Benson turned frowning to the papers on his desk.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WHEN the railroad came to Benson, it reached down from a lake port, a feeble little tentacle of iron which joined another feeble tentacle that had pushed up from a river point. Theoretically, its coming was in response to the town's need, because of its mills and warehouses, and the bounty of its waving fields of grain; so Colonel Sharp declared in an editorial which contained much Latin, some very superior English, and numerous allusions to destiny; and the town, lacking not in local pride, and having had dreams of civic greatness, was prepared to believe that its importance as a commercial centre was the magnet that drew the road thither.
But Jacob Benson and some others knew that the real reason the railroad came, was that they had exchanged certain dollars for uncertain stock; that but for this, the line would have sought the town of Carthage, distant some twenty miles to the east, where the air was heavy with the reek of soft-coal smoke, the chimneys of the blast furnaces blazed unceasingly in the night, and a small but active population worked, drank, and fought, beyond what was habitual to any other population of its size in the State.
While the general public was favourable to the road, there were certain wise ones who clung with satisfaction to the memory of days when the pioneer turned the corn of his clearing into whisky; his wheat into flour; and rafted his produce down the Little Wolf River, and thence by the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans, where boat and cargo were exchanged for Spanish silver. These, dubiously regarding what the world in its short-sighted folly was pleased to call progress, pointed out that even yet, all the town traded in, found its way conveniently enough by the stage road to lake or river point; so it mattered not that the Little Wolf had become a failing stream, flowing through depleted forest lands; so shallow, where it had once floated great rafts, that now the lightest skiff was steered with difficulty among the encroaching sand-bars.
These ancient oracles, looking back over forty years through a haze of pleasant memories, took no stock in Colonel Sharp's mouthfilling sentences. They declared that the advent of the railroad meant the town's ruin, for how could a town reasonably expect to thrive unless it was at either one end or the other of a line?
For full ten years there had been talk of this railroad, but when it did come and when the first brief wonder of it was past, it was at once as a familiar thing; even in the full effulgence of its newness, it was not quite a miracle; it had been a miracle when fifty miles away; it was still a miracle when this distance had been reduced to ten miles; and then when the first train steamed into Benson, the wonder seemed almost as remote, as the day when the first horse was broken and ridden by the first man, that pre-historic genius who had found his own legs all too short for the work they must do.
The railroad came to the town of Benson the year Benson, the man, returned from the West. It came visibly one cold February day in a flurry of snow, and with the fall of twilight; a puffing, panting engine, of even then obsolete type, drawing a single dingy coach, once spectacularly decked with streamers and flags, now wet and bedraggled. It rumbled out of the deep cut north of town, at a rate of speed variously estimated by the crowd of men at the station at from ten to thirty miles an hour.