"Such low-brow insinuations deserve no answer," said Dick severely.
"Anyway," consulting his watch, "it's only half-past eleven, so you'll
have to curb the promptings of your grosser nature."

"No later than that?" groaned Tom. "I don't know when a morning has
seemed so long in passing."

"It _is_ a little slow. I suppose it's this blistering heat and the long
distance between stations. It's about time something happened to break
the monotony."

"Don't raise false hopes, Bert," said Tom, cynically. "Nothing ever
happens nowadays."

"Oh, I don't know," laughed Bert. "How about the Mexican bandits and the
Chinese pirates? Something certainly happened when we ran up against
those rascals."

"They were lively scraps, all right," admitted Tom, "but we had to go
out of the country to get them. In the little old United States, we've
got too much civilization. Everything is cut and dried and pared and
polished, until there are no rough edges left. Think of the fellows that
made this trip across the continent sixty years ago in their prairie
schooners, getting cross-eyed from looking for buffalo with one eye and
Indians with the other, feeling their scalp every five minutes to make
sure they still had it. That was life."

"Or death," put in Dick skeptically.