I Travel by Train | Page 9

begged the other to see the gorgeous sunset. It was not
gorgeous. In fact, it was a washed-out, pale blue-green affair hardly
deserving of a glance. But it was a sunset. The sun was going down. So
the two of them decided just to stay right on where they were and eat
their suppers. They ordered sirloin steaks and French fried potatoes and
apple pie and cheese and ice-cream and coffee. An hour later, when I
had finished my own meal and was thinking that I might go early to
bed, they were having a little drink together as an aid to digestion.
The next morning I was awakened by inescapable early risers. I am
sure they never 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