I Travel by Train | Page 9

get up early at home. They probably are very lazy. But on a train they talk across the aisle to each other about whether they should set their watch forward an hour, or back an hour, or leave it just where it is. Then after they have awakened everybody in their end of the car, they call to the porter to come and make up their berths right away so that they may sit in them. One of the upper berths sticks, and the porter has to do some hammering. But eventually he has all in readiness for them, and they then sit dumb for two hours. In the wakefulness that these on our train brought to me, I had a drowsy memory that we had stood still for a long time in the middle of the night. Then I heard a porter explaining in subdued tones why we were hours late.
But when I lifted the shade to see where we were, I was glad we were nowhere else. A clear sun was coming up over low wooded mountains somewhere in eastern or southeastern Oklahoma. There were no accompaniments--no clouds, no mottled skies, no romantic haze; just hard outlines of gray-green flecked with settlers' unpainted low houses, and a great stark ball of deep red. I was blinded to the band of evergreen and white birches on bleak hills that stretched a thousand miles westward from New Hampshire, to the bronzing reds westward from Massachusetts and Connecticut, to the living brightness of Ohio and Indiana, to the billowing green merely touched with bright tips of red that extended from the Ozarks back eastward across Kentucky and Virginia. Here one was in the presence of nothing but fundamentals.
By noon I was off the train in northern Texas where the world bore yet another face. Cattle roamed in limitless fields, and the trees were still green.
"I'm mighty glad to see you," the hotel manager assured me as if he meant it. "I sure am." And Jake the black "boy," who according to his own testimony was just old enough to remember seeing soldiers coming back from the Civil War, remarked pleasantly as he shuffled along with my luggage: "Mus' a' been 'bout two years ago that you was here the last time, ain't it Doctah?"

II
Discovery
SOMETHING had happened to this little Oklahoma city since my last visit there a year and a half before. At that time it was a serenely active community of a few thousand people, with wide streets, plenty of small shade-trees, a young college, and brand-new churches all on low rolling hills where thirty years or so before there had been no town at alL But this morning I knew before I arrived at the hotel that a change had taken place some fundamental change in the community's thought. It was in the air. The people moved along the street as if life had at last straightened away toward a definite purpose that made the going worth-while.
Always the hotel had seemed so new and shining that it gave the impression of being little used. A man could loaf around in the lobby and talk to the manager, and to the girl at the cigar counter or switchboard, or to a traveling salesman or two who came there regularly, and feel that he was more or less of the family. I had expected to find the same kind of quiet this time. But when the bell-boy who shuffled my luggage kicked the door around so that I could enter, a babel of voices caught me full in the face. The lobby was crowded with short men and tall men in khaki breeches, flannel shirts, broad-brimmed hats, and high laced boots, puttees, or smart riding boots, I could scarcely push my way through to the desk.
"Tour telegram came all right yesterday," the room clerk explained as if he were not doing anything unusual, "but there wasn't a room in the house at the time and there isn't one now. But if you'll just have the boy check your bags, and 11 stick around for a while, I think maybe well be able to fix you up."
"What has happened?" I asked a bit sourly. I had hoped to supplement a short night on the train by stretching out for an hour or two.
"Oh! Haven't you heard? Oil. About twelve or fourteen miles down south here. It may turn out to be the richest field in the mid-continent area."
In the coffee shop I had to stand for fifteen minutes before I could get a stool at the counter. Others waited. The man close against my elbow was a trim fellow of thirty-eight or forty who would have made the perfect smashing lieutenant-colonel in a movie.
I saw him looking me over. Then he asked: