Homeburg Memories | Page 5

school. We are still close chums, though one is on the coast,
another's here in New York, and the third is in the Philippines.
[Illustration: It seemed to me then as if she must have come from
heaven by air-line.]
It was the next year that I noticed a girl as she stepped off of Number
Eleven and was met 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