“You aren’t a train boy, are you?” I asked. “Oh, no,” said the young fellow, “that’s my lunch. I got a week’s go on the trains yet, so I brought enough to eat for that time. I’m going to college away out West. Have one,” he broke in and pointed to the basket. I had no scruples in assisting at the reduction of such a mountain of sandwiches, for I imagined that a company of soldiers could have subsisted on them for three days. I ate my fill, and the young fellow watched me with evident delight. “I’m going out to college, too,” I explained. “We’re birds of a feather, eh?” “What college?” he asked. “Evangelical University,” I replied. “It’s easy to get through there because expenses are moderate. I don’t think I’ll have a chance to get in right away,” I explained. “You see, I haven’t written them that I’m coming or asked for a chance even. I can get out there and get some kind of work, and when everything’s arranged, get into the University. A friend told me about it.”
“Why didn’t you go back with some one?” asked my friend. “Well, you see,” I answered, “I couldn’t afford to go the way the others go. It costs twenty-four dollars and this route only costs me fifteen dollars and sixty-five cents.” “Oh,” said the young fellow. “When you do enter the University what class will you join?” “I’ll have to join the beginners with common school branches,” I said. “Then I’ll work up into the Academic course to prepare for college, then go through college, you see.” “Oh, yes,” he said, “I see.” He then asked me to help myself to another sandwich. “You’ve got nerve, anyway,” he commented. “It’ll be a long pull, won’t it, to do what you plan? How old are you?” “Oh, around twenty,” I answered. “I wish, for your sake,” said the young man, “that you were through with it; this education business takes a lot out of a fellow. It’s a fight right from the start if you don’t have any money. I’m a sophomore in college. By the way, you haven’t told me your name, fellow. Mine’s Harlan M. N. I. Droughtwell. Plenty of initials because my folks wanted to please both branches of the family. In full, I am Harlan Micknell Norman Ingraham Droughtwell.” “And I,” I replied, “am just Al Priddy. No middle name. I suppose, though, that really I am Albert, but it ain’t used much.”
Harlan put the basket aside, after having put over the bread a damp towel and closed the cover. Then he told me to turn in near him. So we both gave ourselves into the keeping of the engineer and slept profoundly above the odors, the litter, the droning aliens:—two youths college bound.
I was first up, in the morning. Harlan, on opening his eyes, proposed that I “dive in” and he pointed to the sandwiches. First of all I wanted to wash my face. I did so at the drinking tank. I looked around. There was a stirring among the aliens; just a stirring. Some were turning over, yawning and giving guttural explosions of sleepy comment. Mothers were feeding hungry, lively babies; but at my end everything was profoundly still. The train boy’s basket was still where I had seen it the night before with the fruit exposed to the air. The boy himself was a tousled, sleepy, uninspiring bundle of blue and white. I looked at my berth-mate, the sandwich man, and noted that he combed his hair from the side. Immediately I was conscious that I combed mine down the middle, and I recollected that my aunt Millie had always said that I looked like a masher with it in that way. So I took out my pocket comb and changed the style of my hair-dressing, while Harlan, entirely unconscious of having wielded so powerful an influence over a fellow, sat in his berth and struggled with his clothes.
All through the morning we traveled; over high trestles, through deep cuts, skirting tobacco fields, whirling through little settlements until at last we were rolled to the deck of a massive iron ferry and, still in the cars, were taken across the lake and landed at Detroit. Meanwhile, I had parted company with Harlan, who had told me to “keep right at it,” meaning thereby, a college education.
Transfer after transfer was made for another night and a day, each time the trains seemed to get slower, to stop more at stations, while the cities grew less frequent. Friday turned into Saturday, Saturday into Sunday, and by Sunday, too, we plunged into an overpowering odor of gas. “Is the lamp leaking?” I asked the trainman mournfully. “It’s terrible. It must be leaking. It makes me seasick.” The man laughed. “Oh, you’re in the gas belt,” he said. “It’s in the air. You will get used to it. I can’t smell it at all, though at first it smells like being right in a gas house, doesn’t it?”
The gas tinged everything; food and drink. I felt like going to sleep to lose the sense of it. But deeper and deeper into it the train plunged, without mercy. “If you’ve got a piece of silver about you,” said the trainman, “a watch-chain or anything of gold or silver, this air will turn it black soon enough. But you’ll get used to it,” he added comfortingly enough. “I shall have to,” I complained, gloomily. “It tastes as if all the gas works in the world had exploded about here.”
Finally I was nearing Groat’s Crossing, the seat of Evangelical University. The train deposited me at a station within twelve miles of it, where I should have to take an accommodation four hours later. There was nothing to see in the place where I waited, but glaring brick buildings and houses on stilts. So I waited around the hot, splintered platform, seated now on a truck, watching a group of young men reading sections of a Sunday paper, or walking miserably up and down wishing for the train, for the gas had gotten into my system, and I felt lonesome, miserable. I might have gone to sleep in the waiting room, but the seats were spoiled for beds by having iron arm rests at intervals of two feet. I tried to thread myself through these, at full length, but could not. There was nothing to do, but stand around and taste gas, until the Groat’s Crossing train came.
With great joy I watched the accommodation come into the station. Only twelve more miles between me and Evangelical University! The end of three days’ travel. Three days from the cotton mills! In that thought I renewed my spirit. Soon I should at least be NEAR a college!
College! For me! It was the anticipation of a first watch twenty times intensified. I, go to college! Look back in the genealogies of the Priddys, rooted back in Britain’s centuries, and lay your finger on a single member of it who ever went beyond the secondary school! And there was the brakeman calling, inconsequently, “Groat’s Crossing!”