Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: In Mizzoura | Page 6

conductor, who took our tickets,
recognized me. Charlie Church had been a freight brake-man when I
was in the St. Louis yards. He was proud of his advancement to a
passenger conductorship--proud of his train--proud of the new Wabash
road-bed on the single track line. This road-bed was made of
macadam-looking metal, clean and red as the painted bricks in the local
Dutch women's gardens, and hard as flint. When we gave the
right-of-way, and ran in on a siding, Church brought us up a few pieces
to the back platform; and with one of them scratched my initials on the
glass window. "What was it, iron ore?--no, that mud that the river
leaves when it rises--'Gumbo' the people call it. Some fellow found by
accident that it became red flint when fired, and was making a fortune
selling it to the railroad." To burn it, he used the slack coal from the
Jonesburg mines nearby, which until then had also been waste. I put a
handful of the stuff in my pocket; and, after the conductor left us, I
turned the whole enterprise over to the Goodwin part. When the play
ended, the audience should feel sure that he and Kate need never want

for a dollar. I knew also where he had accidentally burnt his first
sample, and made his discovery; in the blacksmith shop.
But what accident brought the raw gumbo there? Perhaps the wheels of
the stage-coach; but that wasn't definitely Goodwin. The soft gumbo is
not unlike putty; it would make a fair cushion for a broken limb: but I
didn't want to halt my story with anybody crippled to that extent; and
then I remembered the yellow dog drinking from the blacksmith's tub. I
broke his leg and had Goodwin carry him miles in the stage, with his
poor paw in a poultice of gumbo. It was a counter-pointing touch to a
sheriff with two guns; it gave him an effective entrance; and it coupled
in a continuous train, the sheriff, the bad man who sneered at it, the
blacksmith and his motherly wife who sympathized and helped in a
better dressing, the forge where a piece of the discarded gumbo should
fall amongst the coke, the helper who should pump the bellows for
another and verifying bake: and last, and best of all, it gave me a
"curtain" for a second act; when, perturbed and adrift after being
temporarily rejected by the girl, Goodwin should turn in an undefined
but natural sympathy to the crippled dog in his box under the helper's
bench.
That illustrates one of the dramatist's discovered rules: "If you use a
property once use it again and again if you can." It is a visual thing that
binds together your stuff of speech like a dowel in a mission table.
There are few better places than a railroad train for building stories; the
rhythmic click of the wheels past the fish-plates makes your thoughts
march as a drum urges a column of soldiers. A tentative layout of the
story established in the first act, the educated Kate, discontented in her
blacksmith father's surroundings; the flash fascination of our transient
robber; the robber's distinct lead over Goodwin's accustomed and older
blandishments. The second act saw Goodwin turned down and the
robber preferred. The third act should see the robber's apprehension and
arrest. I milled around the question of his identification as Illinois and
Indiana went past the Pullman window; and then the one sure and
unfailing witness for that purpose volunteered--the express messenger
himself. There was no reason why this young man shouldn't be a native
of Bowling Green, and come home from St. Louis at the end of certain
runs. He would know Goodwin and the blacksmith's family; but, to put
him nearer to them, more "into the story" sentimentally, I gave

Goodwin a little sister, and made the messenger her accepted lover,
with his arrest and detention postponing the wedding. This need to free
his sister's fiancé gave the sheriff hero a third reason for getting the real
robber; the other two being his official duty and the rivalry for Kate.
The messenger and the sheriff's sister, the helper and the comedy
daughter, and Goodwin and Kate, made three pairs of young lovers.
This number might easily lead to a disastrous diffusion of interest
unless the playwright were careful always to make the work of each
couple, even when apparently about their own personal affairs, really to
the forward trend of the story.
I doubt if the production of novels, even to the writer temperamentally
disposed to that form of expression, is as absorbing as play-making.
The difference between the novel and the play is the difference between
was and is. Something has happened for the writer of the novel