There was a porter on the same train who was much the same kind of
furniture as the waiter. He slept days and made up berths all night.
Truly, he began making up berths at Jersey City, and when he got through,
about daylight, it was time to begin to unmake them again. All night long
I could hear him opening and shutting the berths like a concertina. He
sang softly to himself all night long:
“You must camp a little in the wilderness
And then we'll all go home.”
He played his own accompaniment on the berths.
When in repose he was generally asleep with a whisk broom in one hand and
the other hand extended with the palm up, waiting for a dividend to be
declared.
He generally slept with his mouth open, so that you could read his inmost
thoughts, and when I complained to him about the way my bunk felt, he said
he was sorry, and wanted to know which cell I was in.
I rode, years ago, over a new stage line for several days. It was through
an almost trackless wilderness, and the service hadn't been “expedited”
then. It was not a star route, anyhow. The government seemed to think that
the man who managed the thing ought not to expect help so long as he had
been such a fool asterisk it.
(Five minutes intermission for those who wish to be chloroformed.)
The stage consisted of a buckboard. It was one of the first buckboards
ever made, and the horse was among the first turned out, also. The driver
and myself were the passengers.
When it got to be about dinner time, I asked him if we were not pretty
near the dinner station. He grunted. He hadn't said a word since we
started. He was a surly, morose and taciturn man. I was told that he had
been disappointed in love. A half-breed woman named No-Wayno had led him
to believe that she loved him, and that if it had not been for her husband
she would gladly have been the driver's bride. So the driver assassinated
the disagreeable husband of No-Wayno. Then he went to the ranch to claim
his bride, but she was not there. She had changed her mind, and married a
cattle man, who had just moved on to the range with a government mule and
a branding iron, intending to slowly work himself into the stock business.
So this driver was a melancholy man. He only made one remark to me during
that long forty-mile drive through the wilderness. About dinner time he
drove the horse under a quaking asp tree, tied a nose bag of oats over its
head and took a wad of bread and bacon from his greasy pocket. The bacon
and bread had little flakes of smoking tobacco all over it, because he
carried his grub and tobacco in the same pocket. For a moment he
introduced one corner of the bacon and bread in among his whiskers. Then
he made the only remark that he uttered while we were together. He said:
“Pardner, dinner is now ready in the dining-car.”
A Powerful Speech.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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