The journey itself was a revelation to him and an education. With his Broadway prejudice that the United States stopped somewhere just above the Bronx and behind the Jersey hills, he was astonished to find so much habitable country beyond these horizons and so many people in it who did not seem to depend upon New York City for their livelihood or happiness. At first he was so much preoccupied with his errand and himself in his surprising new rôle that he paid little attention to the scenes spread before his eyes. Chicago impressed him only as a dirtier and more provincial New York. But the next morning when he awoke at Omaha he began to realize that America was more than a strip of land along the Atlantic seaboard, and by the time the train had left Ogden his respect for his fatherland had immensely increased.
He noticed also that the character of the people on the train was gradually changing. Large, rough-looking men, with tanned faces not too carefully shaved, and sometimes with a queer assortment of jewelry and patent leather shoes took the places of the pallid, smooth shaven business men that had been his companions from Jersey City to Chicago. There were also a number of women traveling alone, large, competent, and not overrefined. Brainard, whose ideas of Americans other than the types to be seen on the streets of New York had been drawn from the travestied figures of the stage,—the miner and the cowboy with flapping sombrero and chaps,—watched these new specimens of his fellow countrymen with keen interest. In spite of their rather uncouth speech and their familiarity with the negro porters, they were attractive. They had a vigorous air about them, indicating that they came from a big country, with big ways of doing things in it, and a broad outlook over wide horizons. The would-be dramatist began to perceive that the world was not peopled wholly by the types that the American stage had made familiar to him.
A little way beyond Ogden the train rolled out into the bright blue inland sea of the Great Salt Lake and trundled on for mile after mile in the midst of the water on a narrow strip of rocky roadbed. Brainard had read in the newspapers of this famous “Lucin cut-off” where in an effort to save a detour of a few miles around the shore of the lake millions of tons of “fill” had been dumped into an apparently bottomless hole. The pluck and the energy of that road builder who had conceived this work and kept at it month after month, dumping trainloads of rock into a great lake had not specially thrilled him when he read of it. But now the imagination and the courage of the little man who did this sort of thing thrilled him. Harriman, the bold doer of this and greater things, was of course a popular Wall Street hero to the New Yorker,—one of those legendary creatures who were supposed to have their seat of power in the lofty cliffs of that narrow Via Dolorosa and somehow like the alchemists of old conjure great fortunes out of air, with the aid of the “tape.” That was the way in which this young man had always thought of Harriman,—“the wizard of railroad finance.”
But now as he glided smoothly over the solid roadbed that ran straight westward into the remote distance with the salt waves almost lapping the tracks and leaving a white crust from their spume, with lofty mountains looming to south and to north,—as he stood on the rear platform of the heavy steel train observing this marvelous panorama,—a totally new conception of the renowned financier came to him. This was not done by watching the tape! It demanded will and force and imagination and faith—spiritual qualities in a man—to do this. The young traveler mentally did homage to the character that had created the wonderful highway over which for a day and a half he had been comfortably borne in luxurious ease.
As he watched the blue mountains about Ogden fade into the haze, it seemed that New York, his life there, and all his conventional conceptions of the little world in which he had vainly struggled for existence also receded and grew smaller, less real. The train in its westward flight was bearing him forward into a new world, within as well as without! As the track began to wind up again to higher levels before taking its next great leap over the Sierras, Brainard went forward to the smoking room, his usual post of observation, where he sat through long, meditative hours, listening to the talk about him and gazing at the fleeting landscape. Whatever else it might mean,—this jaunt across the continent on a stranger’s errand,—it was bringing him a rich cargo of new ideas.
Of all his fellow travelers the man who happened to occupy the drawing-room in the car where Brainard had his section aroused his curiosity especially. He was one of those well-dressed, alert young business men who had made Brainard conscious of his shabby and inappropriate appearance when he first started on his journey. The door of his room had been closed all the way to Chicago, and Brainard had seen nothing of the man. But since the train left Omaha the door to the drawing-room had been open, and from his section Brainard observed its occupant diligently reading a book. What aroused his attention and interested him in the stranger more than his pleasant appearance of frank good humor had been the sort of book he had chosen for this long journey. It was bound like a “best seller” in a gaudy red cloth, and a picture of a starry-eyed maiden with floating hair adorned the cover. But it was labeled in unmistakable black letters Paradise Lost. Brainard, who had made a painful and superficial acquaintance in his youth with this poetic masterpiece, decided that the smartly dressed young American could not be devoting the journey to Milton’s epic. It must be that some writer of best sellers had cribbed the great poet’s title and fitted it to a less strenuous tale of love and starry-eyed maidens. This theory, however, broke down before the fact that from time to time the young man consulted a small black book that was indubitably a dictionary, and Brainard taking advantage of a moment when the traveler had left his room assured himself that the book was really a copy of Milton’s poem set within profane modern covers. Just why this young man should spend his hours on the train reading the puritan epic of heaven and hell puzzled Brainard and whetted his curiosity to know what sort of man the stranger was.
Earlier this morning as the train was climbing down from the Rockies into Utah, an opportunity had come to speak to his fellow traveler. The train had pulled up somewhere before a desolate station whose architect had tried to make a Queen Anne cottage that looked singularly out of place in the bare, wild landscape. While the engine took its long drink, the passengers stretched their legs and enjoyed the crisp mountain air. The stranger came to the vestibule, yawned, and read the name of the station:
“Palisade, is it? . . . The last time I was over this way it looked more lively than this.”
“What was happening?” Brainard inquired.
“There was a bunch of miners somewheres in Utah making trouble, on a strike. The company had brought in a couple of carloads of greasers, and the miners were down here shooting up the party.”