The Golden Sunset Limited, Pacific Coast bound, snaked its way through a cleft in mountains and came sighing to a stop at the man’s town, El Paso. A patchwork crowd spilled out from the station platform to push around the ladders of the car icers to the train steps. Swarthy Mexicans under sombreros, with their black-shawled women and their little tin trunks, scrambled and clogged at the approaches to the oven-like day coaches forward. Pullman passengers sauntered over frogs and switches to plush and rosewood at the train’s end.

Among these was Grant Hickman, civil engineer, New York, lately captain in the First Division overseas. Arizona bound and west of the Ohio River for the first time in his thirty years, Hickman had broken his journey by a day’s stopover in El Paso. He had given Juarez a whirl, decided the kind of life he saw across the International Bridge was spurious and of little worth, and now was entraining again for his destination some four hundred miles to the westward. He gave the porter his bags to stow for him according to the directions scribbled on his Pullman ticket and began a lazy pacing of the platform, his eye alert for the colour and the bustle of it all. The blending of two races, of widely differing civilizations, here in this sturdy city gave Hickman’s restless imagination a smart fillip. He saw men with gaily coloured blankets worn as cloaks over their shoulders like prayer shawls in a synagogue; Indians with ornaments of beaten silver and raw turquoise hasps on their belts had their shoulders planted against solid brick walls with a grace born only of perfect indolence. All great stuff—regular musical show background.

On his first lap down the platform the New York man’s eyes rested momentarily on two figures standing in the drip of one of the car icers’ laden pushcarts. A girl and a man; she hatless as she had left the car for a stroll, the man all gesticulating hands and eloquently moving shoulders. Hickman caught a scrap of the man’s fervid speech as he strolled past; it was in a foreign tongue, liquid—almost lisping—with its softly rolled r’s and a peculiar singing intonation at the upward lift of each period. Spanish undoubtedly. Just an over-shoulder glimpse of a thin, dark face in sharp profile confirmed Grant in his guess at the speaker’s nationality. The girl’s bared head attracted his appreciative eye; it bore a glory of wondrously burning red hair, coiled in great masses, vividly alive.

Grant turned his corner at the platform’s end and began to retrace his steps, consciously bearing in the direction of the beacon hair. When he was still twenty paces off he saw that the swarthy man had gripped one of the girl’s wrists and that his hawk face was pushed close to hers in what might have been an access of fury or of pleading. Grant quickened his pace instinctively; he did not like the looks of that man’s talon grip on a girl’s wrist. He paused a decent distance from the twain and made a pretence of lighting a cigarette while his eyes glanced steadily over his cupped palms.

Then a surprising thing. The girl launched some verbal javelin at the man who gripped her wrist, at the same instant looking down at the clamping fingers as if to emphasize what must have been a command to release her. No answer but a flash of white teeth beneath a toy moustache. The girl’s free hand shot to a great coil of hair over the nape of her neck, came away with twin prongs of thin steel—anchorage of some hair ornament—showing below her clenched fingers. A lightning jab downward, and the Spanish-speaking man dropped the imprisoned hand to whip his own to his mouth. He snarled something in sharp falsetto. The girl with the red hair tilted her chin at him, and the laugh that slipped between her grudging little teeth was thin and sharp as the double dagger points she had used.

She turned, took three steps to a stool below the Pullman’s steps, mounted with a quick swirl of skirts and was gone. Grant thought he saw a half-formed determination to follow flash into the Spaniard’s eyes. Without knowing why he did it, the New Yorker hastily put one foot upon the lower Pullman step and bent his body so as to block access to it. Very painstakingly he unloosed the knot on his low shoe, straightened the tongue in place and began taking in slack on every loop of the strings.

A grunt of exasperation from behind Grant. When at last he straightened himself and looked around the Spanish gentleman was gone. He chuckled.

“Now that, seÑor, should teach you not to play rough with a red-head.”

He walked down to the Pullman his ticket called for and climbed aboard. Just as the conductor’s bellow, “Bo-oa-rd,” sounded, Grant, looking through the glass of the vestibule, saw the Spanish gentleman with a grip flying for the train out of the baggage room of the station.

Passing into the body of the car he found his bags piled upon a seat midway of its length. As he seated himself he was the least bit startled to see flaming coils of hair above the top of the seat across the aisle and one beyond his. Grant was not displeased. Girls with spirit always walked straight into his somewhat susceptible affections; and a girl who carried a home-made fish spear in her coiffure—

“’Scuse me, Cap’n; ef I could jes’ have a look at youah berth ticket. This gentmum says he reckons you-all’s settin’ in his seat.” Grant looked up to see the porter shifting uneasily before him and with a deprecatory grin on his face. By him stood the waspish Spanish gentleman; the latter inclined himself in a stiff bow as Grant’s gaze met his. Out of the tail of his eye Grant thought he saw a slow turning of the sunset cloud against the high seat-back ahead.

“This is my section,” Grant drawled with no show of inclination to arbitrate the matter. “I always buy a section when I travel.”

“But, pardon, sir—” The Spanish gentleman extended a pink slip. “The agent at the station has but now sold me this lower berth.”

“Indeed?” A slow ache of perversity began to travel along Grant’s spine. He had no love for a man who will manhandle women. “Indeed. The agent at El Paso sold me mine yesterday.”

“Ef I could see youah ticket,” the porter began feebly.

“You couldn’t,” Grant snapped. “Perhaps the Pullman conductor may.”

A cloud began gathering over the finely chiselled features of the Spaniard. His toy moustache went up. He spoke to the porter:

“The seÑor is not what we call sympatico. Have the kindness to fetch the conductor.”

The darkey disappeared. Grant turned to look out of the window, ignoring completely the standing figure in the aisle. But he did not ignore the reflection a trick of the sun cast on the double glass of the window. He saw there just the faint aura of a fiery head which refused to turn, though the compelling gaze of the standing man strove mightily to command it. Faintly in the magic of the dusty glass was carried to this bystander, whose neutrality already was considerably strained, the silent battle of wills.

The Pullman conductor bustled up to Grant’s seat. To him the Spaniard appealed, offering the evidence of the berth check. Grant vouchsafed no comment when he passed his own up for inspection. The man in blue compared them.

“Some ball-up somewhere,” he grunted. Then to Grant: “When was this ticket sold to you?”

“Yesterday morning at ten-fifteen o’clock,” came the prompt answer. The waspish Spanish person admitted he had purchased his only a minute before the train started. The conductor waved at Grant.

“Then I guess the seat belongs to this gentleman. I’ll have to find you one in another car.”

“But, seÑor, I have special reason for remaining in this car.” The Spaniard’s carefully restrained wrath began to bubble over. Grant looked up at him and smiled frankly.

“So have I,” he declared levelly. The other’s eyes snapped and his lips lifted over small white teeth in what was meant to be a smile.

“SeÑor,” he began with a shaking voice, “your courtesy deserves remembrance. I hope some day it may be my pleasure to show you equal consideration.”

“Until then—au revoir,” Grant caught him up. With the porter preceding him, the loser walked down the aisle to the far door of the car. As he passed the seat where the girl was he half turned with a sulky smile. But it was lost. She was looking out at the procession of the telegraph poles. Grant, catching this final passage in the little comedy, grinned.

“There’s going to be lots of paprika in this Western hike,” joyfully he assured himself—“or do we call it chili?”