“Why,” he ejaculated, “my brother and I each have a double express with us, and do you think we’d sit still in our seats?  No.  Hang me if we wouldn’t pot something.”

“You might,” I laughed, a little nettled, I confess, by his speech, “but I’m afraid it would be yourselves.”

“Aw, you fancy resistance impossible?” drawled Albert Cullen.

“It has been tried,” I answered, “and without success.  You can see it’s like all surprises.  One side is prepared before the other side knows there is danger.  Without regard to relative numbers, the odds are all in favor of the road agents.”

“But I wouldn’t sit still, whatever the odds,” asserted his lordship.  “And no Englishman would.”

“Well, Lord Ralles,” I said, “I hope for your sake, then, that you’ll never be in a hold-up, for I should feel about you as the runner of a locomotive did when the old lady asked him if it was’nt very painful to him to run over people.  ‘Yes, madam,’ he sadly replied:  ’there is nothing musses an engine up so.’”

I don’t think Miss Cullen liked Lord Ralles’s comments on American courage any better than I did, for she said—­you take Lord Ralles and Captain Ackland into the service of the K. & A., Mr. Gordon, as a special guard?”

“The K. & A. has never had a robbery yet, Miss Cullen,” I replied, “and I don’t think that it ever will have.”

“Why not?” she asked.

I explained to her how the Canon of the Colorado to the north, and the distance of the Mexican border to the south, made escape so almost desperate that the road agents preferred to devote their attentions to other routes.  “If we were boarded, Miss Cullen,” I said, “your jewelry would be as safe as it is in Chicago, for the robbers would only clean out the express and mail-cars; but if they should so far forget their manners as to take your trinkets, I’d agree to return them to you inside of one week.”

“That makes it all the jollier,” she cried, eagerly.  “We could have the fun of the adventure, and yet not lose anything.  Can’t you arrange for it, Mr. Gordon?”

“I’d like to please you, Miss Cullen,” I said, “and I’d like to give Lord Ralles a chance to show us how to handle those gentry; but it’s not to be done.”  I really should have been glad to have the road agents pay us a call.

We spent that day pulling up the Raton pass, and so on over the Glorietta pass down to Lamy, where, as the party wanted to see Sante Fe, I had our two cars dropped off the overland, and we ran up the branch line to the old Mexican city.  It was well-worn ground to me, but I enjoyed showing the sights to Miss Cullen, for by that time I had come to the conclusion that I had never met a sweeter or jollier girl.  Her beauty, too, was of a kind that kept growing on one, and before I had known her twenty-four hours, without quite being in love with her, I was beginning to hate Lord Ralles, which was about the same thing,