TAKE anywhere a through Western train, and you are pretty sure to hear a conversation ranging, with fascinating familiarity, all over the continent—from the beaches at Nome down into Old Mexico; up through Arizona to the Denver Club, and out across the cattle ranches of Wyoming to the mines of Montana; it may hunt a wild cat in the Black Hills, buy a senatorship in Nevada, call on the President at Washington, do business with Hawaii and Hong Kong in "the bay" of San Francisco, and it is pretty sure to alight, in lowered tones, at some well-known hotel in New York. Look at the men; they may be ill-matched externally. Listen longer, and you will learn that one lives, for the present, at Seattle, the other at Tonopah, but they know the same people, the same stories, dovetailing chapters of the same history. I once heard two of them laughjoy-