“Bejasus, then he must be related to the both of us!”
Somewhere in the country in Indiana they once built a railroad where there never had been one and it created great excitement. One old farmer who had lived on his farm a great many years and had never even seen a train or a track and had raised a large family, mostly girls, was so interested that he put his whole family in the wagon and drove up close to the track so they could get a good view of the cars the first time they came through. But before the train came he got uneasy. He was afraid the old grey mare would get scared and run away. So he got out, unhitched the old horse and tied it to a tree, gave it some hay and got back into the wagon. Pretty soon he saw the train coming very fast, and as the old wagon was quite close to the track he thought the train might jump the track and kill them all, so he leaped out, got between the shafts and started to pull the wagon a little farther down the hill. Just then the train neared the station and he got so excited that he lost all control of himself and away he went down the hill, lickety split. He ran upon a stump, upset the wagon and threw the old woman and all the children out, and hurt them worse than ever the old mare would have. The old woman was furious. She didn’t have any bridle on him and while he was running she missed seeing the train.
“Gol darn you,” she hollered, “if I didn’t have a sprained ankle now, I’d fix you—runnin' away like the crazy old fool that you are!”
“That’s all right, Maria,” he called back meekly. “I was a leetle excited, I’ll admit; but next week when the train goes through again you and the children kin come down and I’ll stay to home. I just can’t stand these newfangled things, I reckon.”
And once upon a time (and this is the last one for the present) there was a real wildcat fight somewhere—a most wonderful wildcat fight. An old farmer was sitting on a fence hoeing corn—that’s the way they hoe corn in some places—and all at once he saw two Thomas wildcats approaching each other from different directions and swiftly. He was about to jump down and run when suddenly the cats came together. It was all so swift that he scarcely had time to move. They came along on their hind feet and when they got together each one began to claw and climb up the other. In fifteen minutes they were out of sight in the air, each one climbing rapidly up the other; but he could hear them squalling for two hours after they were out of sight, and froth and hair fell for two days!
CHAPTER XII
RAILROADS AND A NEW WONDER OF THE WORLD
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the automobile, as it is being perfected now, would make over the whole world’s railway systems into something very different from what they are today. Already the railways are complaining that the automobile is seriously injuring business, and this is not difficult to understand. It ought to be so. At best the railways have become huge, clumsy, unwieldy affairs little suited to the temperamental needs and moods of the average human being. They are mass carriers, freight handlers, great hurry conveniences for overburdened commercial minds, but little more. After all, travel, however much it may be a matter of necessity, is in most instances, or should be, a matter of pleasure. If not, why go forth to roam the world so wide? Are not trees, flowers, attractive scenes, great mountains, interesting cities, and streets and terminals the objective? If not, why not? Should the discomforts become too great, as in the case of the majority of railroads, and any reasonable substitute offer itself, as the automobile, the old form of conveyance will assuredly have to give way.
Think what you have to endure on the ordinary railroad—and what other kind is there—smoke, dust, cinders, noise, the hurrying of masses of people, the ringing of bells, the tooting of whistles, the brashness and discourtesy of employes, cattle trains, coal trains, fruit trains, milk trains in endless procession—and then they tell you that these are necessary in order to give you the service you get. Actually our huge railways are becoming so freight logged and trainyard and train terminal infested, and four tracked and cinder blown, that they are a nuisance.
Contrast travel by railroad with the charm of such a trip as we were now making. Before the automobile, this trip, if it had been made at all, would have had to be made by train—in part at least. I would not have ridden a horse or in any carriage to Indiana—whatever I might have done after I reached there. Instead of green fields and pleasant ways, with the pleasure of stopping anywhere and proceeding at our leisure, substitute the necessity of riding over a fixed route, which once or twice seen, or ten times, as in my case, had already become an old story. For this is one of the drawbacks to modern railroading, in addition to all its other defects—it is so fixed; it has no latitude, no elasticity. Who wants to see the same old scenes over and over and over? One can go up the Hudson or over the Alleghanies or through the Grand Canyon of the Arizona once or twice, but if you have to go that way always, if you go at all—— But the prospect of new and varied roads, and of that intimate contact with woodland silences, grassy slopes, sudden and sheer vistas at sharp turns, streams not followed by endless lines of cars—of being able to change your mind and go by this route or that according to your mood—what a difference! These constitute a measureless superiority. And the cost per mile is not so vastly much more by automobile. Today it is actually making travel cheaper and quicker. Whether for a long tour or a short one, it appears to make man independent and give him a choice of life, which he must naturally prefer. Only the dull can love sameness.
North of Factoryville a little way—perhaps a score of miles—we encountered one of these amazing works of man which, if they become numerous enough, eventually make a country a great memory. They are the bones or articulatory ligaments of the body politic which, like the roads and viaducts and baths of ancient Rome, testify to the prime of its physical strength and after its death lie like whitening bones about the fields of the world which once it occupied.