Surely I must be getting along in years, I said to myself, to be thus indifferent to these early enthusiasms. Twenty years before, if anyone had told me that I could go forth into a brisk Saturday evening crowd such as was filling this one street, and, seeing the young girls and boys and women and men going about, feel no least thrill of possible encounters, I would have said that life, under such circumstances, would not be worth living. Yet here I was, and here we were, and this was exactly what I was doing and life seemed fairly attractive.
Out in the buzzing country street we did nothing but stroll about, buy picture postcards, write on and address them, buy some camera films, get our shoes shined, and finally go for our dinner to a commonplace country restaurant. I was interested in the zealous, cadaverous, overambitious young man who was the proprietor, and a young, plump blonde girl acting as waitress, who might have been his wife or only a hired girl. Her eyes looked swollen and as though she had been crying recently. And he was in a crotchety, non-palliative mood, taking our orders in a superior, contemptuous manner, and making us feel as though we were of small import.
“What ails mine host, do you suppose?” I asked of Franklin.
“Oh, he thinks that we think we’re something, I suppose, and he’s going to prove to us that we’re not. You know how country people are.”
I watched him thereafter, and I actually think Franklin’s interpretation was correct.
As we ambled about afterwards, Speed told us the harrowing story of the descent of the Rev. J. Cadden McMickens on the fair city of Kokomo, Indiana, some few years before, when he was working there as a test man for one of the great automobile companies. After a reasonable period of religious excitement and exhortation, in which the Rev. J. Cadden conducted a series of meetings in a public hall hired for the occasion and urged people to reform and repent of their sins, he suddenly announced that on a given day the end of the world would certainly take place and that all those not reformed or “saved” by that date would be damned. On the night before the fatal morning on which the earth was to be consumed by fire or water, or both, Speed suddenly awoke to the fact that he was not “saved” and that he could not get a train out of Kokomo to Carmel, Indiana, where his mother lived. To him at that time the world was surely coming to an end. Fire, brimstone, water, smoke, were already in the air. As he related this story to us I got the impression that his knees knocked under him. In consequence of the thought of never being able to see his dear mother any more, or his sister or brothers, he nearly succumbed of heart failure. Afterwards, finding that the earth was not destroyed and that he was as safe and sound as ever, he was seized by a great rage against the aforesaid Rev. J. Cadden McMickens, and went to seek him out in order that he might give him “a damned good licking,” as he expressed it, but the Rev. J. Cadden, having seen his immense prophecy come to nothing, had already fled.
“But, Speed,” I protested, “how comes it that you, a sensible young fellow, capable of being a test man for a great automobile factory like that of the H—— Company, could be taken in by such fol de rol? Didn’t you know that the earth was not likely to be consumed all of a sudden by fire or water? Didn’t you ever study geology or astronomy or anything like that?”
“No, I never,” he replied, with the only true and perfect Hoosier response to such a query. “I never had a chance to go to school much. I had to go to work when I was twelve.”
“Yes, I know, Speed,” I replied sympathetically, “but you read the newspapers right along, don’t you? They rather show that such things are not likely to happen—in a general way they do.”
“Yes, I know,” he replied, “but I was just a kid then. That doggone skunk! I’d just like to have a picture of him, I would, frightening me like that.”