“Do you think it’s too much?”
There was a sort of childish naïveté about the inquiry which moved me to laughter—and firmness. Franklin achieves this quite unconsciously, at times—a certain self-abnegating shyness.
“I certainly do. Here it is after eleven. We are supposed to be up early and off—and here you sit eating muskmelons by the crate. This is shameful. Besides, you can get more tomorrow. We are in the land of the muskmelon.”
“Oh, all right,” he consented, quite crestfallen.
I did not realize at the time that I was actually stopping him, and before he had enough. It was a joke on my part.
The next day was Wednesday, a bright, sunny day, and pleasantly cool. The sun streaming under my black shades at six and earlier awoke me, and I arose and surveyed the small town, as much of it as I could see from my window and through encircling trees. It was as clean and homey and pleasing as it had seemed the night before. By now Franklin, hearing me stirring, was up too, and we awakened Bert, who was still asleep. If we were to get to Evansville and on to Indianapolis and Carmel again in this one day, it would have to be a long and speedy run, but even now I began to doubt whether we should make it. Evansville was too interesting to me, as one of my home towns. It was all of fifty miles away as we would ride, and after that would come a cross-country run of one hundred and fortyfive miles as the crow flies, or counting the twists and turns we would make, say one hundred and seventyfive miles—a scant calculation. There were, as my map showed, at least seven counties to cross on returning. In our path lay French Lick and West Baden—the advertised Carlsbads of America. North of that would be Bedford, the home of the world’s supply of Indiana limestone, and beyond it Bloomington, the seat of the State University, where I had spent one dreamy, lackadaisical year. After that a run of at least sixtyfive miles straight, let alone winding, before we could enter Carmel.
“It can’t be done, Franklin,” I argued, as we dressed. “You said three days, but it will be four at the earliest, if not five. I want to see a little of Evansville and Bloomington.”
“Well, if we have decent roads, we can come pretty near doing it,” he insisted. “Certainly we can get home by tomorrow night. I ought to. I have a lot of things to do in town Friday.”
“Well, you’re the doctor,” I agreed, “so long as I see what I want to see.”
We bustled downstairs, agreeing to breakfast in Evansville. It was six thirty. Those favored souls who enjoy rising early in the morning and looking after their flowers were abroad, admiring, pinching, cutting, watering. It was a cheering spectacle. I respect all people who love flowers. It seems to me one of the preliminary, initiative steps in a love and understanding of beauty. Evansville came nearer at a surprising rate. I began to brush up my local geography and list in my mind the things I must see—the houses in which we had lived, the church and school which I was made to attend, the Ohio River, at the foot of Main Street—where once in January, playing with some boys, I fell into the river, knocked off a floating gangway, and came desperately near being swept away by the ice. Then I must see Blount’s Plow Works, and the chair factory of Messrs. Nienaber and Fitton, where my brother Al worked for a time, and where of a Saturday I often went to help him. And the Evansville Ironstone Pottery Company must be found, too, at whose low windows I was wont to stand and delightedly watch the men form cups, plates, pitchers, etc., out of grey, wet clay. This seemed to me the most wonderful manufacturing process of all those witnessed by me in my youth. It was so gracefully and delicately accomplished. There was only one other thing that compared in interest, and that was the heating and melting of iron in great furnaces in an enormous iron foundry on the same street with the Catholic School which I used to pass every day and where the pouring of the glistening metal into cauldrons and the pouring of that into wondrously intricate moulds of sand, whereby were shaped iron fences, gratings, culvert tops, had always been of the intensest interest to me.