business. All of you gentlemen,” I continues to the crowd, “are invited to stay to dinner. We have mutually trusted one another, and the white flag is supposed to wave over the proceedings.”
“The correct idea,” says Caligula, who was standing by me. “Two baggage-masters and a ticket-agent dropped out of a tree while you was below the last time. Did the major man bring the money?”
“He says,” I answered, “that he succeeded in negotiating the loan.”
If any cooks ever earned ten thousand dollars in twelve hours, me and Caligula did that day. At six o’clock we spread the top of the mountain with as fine a dinner as the personnel of any railroad ever engulfed. We opened all the wine, and we concocted entrées and pièces de resistance, and stirred up little savory chef de cuisines and organized a mass of grub such as has been seldom instigated out of canned and bottled goods. The railroad gathered around it, and the wassail and diversions was intense.
After the feast me and Caligula, in the line of business, takes Major Tucker to one side and talks ransom. The major pulls out an agglomeration of currency about the size of the price of a town lot in the suburbs of Rabbitville, Arizona, and makes this outcry.
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