We hurried off in the dusk, and after walking a mile or so came to a railroad, and could see the lights of a depot near us. We mounted the wooden beams which, with straps of iron on their tops for a bearing, were the tracks of those days, and hurried to a point near the depot. There we sat down and waited in the darkness till the arrival of our train—a fearsome thing, that roared and creaked along with spark-showers and rags of flame in the air above it. The trainmen rudely shouted their commands, as if the waiting crowd were so many cattle. I trembled as I hurried with Bony to the side of the train.
“I've only nineteen cents,” I whispered.
“Never mind, sonny—I'll pay yer fare,” said he, jauntily, as if such excitement and generosity were quite familiar to him.
We climbed the platform when all were aboard, and Bony said to me:
“We'll stand here, if they don't kick us off, until we get to the next stop.”
So we stood in the spark-shower as our train roared and creaked along, and the platform began to sway and jump and shove and jerk and waver. A young man in a gay uniform of blue and brass came out with a lantern and bawled this in my ear:
“Look a-here, bub!—see that picture?” He held his lantern so that I could see the picture of a grave on the car door. Its headstone contained these words:
Sacred to the memory of a man who once stood on a car platform
We passed into the car, and sat on a straight-backed seat by a rattling window. It was much shorter than the cars of to-day, and permeated with the odor of whale-oil that came from its lamps, and had a stove at each end. The conductor told us, when we had paid four cents a mile for our fare to the next stop, that we had just left De Kalb Junction and were on the night express for the South. A man was asleep near us with a curious framework of iron behind him. It extended from the middle of his spine to the back of his head, and had a sort of spring in it which permitted him to sit in a leaning posture.
I asked the conductor what it was.