Roughing it De Luxe

by Irvin S. Cobb

And so, disappointed in my dreams of seeing Indians on the hoof and Mormon households taking the air in family groups, I left Salt Lake City, with its fine wide streets and its handsome business district and its pure air and its background of snow-topped mountains, and started on the long homebound hike. It was late in the afternoon. We had quit Utah, with its flat plains, its garden spots reclaimed from the desert, and its endless succession of trim red-brick farmhouses, which seem to be the universal dwelling-places of the prosperous Mormon farmer.

We had departed from the old trail that Mark Twain crawled over in a stage-coach and afterward wrote about in his immortal Roughing It. The Limited, traveling forty-odd miles an hour, was skipping through the lower part of Wyoming before turning southward into Colorado. We were in the midst of an expanse of desolation and emptiness, fifteen miles from anywhere, and I was sitting on the observation platform of the rear car, watching how the shafts of the setting sun made the colors shift and deepen in the cañons and upon the sides of the tall red mesas, when I became aware that the train was slowing down.

Through the car came the conductor, with a happy expression upon his face. Behind him was a pleased-looking flagman leading by the arm a ragged tramp who had been caught, up forward somewhere, stealing a free ride.

The tramp was not resisting exactly, but at every step he said:

"You can't put me off the train between stations! It's the law that you can't put me off the train between stations!"

Neither the conductor nor the flagman said a word in answer. As the conductor reached up and jerked the bellcord the tramp, in the tone and manner of one who advances an absolutely unanswerable argument, said:

"You know, don't you, you can't put me off the train between stations?"

The train halted. The conductor unfastened a tail-gate in the guard-rail, and the flagman dropped his prisoner out through the opening. As the tramp flopped off into space I caught this remark:

"You can't put me off the train between stations."

The conductor tugged another signal on the bellcord, and the wheels began to turn faster and faster. The tramp picked himself up from between the rails. He brushed some adhering particles of roadbed off himself and, facing us, made a megaphone of his hands and sent a message after our diminishing shapes. By straining my ears I caught his words. He spoke as follows: