Loring stood aside and put up his eye-glasses.  It was his first sight near at hand of the untrammeled West in puris naturalibus, and he was finding the spectacle both instructive and diverting.  Looking to Kent for fellowship he saw that his companion was holding himself stiffly aloof; also, he remarked that none of the boisterous partizans flung a word of recognition in Kent’s direction.

“Don’t you know any of them?” he asked.

Kent’s reply was lost in the deep-chested bull-bellow of a cattleman from the Rio Blanco.

“Hold on a minute, boys, before you scatter!  Line up here, and let’s give three cheers and a tail-twister for next-Governor Bucks!  Now, then—­everybody!  Hip, hip——­”

The ripping crash of the cheer jarred Loring’s eye-glasses from their hold, and he replaced them with a smile.  Four times the ear-splitting shout went up, and as the echoes of the “tiger” trailed off into silence the stentorian voice was lifted again.

“Good enough!  Now, then; three groans for the land syndicates, alien mortgagees, and the Western Pacific Railroad, by grabs! and to hell with ’em!”

The responsive clamor was a thing to be acutely remembered—­sustained, long-drawn, vindictive; a nerve-wrenching pandemonium of groans, yelpings and cat-calls, in the midst of which the partizans shuffled into loose marching order and tramped away townward.

“That answers your question, doesn’t it?” said Kent, smiling sourly.  “If not, I can set it out for you in words.  The Western Pacific is the best-hated corporation this side of the Mississippi, and I am its local attorney.”

“I don’t envy you,” said Loring.  “I had no idea the opposition crystallized itself in any such concrete ill will.  You must have the whole weight of public sentiment against you in any railroad litigation.”

“I do,” said Kent, simply.  “If every complainant against us had the right to pack his own jury, we couldn’t fare worse.”

“What is at the bottom of it?  Is it our pricking of the Gaston bubble by building on to the capital?”

“Oh, no; it’s much more personal to these shouters.  As you may, or may not, know, our line—­like every other western railroad with no competition—­has for its motto, ‘All the tariff the traffic will stand,’ and it bleeds the country accordingly.  But we are forgetting your train.  Shall we go and see how late it is?”

II

A MAN OF THE PEOPLE

Train Number Three, the Western Flyer, was late, as Kent had predicted—­just how late the operator could not tell; and pending the chalking-up of its arriving time on the bulletin board, the two men sat on an empty baggage truck and smoked in companionable silence.