“Here, waiter!” called the New Yorker.  “Two more of the same.  It is acknowledged by every one that our city is the centre of art, and literature, and learning.  Take, for instance, our after-dinner speakers.  Where else in the country would you find such wit and eloquence as emanate from Depew and Ford, and—­”

“If you take the papers,” interrupted the Westerner, “you must have read of Pete Webster’s daughter.  The Websters live two blocks north of the court-house in Topaz City.  Miss Tillie Webster, she slept forty days and nights without waking up.  The doctors said that—­”

“Pass the matches, please,” said the New Yorker.  “Have you observed the expedition with which new buildings are being run up in New York?  Improved inventions in steel framework and—­”

“I noticed,” said the Nevadian, “that the statistics of Topaz City showed only one carpenter crushed by falling timbers last year and he was caught in a cyclone.”

“They abuse our sky line,” continued the New Yorker, “and it is likely that we are not yet artistic in the construction of our buildings.  But I can safely assert that we lead in pictorial and decorative art.  In some of our houses can be found masterpieces in the way of paintings and sculpture.  One who has the entree to our best galleries will find—­”

“Back up,” exclaimed the man from Topaz City.  “There was a game last month in our town in which $90,000 changed hands on a pair of—­”

“Ta-romt-tara!” went the orchestra.  The stage curtain, blushing pink at the name “Asbestos” inscribed upon it, came down with a slow midsummer movement.  The audience trickled leisurely down the elevator and stairs.

On the sidewalk below, the New Yorker and the man from Topaz City shook hands with alcoholic gravity.  The elevated crashed raucously, surface cars hummed and clanged, cabmen swore, newsboys shrieked, wheels clattered ear-piercingly.  The New Yorker conceived a happy thought, with which he aspired to clinch the pre-eminence of his city.

“You must admit,” said he, “that in the way of noise New York is far ahead of any other—­”

“Back to the everglades!” said the man from Topaz City.  “In 1900, when Sousa’s band and the repeating candidate were in our town you couldn’t—­”

The rattle of an express wagon drowned the rest of the words.

V

HOLDING UP A TRAIN

Note.  The man who told me these things was for several years
an outlaw in the Southwest and a follower of the pursuit he
so frankly describes.  His description of the modus operandi
should prove interesting, his counsel of value to the
potential passenger in some future “hold-up,” while his
estimate of the pleasures of train robbing will hardly induce
any one to adopt it as a profession.  I give the story in
almost exactly his own words. 

                                                                                                            O. H.