Next door to this restaurant was the Hotel Swilley—mark the name—and farther up the street, “Mr. and Mrs. C. J. Holmes, Undertaker.” In the one drug and book and stationery store, where the only picture postcards we could find were of the depot and the “residence of N. C. Giffen,” whoever he might be, several very young girls, “downtown for a soda,” were calling up some other girl at home.
“Hello, Esther! Is this you, Esther? Well, don’t you know who this is, Esther? Can’t you tell? Oh, listen, Esther! Listen to my voice. Now can’t you tell, Esther? I thought you could. It’s Etta, of course. Wait a minute, Esther, Mabel wants to speak to you. Well, goodbye, Esther.” (This last after Mabel had spoken to much the same effect as Etta.)
After idling about in what seemed an almost Saturday night throng, so chipper and brisk was it, we made our way to Fort Wayne. It was a brisk, cool ride. The moon was on high, very clear, and a light wind blowing which made overcoats comfortable. Just outside Hicksville we encountered another detour, which shut us off from our fine road and enraged us so that we decided to ignore the sign warning us to keep out under penalty of the law and to go on anyhow. There seemed a good road ahead in spite of the sign, and so we deliberately separated the boards on posts which barred the way and sped on.
But the way of the transgressor—remember! Scarcely a mile had gone before the road broke into fragments, partially made passable by a filling of crushed stone, but after that it swiftly degenerated into mud, rubble and ruts, and we began to think we had made a dreadful mistake. Supposing we were stalled here and found? What would become of my trip to Indiana! Fined and detained, Franklin might get very much out of sorts and not care to go on. Oh, dear! Oh, dear!
We bumped along over rocks and stumps in the most uncomfortable fashion. The car rocked like a boat on a helter-skelter at Coney Island. Finally we came to a dead stop and looked into our condition, fore and aft. Things were becoming serious. Perspiration began to flow and regrets for our sinful tendencies to exude, when, in the distance, the fence at the other end appeared.
Immediately we cheered up. Poof! What was a small adventure like this?—a jolly lark, that was all. Who wouldn’t risk a car being stuck in order to achieve a cutoff like this and outwit the officers of the law? One had to take a sporting chance always. Why certainly! Nevertheless, I secretly thanked God or whatever gods there be, and Franklin and Speed looked intensely relieved. We jogged along another eight hundred feet, tore down the wire screen at the other end, and rushed on—a little fearfully, I think, since there was a farm house near at hand with a lot of road-making machinery in the yard. Perhaps it was the home of the road foreman! I hope he doesn’t ever read this book, and come and arrest us. Or if he does I hope he only arrests Franklin and Speed. On reflection a month or so in jail would not hurt them any, I think.
And then, after an hour or so, the city of Fort Wayne appeared in the distance. It does not lie on high ground, or in a hollow, but the presence of some twenty or thirty of those antiquated light towers which I mentioned as having been installed at Evansville, Indiana, in 1882, and which were still in evidence here, gave it that appearance. It seemed at first as though this town must be on a rise and we looking up at it from a valley; as we drew nearer, as though it were in a valley and we looking down from a height. We soon came to one of those pretentious private streets, so common in the cities of the West in these days—a street with a great gate at either end, open and unguarded and set with a superfluity of lights; which arrangement, plus houses of a certain grade of costliness, give that necessary exclusiveness the newly rich require, apparently. It was quite impressive. And then we came to a place where, quite in the heart of the city, two rivers, the St. Mary and the St. Joseph, joined to make the Maumee; and here, most intelligently, I thought, a small park had been made. It was indeed pleasing. And then we raced into the unescapable Main Street of the city, in this instance a thoroughfare so blazing with lights that I was much impressed. One would scarcely see more light on the Great White Way in New York.
CHAPTER XXXIV
A MIDDLE WESTERN CROWD
Though a city of seventyfive thousand, or thereabouts, Fort Wayne made scarcely any impression upon me. Now that I was back in Indiana and a few miles from my native heath, as it were, I expected, or perhaps I only half imagined, that I might gain impressions and sensations commensurate with my anticipations. But I didn’t. This was the city, or town, as it was then, to which my parents had originally traveled after their marriage in Dayton, Ohio, and where my father worked in a woolen mill as foreman, perhaps, before subsequently becoming its manager. It had always been a place of interest, if not happy memory, to my mother, who seemed to feel that she had been very happy here.
When our family, such as it was (greatly depleted by the departure of most of the children), came north to Warsaw, Fort Wayne, so much nearer than Chicago and a city of forty thousand, was the Mecca for the sporting youth of our town. To go to Fort Wayne! What a week end treat! For most of our youth who had sufficient means to travel so far, it was a city of great adventure. The fare was quite one dollar and seventyfive cents for the round trip, and only the bloods and sports, as we knew them, attempted it. I never had money enough to go, as much as I wanted to, nor yet the friends who were eager for my companionship.