Homeburg Memories | Page 5

by one of the Homeburg girls. I didn't know who she was, but it seemed to me then as if she must have come from heaven by air-line, and I felt so friendly toward the girl who met her that I had to go down to her house to call that very night. The visitor had come to stay--her father was starting a new store in Homeburg. I'll tell you, when a snorty old train, which assays two pecks of cinders per car, hauls the most wonderful girl on earth into your town and dumps her into your arms--so to speak, and bunching up events a little--you're bound to love that train.
I could write the history of Homeburg from the 4:11 too. In fact, the train has hauled most of Homeburg into the town. Year after year we watch strangers get off the train and turn around three times, in the way a stranger does when he tries to orient himself and locate the nearest hotel. We get acquainted with those strangers, and in the next week we discover their business and antecedents and politics and preferences in jokes, and whether they pull for the Chicago Cubs or the White Sox. In two weeks they are old-time citizens and go down with us to welcome the newcomers. Henry Broar came to us on the 4:11. I remember he wore a loppy hat and needed a shave that day, and we didn't assess him very highly. But he had a whacking law practice inside of a year, ran for county judge two years later, and now we swell up to the danger point when people mention Congressman Broar, and let it slip modestly that we are intimate enough with Hank to trade shirts with him.
I remember well the day two imposing strangers got off of Number Eleven, and made the town nearly explode with curiosity by walking out to the Dover farm at the edge of town and pacing it off this way and that. Took us a month to learn their business. That was the time we got the Scraper Works. When Allison B. Unk arrived, he made a tremendous impression by wearing a plug hat still in its first youth, and rolling ponderously around town in a Prince Albert. We've despised Prince Alberts ever since because the town fell for that one and deposited liberally in Unk's new bank, which closed up a year later. And then there was the time when the trainmen put off a scared and sick cripple, who lay in the depot waiting-room with a ring of sympathetic incompetents around him until Doc Simms could help him. He touched our hearts, and we shelled out enough to send him on a hundred miles to his people. He came back ten years later and kept Homeburg balanced magnificently in the air for a week by showing us how much fun it is to chum with a millionaire. Even sick cripples are likely to guess the market right in this country, you know, and he never forgot us.
As they come in on Number Eleven, so they go. The young men come to Homeburg full of hope, and their sons go on elsewhere loaded with the same. Mothers weep on the station platform many times a year while their Willies and Johns and Petes hike gaily off to chase their fortunes. And many times a year the old boys come back from Chicago. Some of them are rich and proud, and some of them are rich and friendly, and some of them are just friendly. But they all get off of Number Eleven under our keen, discriminating glare, and they all get the same greeting while we size them up and wonder if their nobby thirty-five dollar suits are their sole stocks-in-trade, and just how much a "lucrative position" means in Chicago.
When the big strike was on, twenty-five years ago, Number Eleven didn't run for two days. We might as well have been marooned on St. Helena. It was awful. When a hand-car came sweeping into town the third day with a big sail on, we hailed it like starving sailors. It was Number Eleven which took on a flat-car loaded with Paynesville's fire department twenty years ago and saved our business section. When President Banks, of the Great F. C. & L. Railroad, rolled into Homeburg in his private car, to become "Pudge" Banks again for a day or two and revisit the scenes of his boyhood, he came on Number Eleven of course. The train hung around while the band played two selections and the mayor gave an address of welcome. That was her longest visit in Homeburg.
The old train even bursts into local politics and social affairs now and then. It managed to jump the