Over the miles official carelessness rode in the carload of bad actors. Only when the train stopped were the guards vigilant.
Sagged down in his seat beside the Hindoo, the Wildcat reviewed a tolerably measly past.
There was no accounting for what white men would do to a boy, but somewhere in the jumble the Wildcat sensed that he had been the victim of a mistake.
"Mebbe I's headed fo' jail 'count o' runnin' past de man at de gates."
After a thirty-minute delay at Granger the Wildcat saw a train leave the yards. On the platform of the observation car, surrounded by half a dozen Blue Fezant Nobles of the Mysterious Mecca, he saw Lily speeding away into an isolated future.
"Lily, you hoodoo, good-bye. Lady Luck, here I is."
In the early days of detachable cuffs and ten-cent whisky there had been a difference of opinion manifest in the railroad surveying party at Granger.
Part of the gang headed northward to the salmon country; the rest of them blazed a trail to the southwest, where the sand fleas live on artichokes.
Lily and her escort were headed southwest towards San Francisco. Presently the Wildcat's car was cut into a train whose trail led northward through Idaho and Oregon.
Lady Luck meanwhile had a hard time keeping up. Exhausted finally with her efforts, she set the stage a few hundred miles ahead and lay down and went to sleep. While she was sleeping a pair of hard boiled actors in the drama rummaged around in the woodshed back of a log house near the banks of the Columbia river.
Pete, a skinny character with ears like a loving cup, raked three wheat sacks out of a pile of lumber.
Into two of these sacks he cut a pair of holes two inches in diameter and about four inches apart. The third sack he left intact. He handed one of the sacks to his partner.
A fat bad actor by the name of Bill slipped the sack over his head. "Little narrow between the eyes."
Three hours later these two agents of Lady Luck engaged in a little hard work in their search for easy money. The product of their energy took shape in the form of a pyramid of old ties piled between the rails of the line over which the Wildcat was approaching in his twelve-wheeled cage.
Ten minutes before the train was due and while her crossing whistles could be heard in the dusk five miles up-stream, the two bad actors scrambled up the south bank of the Columbia. The skinny one poured a quart bottle of coal oil on the pile of ties and lighted it. The fat man lighted a cigarette.