I Travel by Train | Page 6

to come on up.
The conductor was there as soon as I was.
"There he is, under the front trucks of that baggage-car," the engineer said, without being quite able to be wholly matter-of-fact.
The conductor steadied himself by putting one hand against the lower edge of the car's body which stood high above the road-bed and looked under. A very black-headed Italian boy of about fourteen lay there limp and almost completely nude from having been dragged and rolled over the rough limestone ballast.
"He's not cut up to speak of," the conductor said. "We ought to get him out of there and be on our way in no time."
From somewhere a representative of the railroad company appeared. He glanced under. "That's easy. I'll look out for everything. You can scoot right along."
From somewhere also from the houses on the hillside just above the right-of-way--a number of dark-eyed children came running to see why the train had stopped.
"Any of you kids know who that boy was that was walking on the tracks bringing groceries home from the store?"
A cloud swept the faces of the entire group, as if they thought the boy had been arrested for something that he should not have done.
"Do you?"
"Yes," the oldest boy in the group said. "It was Fortunato."
"Fortunato? Your brother?"
"No, just myfriend."
"Well, he was walking on the tracks, and the train killed him."
In terror and helplessness the boy looked about at the rest of us as if we ought not to be there, twisted slowly away without moving his feet, lifted his hands to his face and then sank to the earth sobbing, "Oh, Fortunato!"
The other children stood speechless, except one boy who said half to the rest, half to the conductor, "The train was running on the wrong track."
"Yes, I know it was. But you see, he shouldn't have been walking on either track. He should have walked in the road."
"But there are automobiles."
I wandered back along the train. As I passed the dining-car it was still crowded with people who were obliviously enjoying their breakfasts and the bright morning.
I swung onto the train and walked all the way back to the observation-car.
There was only one person back there a stout woman all freshly made up for the day, who was busy with a story in the Delineator.
She glanced up. "Can you tell me why this train is standing so long?" she asked. "We don't seem to be in any town."
"Oh," I replied, "we killed an Italian boy up ahead."
"Why, how perfectly terrible!" she said in a voice so well modulated that she might have been reading from the story.
The train gave a little shrug of a lurch forward. "But I guess we must be going now."
Passengers began to come in from breakfast. Soon they had filled all the comfortable chairs. For two hours I sat with my back to the window and read. Periodically I let the book drop to the arm of the chair and looked out at the windows on the other side of the car past the heads of the solid row of those who sat across the aisle and did their own reading or smoked as if for once it would do no good to be impatient. Groves of maples, numerous in the hills and on the flat land alike, were splashed with fire. Occasionally some tree was solid yellow. Why had nobody ever said anything about the beauty of the hills between Coshocton, Ohio or Athens and St. Louis? Only Brown County, Indiana, has received any part of the praise due the entire region. And Brown County became known chiefly because a group of painters found it paradise when the genteel population of neighboring cities laughed at it because it was short on railroads and plumbing.
Within the train, too, a change had taken place since yesterday. Most of the New Englanders had gone on to Washington if they had not taken a boat at New York and the transcontinental passengers had already been outnumbered by energetic Buckeyes, who are always going somewhere, and who are not troubled in the least by getting up and taking a train at five or five-thirty in the morning. They sat wherever there was room, smoked cigars, talked pleasantly with some half-recognizable remnant of New England or Virginia in their speech, and felt that the world was not such a bad place, after all.
One of them left the chair next to mine. It was promptly taken by a rangy, bony man whose heavy dark hair was loosely combed over to the side, and whose brows were shaggy. "Did you ever think," he began rather promptly as if he were in great need of expression, "of taking a straw vote of all the people who travel on a train like this to find out how many