under my left elbow. I jumped, and, to disguise it, smote my cheek, where a mosquito might have been, but was not.
A man of about forty, a long figure in a sleeping suit, with a lean, brown, clean-shaven face, courteously bending forward, held towards me the lighted end of a cigar.
'Thanks very much, sir; delighted to find I'm not alone.'
Not empty, thank God; ' said Mr Dick Denver, in an unmoved voice.
'My dear sir,' said I, sitting down next to him, 'I have dreamed of that remark, if I'd seen you; but you were so completely tucked away in that corner, that I'd no idea you were here, and I must confess I was uncommonly glad not to see our 'Frisco friends, or the bummers' { Anglice commercial travellers).
'Guess you're right; they are kind of tiring.'
'What beats me,' I went on, 'is the way people like that, who really have nothing to say, insist upon saying it, and, by Gad, enjoy saying it, and are certain you enjoy hearing them say it, and set you down as a condemned fool if you don't say it yourselves.'
'Right,' said Mr Denver; 'for a man that spreads himself around to be dull,-give me a woman first, and then a bummer. And yet,' he went on meditatively, 'there are some profoundly interesting beetles amongst that last tribe; and—amongst the other too.' He sighed, and relapsed into the silent puffing of his cigar. I had not travelled from Montreal nearly to Calgary with Mr Denver without discovering that he was a silent man on all subjects, and on the subject of women a dumb, and apparently a deaf image. Try him upon the subject of 'bummers' the oyster might open for once, I thought, but without much hope.
'Did you ever have anything to do with any curious specimen?' I said carelessly.
'Some,' he said; 'one mainly—Irishman—he travelled in wine; I guess he was the smartest coon I ever struck, but no head—or rather too much head, like a glass of stout'
'All Irishmen are like that,' I said, sententiously and untruthfully; then, with a cautious insertion of the opener, 'what was his name?'
'Kinahan; we called him Kinjan,' and—more to himself than to me—'Jupiter! I was in the tightest kind of a hole with that cuss and one other.'
'Really tight?' said I.
'Never tighter, except about three times, and those I don't take much stock in talking of.'
'Women?' I said hardily. He nodded.
'And others,' he added, as if he had thereby over-committed himself.
'It seems to me,' said I, feeling the opener deepening in the shell, 'you don't "take much stock" in talking of anything, considering that you really have got something to say; tell me this yarn of Kinjan, and be a benefactor to a poor sleep-forsaken devil.'
Mr Denver chewed the end of his cigar.
'Bore you world without end,' he said.
'Try me,' I besought.