The buffaloes were stuffed in a case at the museum, but they must certainly have been among the finest in the world when they were alive. We also saw some stuffed prairie dogs. But out here you need not go in a museum to see them! After the museum we walked through the Capitol, a fine building splendidly situated on a height overlooking the city and its dome newly gleaming with gold. When we were descending the many steps of the Capitol’s terrace, we saw the same jitney driver who had brought us there, and his car being empty, he drew up expectantly at the curb. Not wanting, however, to return to the spot we had started from, we suggested that he take off his sign and drive us about by the hour.
He grinned broadly. Sure he would! Also he augmented his price with equal alacrity. Then rolling up his “5-cent” sign, and surveying his unplacarded machine in evident satisfaction, he said jauntily:
“I tell you! The cops’ll think I’m the showfer of a millionaire! When you’re nothing but a jitney you stay behind here, and you don’t go there! But you bet they’ll let me through now all right!”
As a jitney he had been trundling along briskly, but now assuming all the characteristics of those who are hired by time instead of by distance, he never let the speedometer go above eight miles an hour; tried his best to keep it at six and stalled the engine about every hundred yards, until at the end of a very little while of halting and creeping we found his tin-kettle tramp machine acute punishment. We told him that if he would only go quickly, we would willingly pay for a second hour’s drive at the end of twenty minutes. But nothing we could say had any effect upon him. He kept on at the same dot-and-go-one creep. Finally, in desperation, Celia shrieked:
“If you don’t get us home at once, it will be too late! You will have to take us to the asylum!”
He looked around at Celia like a scared rabbit, and in her frenzied countenance found evidently no reassurance, for he took us home at a speed that broke the traffic regulations—even for the “showfers of millionaires!”
In a few of our impressions, Des Moines had an eccentric topsy-turviness as though we had stumbled into the pages of “Alice in Wonderland.” At the Chamberlain, an old-fashioned General Grant style of hotel, the elevator boys sit on chairs in the center of the elevator and the guests stand. When I asked to have a cup of coffee and toast sent up to my room the next morning at half-past seven, the head waitress raised her eyebrows and explained:
“If you will tell the clerk at the desk, he will have your room called at whatever hour you say.”
“I don’t want my room called,” I protested, “I want you to send my coffee up to me at seven-thirty.”