Though he was far enough from realizing it, his education and the
Eastern environment had given him a touch of Old-World insularity. The
through sleeper in which he had his allotment of space was well filled,
and there were the usual opportunities for the making of passing
acquaintanceships in the smoking-compartment. But it was not until the
second day, after the dining-car luncheon and its aftermath of a
well-chosen cigar had broken down some of the barriers of the acquired
reserve, that he fell into talk with the prosperous-looking gentleman
who had seized upon the only chair in the smoking-compartment--a man
whose thin, hawk-like face, narrowly set eyes, and uneasy manner were
singularly out of keeping with the fashionable cut of his clothes, with
his liberal tips, and with the display of jewelry on his watch-fob.
At first the conversation was baldly desultory, as it was bound to be,
with an escaped lover, whose disappointment was still rasping him like a
newly devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half of it. The
hawk-faced one, who had boarded the train at Omaha and whose section was
directly opposite Blount's, defined himself as a mine-owner whose
property, vaguely located as somewhere "in the mountains," was involved
in litigation.
It was the reference to the litigation which first drew Blount beyond
the boundaries of the commonplaces.
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