He wiped his sweaty forehead with a grimy hand.
“Wouldn’t like to go down, would you?” he asked genially, after a time—quite unconscious of our earlier conversation, I think.
“No, thanks,” I replied.
I had a sicky feeling, conveyed by that dark, dripping shaft. Three hundred and fifty feet—not me!
But I said to myself as I looked at all the healthy, smiling miners we met farther on, “If I were a prince or a president and these were my subjects, how proud I would be of a land that contained such—how earnest for their well being”—I had so little courage to do what they were doing.
But in spite of these mines, which were deep and far-reaching, as we learned, in many districts stretching for miles in different directions, the soil manifested that same fertility and the land grew flatter and flatter. All the towns in here were apparently dependent upon them. There were no rises of ground. Interesting groves of trees crowded to the roadside at times, providing a cooling shade, and excessively marshy lands appeared, packed with hazel bushes and goldenrod, but no iron weed as in the East. The roads were sped over by handsome automobiles—much finer in many instances than ours—and I took it that they were representative of the real farmer wealth here, a wealth we as a family had never been permitted to taste.
In about two hours we entered Vincennes—a front tire having blown up just outside Sullivan on the banks of the Busseron. At its edge we came upon a fairgrounds so gaily bedecked with tents and flags that we parked our car and went in—to see the sights. The Knox County Fair. It seemed to me that this farmers' show supported my belief in their prosperity, for to me at least it turned out to be the most interesting county fair I had ever seen. The animals displayed—prize sows and boars, horses and sheep of different breeds, chickens and domestic animals of various kinds,—were intensely interesting to look at and so attractively displayed. I never saw so many fat sheep, dams and rams, nor more astonishing hogs, great, sleek rolling animals that blinked at us with their little eyes and sniffed and grunted. Great white pleasant tents were devoted to farm machinery and automobiles and by these alone one could tell that here was a prosperous and buying population, else the manufacturers had never troubled to send so much and such expensive machinery. All that the farmer could use—machines for ploughing, planting, cutting, reaping, binding, fertilizing, baling (I think I counted a score of separate machines of this kind), to others intended for use around the home—kerosene cook stoves, well pumps, cream separators, churns, washing machines—a whole host of these—to the latest inventions in motor ploughs and motor driven farm wagons—were here. The display of automobiles was lavish—really all the important makes were represented and in addition there was a racetrack with races going on and a large number of tented amusements—the wild men from Boola-Boola; Calgero, the mindreader, several moving picture shows, a gypsy dancer, and the like.
Franklin and I browsed around at our leisure. On so fine and so hot an afternoon it was amusing to idle under these great trees and study the country throng. A hungry boy was treated to “weenies” (the Indiana version of “hot dog”) and coffee by him—a treat he was very backward about accepting. Hundreds, judging by the parked cars outside, possessed automobiles. Various church congregations of the region had established restaurant booths to aid one or other of their religious causes. At a table in the booth of the Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church of Vincennes I ate a dish of chicken dumplings, a piece of cherry pie, and drank several glasses of milk, thereby demonstrating, I think, that no inalienable enmity existed between myself and the Catholic Church, at least not on the subject of food. At this booth, besides the several becalicoed and bestarched old ladies who were in attendance, I noticed a tall Bernhardtesque girl of very graceful and sinuous lines who was helping to wait on people. She had red hair, long delicate tapering fingers, a wasplike but apparently uncorseted waist, and almond shaped greenish grey eyes. No edict of the Church prevented her from wearing hip tight skirts or one that came lower than perhaps four or five inches below the knee. She had on rings and pins and, quite unconsciously I think, took graceful and dreamful attitudes. There was a kind of high scorn—if not rebellion—in her mood, for one aiding a religious cause——
I wondered how long Vincennes and the sacred precincts of the Church would retain her.