Overland journeys to the Pacific; West (U.S.) -- Description and travel
There are a great many things one only remembers to say as the train
is drawing out of the station, and which have to be spoken from the
car-window. And now that my train is so soon to start towards the East,
I find there are many things which it seems most ungracious to leave
unsaid. I should like to say much of the hospitality of the West. We
do not know such hospitality in the East. A man brings us a letter of
introduction there, and we put him up at the club we least frequently
visit, and regret that he should have come at a time when ours is so
particularly crowded with unbreakable engagements. It is not so here.
One might imagine the Western man never worked at all, so entirely is
his time yours, if you only please to claim it. And from the first
few days of my trip to the last, this self-effacement of my hosts and
eagerness to please accompanied me wherever I went. It was the same
in every place, whether in army posts or ranches, or among that most
delightful coterie of the Denver Club “who never sleep,” or on the
border of Mexico, where “Bob” Haines, the sheriff of Zepata County,
Texas, before he knew who I or my soldier escort might be, and while we
were still but dust-covered figures in the night, rushed into the house
and ordered a dinner and beds for us, and brought out his last two
bottles of beer. The sheriff of Zepata County, “who can shoot with both
hands,” need bring no letter of introduction with him if he will deign
to visit me when he comes to New York. And as for that Denver Club
coterie, they already know that the New York clubs are also supplied
with electric buttons.
And now that it is at an end, I find it hard to believe that I am not
to hear again the Indian girls laughing over their polo on the prairie,
or the regimental band playing the men on to the parade, and that I am
not to see the officers’ wives watching them from the line at sunset,
as the cannon sounds its salute and the flag comes fluttering down.
And yet New York is not without its good points.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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