“When we dropped anchor off Guayaquil half a dozen skippers from other steamers came on board to warn our skipper not to let any of his crew or officers go ashore except the ones he wanted to lose. A launch came off for me from Duran, which is on the other side of the river and is the terminal of the railroad. And it brought off a man that soared up the gangway three jumps at a time he was that eager to get aboard. When he hit the deck he hadn’t time to speak to any of us. He just leaned out over the rail and shook his fist at Duran and shouted: ‘I beat you to it! I beat you to it!’ “‘Who’d you beat to it, friend?’ I asked. ‘The railroad,’ he said, as he unbuckled the straps and took off a big ’44 Colt’s automatic from where he wore it handy on his left side under his coat, ‘I staved as long as I agreed—three months—and it didn’t get me. I was a conductor.’ “And that was the railroad I was to work for. All of which was nothing to what he told me in the next few minutes. The road ran from sea level at Duran up to twelve thousand feet on Chimborazo and down to ten thousand at Quito on the other side the range. And it was so dangerous that the trains didn’t run nights. The through passengers had to get off and sleep in the towns at night while the train waited for daylight. And each train carried a guard of Ecuadoriano soldiers which was the most dangerous of all. They were supposed to protect the train crews, but whenever trouble started they unlimbered their rifles and joined the mob. You see, whenever a train wreck occurred, the first cry of the spiggoties was ‘Kill the Gringos!’ They always did that, and proceeded to kill the train crew and whatever chance Gringo passengers that’d escaped being killed in the accident. Which is their kind of arithmetic, which I told you a while back as being different from ours. “Shucks! Before the day was out I was to find out for myself that that ex-conductor wasn’t lying. It was over at Duran. I was to take my run on the first division out to Quito, for which place I was to start next morning—only one through train running every twenty-four hours. It was the afternoon of my first day, along about four o’clock, when the boilers of the _Governor Hancock_ exploded and she sank in sixty feet of water alongside the dock. She was the big ferry boat that carried the railroad passengers across the river to Guayaquil. It was a bad accident, but it was the cause of worse that followed. By half-past four, big trainloads began to arrive. It was a feast day and they’d run an excursion up country but of Guayaquil, and this was the crowd coming back.