I Travel by Train | Page 7

of them are running away from something the same as we are?" He gave a single ha of a silent laugh. "They might not tell you what they were running from, but they might be willing to say whether they were running."
I twisted a little in my chair to look him in the face. His eyes were very wide open, like those of a maniac occupied with his favorite hallucination. But there was a trace of a smile close round his lips and under his eyes and in front of his ears. It spread till it covered his face.
"Maybe you think I'm crazy," he said as he tried to make out the expression on my own face. "And who knows, maybe I am."
"And maybe you are only another Hoosier poet."
He laughed his single ha of a silent laugh again.
"Maybe I am that, too. You know, there's a mighty thin shade of difference. And I come from Kokomo, if there's anything in a name."
His face spread in a new smile. "And I'll be coming back from St. Louis by way of Paris."
I must have seemed puzzled. "Paris, Illinois," he added. "Don't you remember? That's where lots of American girls have got their French."
We talked about Booth Tarkington, Meredith Nicholson, James Whitcomb Riley, Lew Wallace, Theodore Dreiser, George Barr McCutcheon, Gene Stratton Porter, and a dozen others of the older generation of Hoosier writers. Of course, he had known them all. He paused sometimes to speak of the sumac in the ravines in southern Illinois, or nod for my benefit toward the men in small towns who were selling late roasting-ears, and apples fresh from the tree.
As we came into the smoke of East St. Louis, the train moved cautiously. It was above the housetops. It seemed to be getting ready for something important.
"Old Man River!" the man from Kokomo announced. "I find something to come over here for every once in a while just to see this."
He glanced at the man opposite us who had his face buried in a copy of Liberty. "It must be a hell of a good story he's reading if he means to pass this up for it. Or maybe he's just afraid he'll fall short three seconds of the prescribed reading time."
There was quiet as we moved deliberately above the last houses frowsy affairs of tarred paper, corrugated iron, and oddments of boards--and out over the east bank of the spreading river, over the resistless, eddying, boiling middle of it where we could look down through the steel of the bridge into it just as if nothing much supported the train, and at last over steamboats moving in to the western waterfront. Then everybody scrambled forward to be ready by the time we were in the station.
But for me St. Louis was only a pause--not long enough to rob me of my sense of motion. My next train stood ready, I was on it so soon, and it was so soon away, that I had difficulty in feeling that I had made a change.
After a late luncheon I sat in the lounge half of the cafe-car and studied the world outside. Without effort, even in spite of myself, I heard the conversation of two men who had lingered, after everyone else, at the luncheon table nearest me. One had a heavy roll under his chin; the other, on the back of his neck. They talked and ate and drank time away.
Within two or three hours we were climbing toward a ridge of the Ozarks over sharp curves and counter-curves, on and on, up and up. Close beside the long train, which moved a little below speed yet resistlessly, thin-looking cows picked grass from steep rocky hillsides under good-sized papaw bushes that were just beginning to lose their greenish yellow leaves and reveal fat clumps of green fruit not yet quite ready to fall. The only bright color anywhere was the red of some gum or persimmon tree.
How many railroads are there in the world that spurn the valleys, as this one does, and follow low mountain ridges for a hundred or a hundred and fifty miles? In these ancient worn-off hills the valleys were too complicated, too stuffy, for some dreaming surveyor, and he took to the hills. Now, after the engine's long steady climb that seemed to be taking us across a county or two, we were up on them ourselves. We swept round long curves from which we could look down over ranges of hills on both sides of the train; we took long straight-of-ways on the comb of watersheds; we described letter S's; we made sharp hair-pin turns all in an effort to keep to the ridges. Once we passed a freight train that was taking water at a tank and filling