"Mr. Glover! of all the hands! I'm not surprised you were chosen to show the sights. There's something happening in your hand every few minutes. Adventures, heart affairs, fortunes, perils--such a life-line, Mr. Glover. On my word there you are hanging by a hair--a hair--on the verge of eternity----"
"Oh, come, Louise," protested Mrs. Whitney. "Touch on lighter lines, please."
"Lighter lines! Why, Mr. Glover's heart-line is a perfect cañon." The laughter did not daunt her. "A perfect cañon. I've read about hands like this, but I never saw one. No more to-night, Mr. Glover, you are too exciting."
"But about hanging on the verge--has it anything to do with a lynching, do you think, Miss Donner?" asked Glover. "The hair rope might be a lariat----"
"Mr. Glover!"--the train conductor opened the car door. "Is Mr. Glover in this car?"
"May I be excused for a moment?" said Glover, rising.
"What did I tell you?" exclaimed Louise, "a telegram! Something has happened already."
At five o'clock that evening, snow was falling at Medicine Bend, but Callahan, as he studied the weather bulletins, found consolation in the fact that it was not raining, and resting his heels on a table littered with train-sheets he forced the draft on a shabby brier and meditated.
There were times when snow had been received with strong words at the Wickiup: but when summer fairly opened Callahan preferred snow to rain as strongly as he preferred genuine Lone Jack to the spurious compounds that flooded the Western market.
The chief element of speculation in his evening reflections was as to what was going on west of the range, for Callahan knew through cloudy experience that what happens on one side of a mountain chain is no evidence as to what is doing on the other--and by species of warm weather depravity that night something was happening west of the range.
"It is curious," mused Callahan, as Morrison, the head operator, handed him some McCloud messages--"curious, that we get nothing from Sleepy Cat."
Sleepy Cat, it should be explained, is a new town on the West End; not only that, but a division town, and though one may know something about the Mountain Division he may yet be puzzled at Callahan's mention of Sleepy Cat. When gold was found in the Pilot range and camps grew up and down Devil's Gap like mushrooms, a branch was run from Sleepy Cat through the Pilot country, and the tortoise-like way station became at once a place of importance. It takes its name from the neighboring mountain around the base of which winds the swift Rat River. At Sleepy Cat town the main line leaves the Rat, and if a tenderfoot brakeman ask a reservation buck why the mountain is called Sleepy Cat the Indian will answer, always the same, "It lets the Rat run away."