"This is a hell of a town," said the conductor cheerfully.
I waited for an explanation. It came.
"Why, I went to a nigger-minstrel show here the other night. A mountaineer in the gallery shot a nigger and a white man dead in the aisle, but the band struck up 'Dixie,' and the show never stopped. But one man left the house and that was Bones. They found him at the hotel, but he refused to go back. 'I can't be funny in that place,' he said."
Now the curious thing is that each one of those three, the slayer and the slain—the Saxon through the arrogance of race, the African through the imitative faculty that has given him something of that same arrogance toward the people of other lands—felt himself the superior of any Oriental with a yellow skin. And now when I think of the exquisite courtesy and ceremony and gentle politeness in this land, I smile; then I think of the bearing of the man toward the woman of this land, and the bearing of the man—even the mountaineer—toward the woman in our own land, and the place the woman holds in each—and the smile passes.
Along that old wilderness trail I went across the Ohio, through prairie lands, across the rich fields of Iowa, the plains of Nebraska, over the Rockies, and down into the great deserts that stretch to the Sierras. Along went others who were concerned in that trail: three Japanese students hurrying home from England, France, and Germany, bits of that network of eager investigation that Japan has spread over the globe—quiet, unobtrusive little fellows who rushed for papers at every station to see news of the war; three Americans on the way to the Philippines for the Government; an English Major of Infantry and an English Captain of Cavalry and a pretty English girl; and two who in that trail had no interest—two newspaper men from France. I have been told that the only two seven-masted vessels in the world collided one night in mid-ocean. Well, these sons of France—the only ones on their mission, perhaps, in broad America—collided not only on the same train, the same sleeper, and the same section, I was told, but both were gazetted for the same lower berth. Each asserted his claim with a politeness that became gesticulatory and vociferous. Conductor, brakeman, and porter came to the scene of action. Nobody could settle the dispute, so the correspondents exchanged cards, claimed Gallic satisfaction mutually, and requested the conductor to stop the train and let them get off and fight. The conductor explained that, much as he personally would like to see the scrap, the law of the land and the speed of the Overland Limited made tarrying impossible. Without rapiers I have often wondered how those two gentlemen of France would have drawn each other's blood. Each still refused to take the upper berth, but next day they were friends, and came over sea practically arm and arm on shipboard, and arm and arm they practically are in Japan to-day.
Through the stamping grounds of Wister's "Virginian" and other men of fact and fiction in the West, the trail led—through barren wastes with nothing alive in sight except an occasional flock of gray, starved sheep with a lonely herder and his sheep-dog watching us pass, while a blue-eyed frontiersman gave me more reasons for race arrogance with his tales of Western ethics in the old days: How men trusted each other and were not deceived in friendship and in trade; how they sacrificed themselves for each other without regret, and no wish for reward, and honored and protected women always.
Then forty miles of snowsheds over the Sierras, and the trail dropped sheer into the dewy green of flowers, gardens, and fruit-tree blossoms, where the grass was lush, cattle and sheep were fat, and the fields looked like rich orchards—to end in the last camp of the Saxon, San Francisco—where the heathen Chinee walks the streets, where Robert Louis Stevenson's bronze galley has motionless sails set to the winds that blow through a little park, where Bret Harte's memory is soon to be honored in a similar way, and where a man claimed that the civilization of the trail had leaped in one bound from Chicago to the Pacific Coast. And I wondered what the intermediate Saxons, over whose heads that leap was made, would have to say in answer.
He had sailed one wide ocean—this Saxon—the other and wider one was by comparison a child's play on a mill-pond with a boat of his own making, and over it I followed him on.
On the dock two days later I saw my first crowd of Japanese, in Saxon clothes, waving flags, and giving Saxon yells to their countrymen who were going home to fight. After that, but for an occasional march of those same countrymen on the steerage deck to the measure of a war-song, no more tidings, or rumors or suggestions of war.
Seven days later, long, slowly rising slopes of mountains veiled in mist came in view, and we saw waves of many colors washing the feet of newest America, where the Saxon has pitched his latest but not his most Eastern—as I must say now—camp; and where he is patching a human crazy quilt of skins from China, Japan, Portugal, America, England, Africa. The patching of it goes swiftly, but there will be one hole in the quilt that will never be filled again on this earth, for the Hawaiian is going—as he himself says, he is "pau," which in English means finished, done for, doomed. Now girls who are three-quarters Saxon dance the hula-hula for tourists, and but for a movement of their feet, it is the dance of the East wretchedly and vulgarly done, and the spectator would wipe away, if he could, every memory but the wailing song of the woman with the guitar—a song which to my ear had no more connection with the dance than a cradle song could have with a bacchanalian orgy.