“What do you call this stuff, anyway?”

“Just putting down what I saw.”

Gardner read on.  “What about this, about a Pullman sleeper ’elegant as a hotel bar and rigid as a church pew’?  Where do you get that?”

Banneker looked startled.  “I don’t know.  It just struck me that is the way a Pullman is.”

“Well, it is,” admitted the visitor, and continued to read.  “And this guy with the smashed finger that kept threatening to ‘soom’; is that right?”

“Of course it’s right.  You don’t think I’d make it up!  That reminds me of something.”  And he entered a memo to see the litigious-minded complainant again, for these are the cases which often turn up in the courts with claims for fifty-thousand-dollar damages and heartrending details of all-but-mortal internal injuries.

Silence held the reader until he had concluded the seventh and last sheet.  Not looking at Banneker, he said: 

“So that’s your notion of reporting the wreck of the swellest train that crosses the continent, is it?”

“It doesn’t pretend to be a report,” disclaimed the writer.  “It’s pretty bad, is it?”

“It’s rotten!” Gardner paused.  “From a news-desk point of view.  Any copy-reader would chuck it.  Unless I happened to sign it,” he added.  “Then they’d cuss it out and let it pass, and the dear old pin-head public would eat it up.”

“If it’s of any use to you—­”

“Not so, my boy, not so!  I might pinch your wad if you left it around loose, or even your last cigarette, but not your stuff.  Let me take it along, though; it may give me some ideas.  I’ll return it.  Now, where can I get a bed in the town?”

“Nowhere.  Everything’s filled.  But I can give you a hammock out in my shack.”

“That’s better.  I’ll take it.  Thanks.”

Banneker kept his guest awake beyond the limits of decent hospitality, asking him questions.

The reporter, constantly more interested in this unexpected find of a real personality in an out-of-the-way minor station of the high desert, meditated a character study of “the hero of the wreck,” but could not quite contrive any peg whereon to hang the wreath of heroism.  By his own modest account, Banneker had been competent but wholly unpicturesque, though the characters in his sketch, rude and unformed though it was, stood out clearly.  As to his own personal history, the agent was unresponsive.  At length the guest, apologizing for untimely weariness, it being then 3.15 A.M., yawned his way to the portable shack.

He slept heavily, except for a brief period when the rain let up.  In the morning—­which term seasoned newspaper men apply to twelve noon and the hour or two thereafter—­he inquired of Banneker, “Any tramps around here?”

“No,” answered the agent, “Not often.  There were a pair yesterday morning, but they went on.”

“Some one was fussing around the place about first light.  I was too sleepy to get up.  I yipped and they beat it.  I don’t think they got inside.”