Though he was far enough from realizing it, his education and the Eastern environment had given him a touch of Old-World insularity. The through sleeper in which he had his allotment of space was well filled, and there were the usual opportunities for the making of passing acquaintanceships in the smoking-compartment. But it was not until the second day, after the dining-car luncheon and its aftermath of a well-chosen cigar had broken down some of the barriers of the acquired reserve, that he fell into talk with the prosperous-looking gentleman who had seized upon the only chair in the smoking-compartment--a man whose thin, hawk-like face, narrowly set eyes, and uneasy manner were singularly out of keeping with the fashionable cut of his clothes, with his liberal tips, and with the display of jewelry on his watch-fob.
At first the conversation was baldly desultory, as it was bound to be, with an escaped lover, whose disappointment was still rasping him like a newly devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half of it. The hawk-faced one, who had boarded the train at Omaha and whose section was directly opposite Blount's, defined himself as a mine-owner whose property, vaguely located as somewhere "in the mountains," was involved in litigation.
It was the reference to the litigation which first drew Blount beyond the boundaries of the commonplaces. Oddly enough, considering the fact that his planned-for Eastern career would have given him little occasion to dip into the mining codes, he had specialized somewhat in mining law. Hence, when the hawk-faced man had told his story, Blount found himself thawing out sufficiently to be suggestively helpful to the man who had apparently purchased more trouble than profits in his mining ventures.
Into the cleft thus opened by the axe of human sympathy the man in the wicker chair presently inserted a wedge of cautious inquiry touching another matter. In addition to his mining ventures he had been making investments in timber-lands, or, rather, in certain lumber companies operating "in the mountains"--bad investments, he feared, since the Government had lately taken such a decided stand against the cutting of timber in the mountain-land reserves and water-sheds. Was it likely, he asked, that the talk would materialize in restraining action? If so, he was in the hole again--worse off than he should be if his mining lawsuits should go against him.