Before he could reply the train boy, who had come into the smoking room a few minutes before, piped up.  He was a train boy of a type I had supposed extinct:  the kind of train boy one might have encountered on almost any second-rate train twenty years ago,—­a bold, impudent young smartaleck, full of insistent salesmanship and obnoxious conversation.  He declared that dinner was not to be had, and that the only sustenance available en route consisted in the uninviting assortment of fruit, nuts, candy, and sweet tepid beverages contained in his basket.

Fortunately for us, the man we had addressed knew better.

“What do you want to lie like that for, boy?” he demanded.  “You know as well as I do that the brakeman takes on five boxes of lunch at Covin.”

“Well,” said the boy, with a grin, “I gotta sell things, ain’t I?  The brakeman hadn’t oughta have that graft anyhow. I’d oughta have it.  He gets them lunches fer two bits and sells ’em for thirty-five cents.”  Far from feeling abashed, he was pleased with himself.

“Folks is funny people,” remarked a man with a weather-beaten face who sat in the corner seat, and seemed to be addressing no one in particular.  “I know a boy that’s going to git hung some day.  And when they’ve got the noose rigged nice around his neck, and everything ready, and the trap a-waitin’ to be sprung, why, then that boy is goin’ to be so sorry for hisself that he won’t hardly know what to do.  He’ll say:  ’I ain’t never had no chance in life, I ain’t.  The world ain’t never used me right.’ ...  Yes, folks is funny people.”

After this soliloquy there occurred a brief silence in the smoking room, and presently the train boy took up his basket and went upon his way.

“You say they take on the lunches at Covin now?” one of the passengers asked of the man in the electric-blue cap.

“Yes.”

“What’s become of old man Whitney, over to Fayetteville?”

“They used to git lunches off of him,” replied the other, “but the old man wasn’t none too dependable.  Now and then he’d oversleep, and folks on the 5 A.M. out of Columbus was like to starve for breakfast.”

“Right smart shock-headed boy the old man’s got,” put in another.  “The old man gives ’im anything he wants.  He wanted a motorcycle, and the old man give ’im one.  Then he wanted one of them hot-candy machines; they cost about two hundred and fifty dollars, but the old man give it to ’im just the same.”

“The kid went to San Francisco with it, didn’t he?” asked the man with the electric-blue cap.

“He started to go there,” replied the former speaker, “but he only got as fur as Little Rock; then he come on back home, and the old man bought ’im a wireless-telegraph plant.  Yeaup!  That boy gets messages right outa the air—­from Washington, D.C., and Berlin, and every place.  The Govamunt don’t allow ’im to tell you much of it.  He tells a little, though—­just to give you a notion.”