The Man Who Talked Too Much (ePub)

Excerpt: The Westbound Overland on the Santa Fe Railway, although doing its splendid fifty miles an hour, seemed to two of its passengers to be moving at a snail?s pace; for the journey ahead of them was long, and their destination, which was far northward from San Francisco, the only spot on earth worth reaching. To increase boredom they had for so long been partners and fellow adventurers that all ordinary topics of conversation between them had long been exhausted, and the barren scenery through which they passed was too familiar to be worthy of interest. Furthermore, they had, but a few days previously, escaped from a certain district in Mexico where for a brief time they had gambled their lives, and were still too glad of escape to indulge in foolish conversation. The veriest fool could not have mistaken them for other than what they were; miners, prospectors, men of still places where life is crude and hard. There was nothing to distinguish them or attract a second glance, other than their incongruity of size; for one was a magnificent giant, and the other a blocky, stocky runt, with shoulders much too large for his stature and a flaming red head that seemed to have defied even the bleaching of the sun. That these two were known to frontiersmen and men of their ilk, over many thousands of miles, as ?David and Goliath,? meant nothing to them, nor to any of their fellow passengers; but that they had casually reversed a seat in the smoking car and thus sprawled over two seats instead of one did, as a magnet, attract the attention of a man who wandered inward with a very large and very new alligator-skin suit case that he dropped in the aisle beside them.