Panting, the Englishman threw himself into a way-car that was already making ten miles an hour. The train official unfolded the paper, read it, looked the Englishman over, and said, "All right."
It was nearly night when the train arrived at W., and the dead-head followed the train crew into an unpainted pine hotel, where all hands fell eagerly to work. A man stood behind a little high desk at the door taking money; but when the Englishman offered to pay he said, "Yours is paid fer."
"Not mine; nobody knows me here."
"Then, 'f the devil don't know you better than I do you're lost, young man," said the landlord. "But some one p'inted to you and said, 'I pay fer him.' It ain't a thing to make a noise about. It don't make no difference to me whether it's Tom or Jerry that pays, so long as everybody represents."
"Well, this is a funny country," mused the Englishman, as he strolled over to the shop. Now when he heard the voice of the foreman, with its musical burr, which stamped the man as a Briton from the Highlands, his heart grew glad. The Scotchman listened to the stranger's story without any sign of emotion or even interest; and when he learned that the man had "never railroaded," but had been all his life in the British Government service, he said he could do nothing for him, and walked away.
The young man sat and thought it over, and concluded he would see the master-mechanic. On the following morning he found that official at his desk and told his story. He had just arrived from England with a wife and three children and a few dollars. "That's all right," said the master-mechanic; "I'll give you a job on Monday morning."
This was Saturday, and during the day the first foreman with whom the Englishman had talked wired that if he would return to E. he could find work. The young man showed this wire to the master-mechanic. "I should like to work for you," said he; "you have been very kind to give me employment after the foreman had refused, but my family is near this place. They are two hundred miles or more from here."
"I understand," said the kind-hearted official, "and you'd better go back to E."
The Englishman rubbed his chin and looked out of the window. The train standing at the station and about to pull out would carry him back to the junction, but he made no effort to catch it, and the master-mechanic, seeing this, caught the drift of the young man's mind. "Have you transportation?" he asked. The stranger, smiling, shook his head. Turning to his desk, the master-mechanic wrote a pass to the junction and a telegram requesting transportation over the Iowa Central from the junction to the town of E.
That Sunday the young man told his young wife that the new country was "all right." Everybody trusted everybody else. An official would give a stranger free transportation; a station agent could give you a pass, and even an engine-driver could carry a man without asking permission.