As a matter of fact, it is an ocher-colored wooden railroad station, a rather bare dining-room, and lunch counter, and perfectly good, clean bedrooms upstairs. You cannot get a suite with a private bath, and if you are more or less spoiled by the supercomforts of luxurious living, you may not care to stay very long. But if in all of your journeying around the world, you never have to put up with any greater hardship than spending a night at the Union Pacific in North Platte, you will certainly not have to stay at home on that account. There are no drunkards or toughs or even loafers hanging about; the food is cleanly served and good; the rooms, although close to the railroad tracks, are as spotless as brooms and scrubbing-brushes can make them.[4]
There is a place, though, between the Missouri and the Rio Grande—there is no use in being more exact as to its locality—where, except in case of accident—ours was a broken spring—you are not likely to stay. There our own particular horrors were pretty well realized: dirty rooms over a saloon and lounging toughs on the corner; uneatable hunks of food at a table in a barroom, our dinner put in front of us on a platter, and no plates used at all. And the bedrooms! I slept on top of my bed wrapped in an ulster with my head on the lining of my coat. And even so, I was seriously bitten by small but voracious prior inhabitants. The next day all the “bath” I had was a catlick with the corner of a handkerchief held reluctantly under a greasy spigot.
This experience was pretty unappetizing but also it was our only bad one, sent no doubt as a punishment for our lack of appreciation of one or two former stopping-places, which, as E. M. would say, “sounds fair enough.” Also in order to live consistently up to that motor philosophy I wrote about, we will in time be glad of the color it will give to our memory book. But at present its color seems merely a grease spot on the page, and all the motor philosophy in the world doesn’t seem potent enough to blot out the taste and smell, to say nothing of the stings.
By the way, I seem to have arrived at North Platte and possibly farther, on a magic carpet—a little difficult for anyone taking this as a guide to follow! Therefore to go back, merely on the subject of the roads, almost as far as Des Moines. Taking the general average of luck in motoring, no matter how well things have gone for you, the chances are that you have had some delays. A day or two of rain that held you up, detours that made you lose your way, a run of tire trouble—something, no matter what it is, that has delayed you more than you expected. And whatever it is you find yourself thinking this does not matter very much because when we get to those Nebraska fast roads we can make up lost time easily.
The very sound “Nebraska” correlates “dragged roads” speed! While you are still gently running through the picturesque Sir Joshua Reynolds scenery of the River to River road in Iowa, you find that your mind is developing an anticipatory speed craze. So thoroughly imbued has your mind become with the “fast road” idea that the very ground has a speed gift in its dragged surface. What if your engine is barely capable of forty miles an hour, that miraculously fast stretch magically carries you at the easiest fifty. If you have a big powerful engine, you forget that ordinarily you dislike whizzing across the surface of the earth, and for just this once—even though you think of it more in terror than in joy—you are approaching the raceway of America, and you, too, are going to race!
“We must be sure that everything is in perfect running order,” you exclaim excitedly as you picture your car leaping out of Omaha and shooting to Denver while scarcely turning over its engine. “Not many stopping-places,” you are told. What matter is that to you? You are not thinking of stopping at all. North Platte, perhaps, yes. Three hundred and thirty miles in a day is just a nice little fast road run.
“A nice little which?” says the head of a garage in Omaha.
“We’ll leave early,” you continue, unheeding, “and make a dash across the continental speedway——”
“See here, stranger,” says the garage man, “what state of fast circuits d’y think y’re in? This is Nebraska and the speed limit is twenty miles!”
“Twenty miles a minute?” you gasp, “that certainly is speed!”