A Wyoming ranch foreman was sent East by his employer in charge of a carload of polo ponies. He was gone four weeks. When he arrived back at the ranch he wore an air of unmistakable pleasure and relief.
“Gee,” he said, “it’s good to git home again. So fur as I’m concerned I don’t want never to travel no more.”
“Didn’t you like New York?” asked one of the hands.
“Oh, it’s all right in its way,” he said, “but I don’t keer for it.”
“What’s chiefly the matter with it?”
“Oh,” he said, “it’s so dad blame far frum everywhere.”
§ 23 The Way of the Neighborhood
It is not so very long ago that life in the Kentucky mountains was primitive. They used to tell a story to illustrate how primitive things actually were. It may not have been true. Probably it wasn’t, but at any rate it was an illustration, even though an exaggerated one, of a prevalent condition.
There was a narrow-gauge, jerk-water road which skirted through the knobs. One day the train—there was only one train a day, each way—was laboring slowly upgrade when the engineer halted his locomotive to let a cavalcade cross the track ahead of him. First there streaked past a pack of hounds, all baying. Behind the dogs followed men, on horseback and mule-back, galloping at top speed and cheering the hunt on with shrill whoops and blasts from a horn. The troupe had vanished into the deep timber bordering the right-of-way when a Northern man, riding in the shabby day-coach, addressed a fellow-passenger who was a native.
“Sheriff’s posse, I suppose?” he said.