Martin got a job at once. He got killed, also, in a little while; but that is part of the business on a new road.
Near the shops at Topeka stands the railroad Young Men's Christian Association building. They were enlarging it when I was there. There are no "saloons" in Kansas, so Player and his company help the men to provide other amusements.
ON THE LIMITED
One Sabbath evening, not long ago, I went down to the depot in an Ontario town to take the International Limited for Montreal. She was on the blackboard five minutes in disgrace. "Huh!" grunted a commercial traveller. It was Sunday in the aforesaid Ontario town, and would be Sunday in Toronto, toward which he was travelling. Even if we were on time we should not arrive until 9.30—too late for church, too early to go to bed, and the saloons all closed and barred. And yet this restless traveller fretted and grieved because we promised to get into Toronto five minutes late. Alas for the calculation of the train despatchers, she was seven minutes overdue when she swept in and stood for us to mount. The get-away was good, but at the eastern yard limits we lost again. The people from the Pullmans piled into the café car and overflowed into the library and parlor cars. The restless traveller snapped his watch again, caught the sleeve of a passing trainman, and asked "'S matter?" and the conductor answered, "Waiting for No. 5." Five minutes passed and not a wheel turned; six, eight, ten minutes, and no sound of the coming west-bound express. Up ahead we could hear the flutter and flap of the blow-off; for the black flier was as restless as the fat drummer who was snapping his watch, grunting "Huh," and washing suppressed profanity down with café noir.
Eighteen minutes and No. 5 passed. When the great black steed of steam got them swinging again we were twenty-five minutes to the bad. And how that driver did hit the curves! The impatient traveller snapped his watch again and said, refusing to be comforted, "She'll never make it."
Mayhap the fat and fretful drummer managed to communicate with the engine-driver, or maybe the latter was unhappily married or had an insurance policy; and it is also possible that he is just the devil to drive. Anyway, he whipped that fine train of Pullmans, café, and parlor cars through those peaceful, lamplighted, Sabbath-keeping Ontario towns as though the whole show had cost not more than seven dollars, and his own life less.
On a long lounge in the library car a well-nourished lawyer lay sleeping in a way that I had not dreamed a political lawyer could sleep. One gamey M.P.—double P, I was told—had been robbing this same lawyer of a good deal of rest recently, and he was trying at a mile a minute to catch up with his sleep. I could feel the sleeper slam her flanges against the ball of the rail as we rounded the perfectly pitched curves, and the little semi-quaver that tells the trained traveller that the man up ahead is moving the mile-posts, at least one every minute. At the first stop, twenty-five miles out, the fat drummer snapped his watch again, but he did not say, "Huh." We had made up five minutes.
A few passengers swung down here, and a few others swung up; and off we dashed, drilling the darkness. I looked in on the lawyer again, for I would have speech with him; but he was still sleeping the sleep of the virtuous, with the electric light full on his upturned baby face, that reminds me constantly of the late Tom Reed.
A woman I know was putting one of her babies to bed in lower 2, when we wiggled through a reverse curve that was like shooting White Horse Rapids in a Peterboro. The child intended for lower 2 went over into 4. "Never mind," said its mother, "we have enough to go around;" and so she left that one in 4 and put the next one in 2, and so on.