The three days went all too quickly, thanks to Miss Cullen, and by the end of that time I began to understand what love really meant to a chap, and how men could come to kill each other for it.  For a fairly sensible, hard-headed fellow it was pretty quick work, I acknowledge; but let any man have seven years of Western life without seeing a woman worth speaking of, and then meet Miss Cullen, and if he didn’t do as I did, I wouldn’t trust him on the tailboard of a locomotive, for I should put him down as defective both in eyesight and in intellect.

CHAPTER II

THE HOLDING-UP OF OVERLAND NO. 3

On the third day a despatch came from Frederic Cullen telling his father he would join us at Lamy on No. 8 that evening.  I at once ordered 97 and 218 coupled to the connecting train, and in an hour we were back on the main line.  While waiting for the overland to arrive, Mr. Cullen asked me to do something which, as it later proved to have considerable bearing on the events of that night, is worth mentioning, trivial as it seems.  When I had first joined the party, I had given orders for 97 to be kicked in between the main string and their special, so as not to deprive the occupants of 218 of the view from their observation saloon and balcony platform.  Mr. Cullen came to me now and asked me to reverse the arrangement and make my car the tail end.  I was giving orders for the splitting and kicking in when No. 3 arrived, and thus did not see the greeting of Frederic Cullen and his family.  When I joined them, his father told me that the high altitude had knocked his son up so, that he had to be helped from the ordinary sleeper to the special and had gone to bed immediately.  Out West we have to know something of medicine, and my car had its chest of drugs:  so I took some tablets and went into his state-room.  Frederic was like his brother in appearance, though not in manner, having a quick, alert way.  He was breathing with such difficulty that I was almost tempted to give him nitroglycerin, instead of strychnine, but he said he would be all right as soon as he became accustomed to the rarefied air, quite pooh-poohing my suggestion that he take No. 2 back to Trinidad; and while I was still urging, the train started.  Leaving him the vials of digitalis and strychnine, therefore, I went back, and dined solus on my own car, indulging at the end in a cigar, the smoke of which would keep turning into pictures of Miss Cullen.  I have thought about those pictures since then, and have concluded that when cigar-smoke behaves like that, a man might as well read his destiny in it, for it can mean only one thing.

After enjoying the combination, I went to No. 218 to have a look at the son, and found that the heart tonics had benefited him considerably.  On leaving him, I went to the dining-room, where the rest of the party were still at dinner, to ask that the invalid have a strong cup of coffee, and after delivering my request Mr. Cullen asked me to join them in a cigar.  This I did gladly, for a cigar and Miss Cullen’s society were even pleasanter than a cigar and Miss Cullen’s pictures, because the pictures never quite did her justice, and, besides, didn’t talk.