Читать книгу The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches - Benjamin F. Taylor - Страница 8

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They have discovered that our next-door neighbor, the moon, is about the temperature of boiling water. What a splendid locomotive was spoiled just to make a moon! Those of us who are forty years old have been spending the last twenty in unlearning much they had persuaded us to believe in the first ten. No Great African Desert. No Great American Desert. No giants in Patagonia, except little ones. No William Tell, no apple, no target practice. "G. Washington" never had a hatchet. No Maelstrom off the Norwegian coast. No White Nile mystery. Homer never wrote Homer, nor Ossian Ossian. There are two things, two blessed doubts, that we know as little about as we ever did, to-wit: Who wrote the Letters of Junius? and Is there an open Polar Sea? I sincerely hope they will never find out.

The locomotive is aggressive. It assaults and captures and tames the wilderness. You are a passenger on the Missouri, Kansas and Texas Railway, that can swing you down through Missouri and the Indian Territory and Texas to the Gulf of Mexico. You embark at Sedalia, the most vigorous inland town in Missouri except Kansas City. The cars are as elegant as any in America, the track smooth to a wonder, and altogether the perfection of locomotive civilization. Away you glide. Fort Scott is passed, and the train begins to show queer characteristics. The men that get aboard are leaner and longer, with a swinging stride like so many panthers. They carry brown rifles, they are girt about with a small armament of revolvers. They are in full blossom as to the brims of their hats, like sunflowers. They talk deer, horse, bear, turkey. They brevet you, and you become captain or colonel by the breath of their mouths, which is tobacco. There are sleepy-looking dogs in the baggage-car, with ears like little leather aprons. You see more flat women in sunbonnets than you ever saw before in one place. Three or four exaggerated creatures lie in a heap in a corner. They are the half-way station between a large rabbit and a small donkey. They are ears with bodies to them. It is your first sight of a buck-rabbit. You hear border talk and see border manners, in cars finished to the last touch of pier-glass polish. You look up, and lo, a Cherokee at your elbow! There he stands, as if a fresh creation, and positively his first appearance anywhere. His eyes, like black beads suddenly struck with intelligence, had taken you all in before you saw him at all. You begin to realize where you are—that old Fort Holmes is at your right and Little Rock at your left; that you are in a country with such places in it as Elk City, Panther, Yellville, Crockett and Waxahatchie.

Again, you are on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railway. You land at Emporia, Kansas, one hundred and twenty-eight miles from Kansas City. The locomotive breasts the prairie in panoply as glittering as anywhere. You find a brisk and busy town, well-filled stores, elegant houses, capital schools, a public library, and intelligent and hospitable people. The railroad was Pharaoh's daughter to it. It found the little Moses in the bulrushes, and made Emporia a marvel in the wilderness. You see last week's New York fashions in the streets, the latest works of literature upon the tables. The pretty dining-room girl startles your left ear at breakfast with, "Buffalo-steak or antelope?" You regard her in a dazed way, and ask "What?" "Buffalo-steak or antelope?" and you say "Both!" A citizen, on hospitable thoughts intent, promises to take you out antelope-hunting. You faintly enquire "Where?" and the reply is, "O, ten or a dozen miles!" You begin to understand things, and to see that the locomotive is trailing civilization along after it wherever it goes.

Again on the train: A man enters the car who toes straight out the way he is going. He has a red sash, silk, and Chinese at that, about his waist. The glitter of a silver-mounted revolver at his left side, a shady sombrero upon his head, an uncivilized nugget of gold for a breastpin, a small log-chain of the same material a-swing upon his breast, buttons up and down the side seams of his pantaloons, square-shouldered, broader at the breast than equatorially. There you have him, and isn't he cool? He gives you a square look with both eyes. He seats himself upon the crimson cushions as indifferently as if he had never seen anything else. It is an American turned into a Mexican herder, arrayed in his holiday clothes, and bound for St. Louis. He is at home on horseback, is at home anywhere, and can throw a lariat like a savage. He takes an apple out of one pocket, a desperate-looking knife out of another; a little jerk of the wrist, and about eight inches of steel blade flash out, he looks at you a second, and—carves his apple! Then that cutlery becomes a toothpick of the Arkansas patent. He will tell you it is a frog-sticker.

I should like to see the railroad-hog, a variety in the animal kingdom of which there is something to be said by-and-by, get his seat while he is in the baggage-car taking a smoke. If carved ox is beef, and manufactured calf is veal, that hog would be in danger of turning into pork. Though the herder is quiet, civil, self-reliant, yet he is a peripatetic Bill of Rights. He is his own Legislature, and the first law is self-defence. He answers your questions in a quaint, sententious way. He will tell you that a great herd of those Southwestern cattle look like a drove of horns with legs and tails to them; that they all think a man has four feet, and is half horse. They seldom see him except mounted, and when they do, that man must make "a right smart" use of the two feet he has left, to escape being gored and trampled to death. Those illogical cattle have no idea of the concrete. The herder loves the free life, the swift motion, the abundant air, and the elbow-room of the plains. He has not taken as much medicine as you can put on a knife-blade in eight years. When he is "under the weather," he just curls down somewhere, and sleeps it off like a dog.

Yonder are a couple of rough men, with Northeasterly voices, and shaggy about the head as a couple of buffaloes. They have just come in from killing two hundred of those "cattle upon a thousand hills." They think they are hunters. They are unacquainted with Webster, and miss the right word, for they are unlicensed butchers, and ought to be punished. They had slain the two hundred for their tongues alone, and left the great carcasses a reckless waste upon the plains. If those fellows could only have an Egyptian "lean year" all to themselves, I should like to put them on a strictly vegetable diet, and turn them out to graze with Nebuchadnezzar. Such touches of border-life give a Far Western train a character of its own that is by no means unpleasant. You feel something as you did when you entered the National Conservatory at Washington, breathed the scented air of the home-made tropic and saw the great-leafed palms, and waited a minute for an elephant to come out.

But let nobody think that the world on wheels in Kansas, Nebraska, Texas and the Plains essentially differs from the same world trundling about in New England. Equal courtesy, heartier cordiality, just as much intelligence as characterize the route from New York to Boston. Writing of Boston: A certain publishing house in that city once sent a letter to a Chicago citizen, and a man to bring it, asking for a list of those places in the West where the people would be "up to their publications," for that is the way they put it. The Chicago citizen referred them to a great fat Gazetteer, and the inquisition ended.