But just because he had “played Rebel” for a few days solely to put a little life into the war, the boys were “down on” him. His followers in that campaign we made no note of and harbored no grudge against.
Perhaps there was wounded vanity in the recollection how nearly his superior generalship had routed our superior forces. So unreasoning are early prejudices that I presume a few of us never did quite get the last grain of grudge out of our heads—unless, perhaps, fifteen years later, when Mat was clerking in his father’s store, and word came of the death of Capt. Tip in Arizona. He was slain by the Apaches after an heroic fight which saved an immigrant party till the arrival of troops enough to scatter the red fiends.
Well, Mat’s plan progressed famously. A small army of us, with brooms and shovels, worked over that mile and a half of road till the coast was in such good shape as no one ever dreamed of before.
The weather stayed obstinately cold; so, under Mat’s direction, we brought water by the bucketful and wet down the safer parts of the slide. There was some friction about this, for the older people objected to so much glare ice; but Mat compromised by not wetting the street crossings, and only a narrow track at the side of the road, so that sleighs had plenty of room without encroaching on our slide.
At the tannery corner we made a crescent of hard-packed snow, with sloping concavity, which rendered it rather easier to turn that dangerous angle. It was like the raised rail on the outside of the railway curve, or the “saucer-edge” of an automobile race-track.
And then came the marshalling of the clans. Our embryo Napoleon, of course, was commander-in-chief, and his pride, the double-runner “Avalanche,” led the line. There were in those days but half a dozen other double-runners in town. These were owned by young men. Mat’s was the only one in “our crowd.” It was a very fancy affair for then and there.
Right-hand-man Hunt was privileged to manage the rear, and the coveted remaining seats were occupied by guests of passing invitation.
It was no small social power to control a double-runner, and Mat made the most of it, giving rides to all his friends with great princeliness. But I remember that we never saw on Mat’s “traverse” any of the urchins from the lower end of the village—they had no “influence.”
Behind the “Avalanche” came sleds of all sorts and sizes. As for Tip, no one had seen him for several days. He lived up on the other hill—a hill even steeper than Dolloff’s, but coming in with such an ugly turn at the engine-house that no one coasted there since big Ned Green broke his neck on a wood-pile around the bend.
The great Saturday came for the formal inauguration of the Cannonball Railroad. Sixty-odd boys were gathered at the top of Dolloff’s Hill. Some girls were there, too, with their high, flat-runnered sleds, upon which we looked with supreme scorn. Kitty White and Annie Waters and May Thurston were comfortably tucked up on the cushioned seat behind Mat on his double-runner; and Hunt was holding back on the tail-board till the signal.