"Mitch"--except perhaps his preference for late-hour poker. But he
had a way of stopping with one leg out of his trousers when at
last all the house had calmed down and cots were ceasing to creak,
to make some such wholly irrelevant remark as; "By----, that----
dispatcher give me 609 to-day and she wouldn't pull a greased
string out of a knot-hole"--and thereby always hung a tale that
was sure to range over half the track mileage of the States and
wander off somewhere into the sandy cactus wilderness of Chihuahua
at least before "Mitch" succeeded in getting out of the other
trouser leg.

The cot directly across from my own groaned--occasionally--under
the coarse-grained bulk of Tom. Tom was a "rough-neck" par
excellence, so much so that even in a houseful of them he was
known as "Tom the Rough-neck," which to Tom was high tribute. Some
preferred to call him "Tom the Noisy." He was built like a steam
caisson, or an oil-barrel, though without fat, with a neck that
reminded you of a Miura bull with his head down just before the
estoque; and when he neglected to button his undershirt--a not
infrequent oversight--he displayed the hairy chest of a mammoth
gorilla.

Tom's philosophy of getting through life was exactly the same as
his philosophy of getting through a rocky hillside with his steam-
shovel. When it came to argument Tom was invariably right; not
that he was over-supplied with logic, but because he possessed a
voice and the bellows to work it that could rise to the roar of
his own steam-shovel on those weeks when he chose to enter the
shovel competition, and would have utterly overthrown, drowned
out, and annihilated James Stewart Mill himself.