The Gilded Age | Page 4

know what's coming.
"Even you and I will see the day that steamboats will come up that little
Turkey river to within twenty miles of this land of ours--and in high
water they'll come right to it! And this is not all, Nancy--it isn't even
half! There's a bigger wonder--the railroad! These worms here have
never even heard of it--and when they do they'll not believe in it. But
it's another fact. Coaches that fly over the ground twenty miles an
hour--heavens and earth, think of that, Nancy! Twenty miles an hour. It
makes a main's brain whirl. Some day, when you and I are in our
graves, there'll be a railroad stretching hundreds of miles--all the way
down from the cities of the Northern States to New Orleans--and its got
to run within thirty miles of this land--may be even touch a corner of it.
Well; do you know, they've quit burning wood in some places in the
Eastern States? And what do you suppose they burn? Coal!" [He bent
over and whispered again:] "There's world--worlds of it on this land!
You know that black stuff that crops out of the bank of the
branch?--well, that's it. You've taken it for rocks; so has every body
here; and they've built little dams and such things with it. One man was
going to build a chimney out of it. Nancy I expect I turned as white as a
sheet! Why, it might have caught fire and told everything. I showed
him it was too crumbly. Then he was going to build it of copper
ore--splendid yellow forty-per-cent. ore! There's fortunes upon fortunes
of copper ore on our land! It scared me to death, the idea of this fool
starting a smelting furnace in his house without knowing it, and getting
his dull eyes opened. And then he was going to build it of iron ore!
There's mountains of iron ore here, Nancy--whole mountains of it. I
wouldn't take any chances. I just stuck by him--I haunted him--I never
let him alone till he built it of mud and sticks like all the rest of the

chimneys in this dismal country. Pine forests, wheat land, corn land,
iron, copper, coal-wait till the railroads come, and the steamboats!
We'll never see the day, Nancy--never in the world---never, never,
never, child. We've got to drag along, drag along, and eat crusts in toil
and poverty, all hopeless and forlorn--but they'll ride in coaches, Nancy!
They'll live like the princes of the earth; they'll be courted and
worshiped; their names will be known from ocean to ocean! Ah,
well-a-day! Will they ever come back here, on the railroad and the
steamboat, and say, 'This one little spot shall not be touched--this hovel
shall be sacred--for here our father and our mother suffered for us,
thought for us, laid the foundations of our future as solid as the hills!'"
"You are a great, good, noble soul, Si Hawkins, and I am an honored
woman to be the wife of such a man"--and the tears stood in her eyes
when she said it. "We will go to Missouri. You are out of your place,
here, among these groping dumb creatures. We will find a higher place,
where you can walk with your own kind, and be understood when you
speak--not stared at as if you were talking some foreign tongue. I would
go anywhere, anywhere in the wide world with you I would rather my
body would starve and die than your mind should hunger and wither
away in this lonely land."
"Spoken like yourself, my child! But we'll not starve, Nancy. Far from
it. I have a letter from Beriah Sellers--just came this day. A letter
that--I'll read you a line from it!"
He flew out of the room. A shadow blurred the sunlight in Nancy's face
--there was uneasiness in it, and disappointment. A procession of
disturbing thoughts began to troop through her mind. Saying nothing
aloud, she sat with her hands in her lap; now and then she clasped them,
then unclasped them, then tapped the ends of the fingers together;
sighed, nodded, smiled--occasionally paused, shook her head. This
pantomime was the elocutionary expression of an unspoken soliloquy
which had something of this shape:
"I was afraid of it--was afraid of it. Trying to make our fortune in
Virginia, Beriah Sellers nearly ruined us and we had to settle in
Kentucky and start over again. Trying to make our fortune in Kentucky

he crippled us again and we had to move here. Trying to make our
fortune here, he brought us clear down to the ground, nearly. He's an
honest soul, and means the very best in the world, but I'm afraid, I'm
afraid he's too flighty. He has splendid ideas, and he'll divide his