“Well—” replied Mary Jane doubtfully, “do you suppose they’ll have hashed brown potatoes for lunch? ’Cause if they will, I think I’ll save my other order till then. I’m not just as hungry as I was.”
“Good reason why,” laughed Alice, “come on, let’s not eat any more now. Let’s go into the observation car.”
The girls found riding in the observation car almost as much fun as eating in the diner. First they stood out on the “back porch” as Mary Jane called it and got good breaths of fresh air; then they came inside and settled themselves in big easy chairs and looked at all the “funny papers” they found in the car library—that took a long time because there were so many. Next they wrote letters, Mary Jane didn’t really write to be sure, but she drew a very good picture of the coal cars they passed on the way and of hills and valleys and put it in an envelope ready to send to Doris; and Alice wrote a nice long letter to her chum, Frances. And then, much to every one’s surprise, the dining car man came through the train calling, “First call for luncheon! Dining car third car in front!” and it was time to wash up ready to eat again.
In the afternoon the country they were passing proved so interesting that Mary Jane and Alice didn’t even try to look at books or magazines. For the mountains had grown higher and more interesting every mile of the way. Now they passed great holes in the ground out from which came little cars full of freshly mined coal, and Mr. Merrill explained to the girls all about how coal was dug out of the earth, loaded on those queer little cars and sent up to the sunshine ready to be loaded into railroad cars to take away for folks to use. And they passed mining villages tucked down in the valleys. Some had great, rough barracks where all the miners lived. Some, and those were the most interesting to the girls, had groups of tiny little shacks where the miners lived with their families. They saw children playing, women working at their house work, and here and there a miner, his lamp on his head, going off to the mine for his work. Mary Jane and Alice had never realized till they saw those funny little lamps, fastened to the miner’s cap, how queer it must seem to work hours down, down, down, deep in the darkness of the earth.
“I do believe,” said Alice thoughtfully, “that I’ll always notice more about coal now that I can guess better how hard it is to work down in the ground.”
As long as the daylight lasted, the girls strained their eyes to see all that might be seen of the coal country. And just after the sun set behind the iron mountains leaving the darkness of a winter evening behind, they noticed flashes of light off to the south-east.
“The steel furnaces of Birmingham,” said Mr. Merrill, “and you shall see them close too, to-morrow. But now it’s time to get our things on to meet Uncle Will.”
They hustled back to their own car to find that the porter had carefully picked up their things and that everything was ready for them to slip into their wraps and get off the train. So there was still time to watch out into the darkness and see more of those brilliant flashes of light that made the sky glow so mysteriously.
Mrs. Merrill’s uncle was at the station and hurried them into a big “boulevard bus” which would quickly take them home where aunt and cousins and a good dinner were waiting.
“There’s just one thing I don’t like about this city,” said Mary Jane later in the evening.