"I'm pretty far ahead now, I guess," he said. At Reno he boarded a
south-bound freight on the line of the Carson and Colorado railroad,
paying for a passage in the caboose. "Freights don' run on schedule
time," he muttered, "and a conductor on a passenger train makes it his
business to study faces. I'll stay with this train as far as it goes."
The freight worked slowly southward, through western Nevada, the country
becoming hourly more and more desolate and abandoned. After leaving
Walker Lake the sage-brush country began, and the freight rolled heavily
over tracks that threw off visible layers of heat. At times it stopped
whole half days on sidings or by water tanks, and the engineer and
fireman came back to the caboose and played poker with the conductor and
train crew. The dentist sat apart, behind the stove, smoking pipe after
pipe of cheap tobacco. Sometimes he joined in the poker games. He
had learned poker when a boy at the mine, and after a few deals his
knowledge returned to him; but for the most part he was taciturn and
unsociable, and rarely spoke to the others unless spoken to first. The
crew recognized the type, and the impression gained ground among them
that he had "done for" a livery-stable keeper at Truckee and was trying
to get down into Arizona.
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