I Travel by Train | Page 7

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 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?