The young man sat across from me, one palm braced against the hard, dry leather of the seat, the other holding on his lap a small black bag. He was somewhere near nineteen or twenty. His build was almost delicate. He was dressed in checkered flannel and wore a dark tie with a stickpin in its center. You could tell he was a city boy. From the time we’d left Austin two hours before, I had been wondering about the bag he carried so carefully in his lap. I noticed that his light-blue eyes kept gazing down at it. Every time they did, his thin-lipped mouth would twitch—whether toward a smile or a grimace I couldn’t tell. Another black bag, slightly larger, was on the seat beside him, but to this he paid little attention. I’m an old man, and while not usually garrulous, I guess I do like to seek out conversation. Just the same, I hadn’t offered to speak in the time we’d been fellow passengers, and neither had he. For about an hour and a half I’d been trying to read the Austin paper, but now I laid it down beside me on the dusty seat.
