came back to the caboose and played poker with the conductor and
train crew. The dentist sat apart, behind the stove, smoking pipe after
pipe of cheap tobacco. Sometimes he joined in the poker games. He
had learned poker when a boy at the mine, and after a few deals his
knowledge returned to him; but for the most part he was taciturn and
unsociable, and rarely spoke to the others unless spoken to first. The
crew recognized the type, and the impression gained ground among them
that he had "done for" a livery-stable keeper at Truckee and was trying
to get down into Arizona.

McTeague heard two brakemen discussing him one night as they stood
outside by the halted train. "The livery-stable keeper called him a
bastard; that's what Picachos told me," one of them remarked, "and
started to draw his gun; an' this fellar did for him with a hayfork.
He's a horse doctor, this chap is, and the livery-stable keeper had got
the law on him so's he couldn't practise any more, an' he was sore about
it."

Near a place called Queen's the train reentered California, and McTeague
observed with relief that the line of track which had hitherto held
westward curved sharply to the south again. The train was unmolested;
occasionally the crew fought with a gang of tramps who attempted to ride
the brake beams, and once in the northern part of Inyo County, while
they were halted at a water tank, an immense Indian buck, blanketed to
the ground, approached McTeague as he stood on the roadbed stretching
his legs, and without a word presented to him a filthy, crumpled letter.
The letter was to the effect that the buck Big Jim was a good Indian and
deserving of charity; the signature was illegible. The dentist stared at
the letter, returned it to the buck, and regained the train just as it
started. Neither had spoken; the buck did not move from his position,
and fully five minutes afterward, when the slow-moving freight was miles
away, the dentist looked back and saw him still standing motionless
between the rails, a forlorn and solitary point of red, lost in the
immensity of the surrounding white blur of the desert.

At length the mountains began again, rising up on either side of the
track; vast, naked hills of white sand and red rock, spotted with
blue shadows. Here and there a patch of green was spread like a gay
table-cloth over the sand. All at once Mount Whitney leaped over the
horizon. Independence was reached and passed; the freight, nearly