His Great Adventure. Robert Herrick
at the fleeting landscape. Whatever else it might mean—this jaunt across the continent on a stranger’s errand—it was bringing him a rich cargo of new ideas.
Of all his fellow travelers the man who happened to occupy the drawing-room in the car where Brainard had his section aroused his curiosity especially. He was one of those well-dressed, alert young business men who had made Brainard conscious of his shabby and inappropriate appearance when he first started on his journey. The door of his room had been closed all the way to Chicago, and Brainard had seen nothing of the man. But since the train left Omaha the door to the drawing-room had been open, and from his section Brainard observed its occupant diligently reading a book. What aroused his attention and interested him in the stranger more than his pleasant appearance of frank good humor had been the sort of book he had chosen for this long journey. It was bound like a “best seller” in a gaudy red cloth, and a picture of a starry-eyed maiden with floating hair adorned the cover. But it was labeled in unmistakable black letters Paradise Lost. Brainard, who had made a painful and superficial acquaintance in his youth with this poetic masterpiece, decided that the smartly dressed young American could not be devoting the journey to Milton’s epic. It must be that some writer of best sellers had cribbed the great poet’s title and fitted it to a less strenuous tale of love and starry-eyed maidens. This theory, however, broke down before the fact that from time to time the young man consulted a small black book that was indubitably a dictionary, and Brainard taking advantage of a moment when the traveler had left his room assured himself that the book was really a copy of Milton’s poem set within profane modern covers. Just why this young man should spend his hours on the train reading the puritan epic of heaven and hell puzzled Brainard and whetted his curiosity to know what sort of man the stranger was.
Earlier this morning as the train was climbing down from the Rockies into Utah, an opportunity had come to speak to his fellow traveler. The train had pulled up somewhere before a desolate station whose architect had tried to make a Queen Anne cottage that looked singularly out of place in the bare, wild landscape. While the engine took its long drink, the passengers stretched their legs and enjoyed the crisp mountain air. The stranger came to the vestibule, yawned, and read the name of the station:
“Palisade, is it? … The last time I was over this way it looked more lively than this.”
“What was happening?” Brainard inquired.
“There was a bunch of miners somewheres in Utah making trouble, on a strike. The company had brought in a couple of carloads of greasers, and the miners were down here shooting up the party.”
He got down to the ground, yawned again, and opened a gold cigarette case which he offered to Brainard—“Have one?”
Brainard took one of the monogrammed cigarettes, and they sauntered together in the sunlight.
“Yes, sir,” his new acquaintance continued, “they sure did have a lively time. The greasers were over there on the siding in their cars, and they just let go at ’em with their guns. Now and then they’d hit the station, for fun, you know. I guess maybe you can see the holes yet.”
The young man pointed up at some scars among the shingles and a broken window in the upper story. “Sure enough they left their marks!”
“What did they do to ’em?” Brainard asked naïvely, as they returned to the car when the conductor droned “all aboard.”
“Who?” the stranger asked. “The police?”
He waved a hand at the desolate stretch of sage brush backed by grim mountains and laughed. As the train moved off, he added, “Lord, I don’t know! They were still popping when my train pulled out. There weren’t many greasers fit to work in the mines. What was left after the reception must have walked home—a long ways.”
Brainard was somewhat impressed with the possibilities of a country that could offer such a scrap, en passant, so to speak. The stranger invited him into his room and gave him another cigarette.
“From New York?” he inquired. “Not a bad sort of place,” he observed tolerantly. “Ever been on the Coast? You’ve something to see.”
“How is San Francisco since the earthquake?” Brainard inquired, thinking to come cautiously and guardedly to the topic of Krutzmacht.
“It’s all there and more than ever,” the stranger cheerily responded. “You won’t find any large cracks,” he jested.
“It’s queer that you all went straight back to the same ground and built over again.”
“Why? It was home, wasn’t it? Folks always have a feeling for the place they’ve lived in, even if it has disadvantages. It’s only human!”
Brainard reflected that this was a sentimental point of view he should hardly have expected from the practical sort of man opposite him. In the course of their conversation Brainard inquired about the graft prosecution then in full swing, which had attracted the notice even of eastern papers on account of the highly melodramatic flavor that a picturesque prosecuting attorney had given to the proceedings. The man from San Francisco readily gave his point of view, which was unfavorable to the virtuous citizens engaged in the task of civic purification. When Brainard asked about the celebrated prosecuting attorney, the stranger looked at him for the first time suspiciously, and said coldly:
“Well, as that gentleman has just been parading up and down the state saying he was going to put me in state prison for the better part of my remaining years, I can’t say I have a high opinion of him.”
“Indeed!” Brainard emitted feebly. The stranger was more mysterious than ever. He did not seem in the least like a candidate for state prison.
“You see,” the young man continued cheerfully, “I’m loose now on about seventy-five thousand dollars of bonds. Time was up in fact day before yesterday, and I’ve been wondering some what they are going to do to my bondsmen. Well, we’ll find out at Ogden when we get the coast papers.”
And when they reached Ogden Brainard ventured to inquire, seeing his new acquaintance deep in the folds of a San Francisco newspaper—“Well, what did they do to those bondsmen?”
“Nothing yet, so far as I can see. Oh, hell, it’s all bluff anyway!” and he dropped his newspaper out of the open window. …
A man of such cheerful and frank presence, who read Paradise Lost (with the aid of a dictionary) and traveled to New York on seventy-five thousand dollars of bail bonds was a curiosity to Brainard. He very much wished to ask him a few impertinent questions in order to satisfy his curiosity, but could not summon sufficient courage, though he felt sure that the agreeable stranger would cheerfully enlighten him.
V
As Brainard entered the smoking compartment of the “club car,” he observed that his interesting fellow traveler was in close conversation with a new arrival, who had taken the section opposite Brainard at Ogden. He had already noted this grizzled, thickset person, about sixty years old, who wore a black frock coat, had a large seal ring and a massive Masonic charm. When the newcomer opened his grip to extract a black skull cap, he had seen that the remaining contents of the bag were a mass of papers, a few bits of loose rock, and a bottle of whisky. Whatever toilet articles the traveler carried were carefully concealed.
Already the oldish, grizzled traveler with the skull cap was at home, the center of a little group of men at one of the card tables—a bottle of beer in front of him, a cigar tilted at an angle between his teeth. He was conversing with that perfect naturalness and freedom that Brainard had observed was the custom in this large country, even among complete strangers.
“Yes, sir,” he was saying, “I came back from Alaska in 1907 broke—that is, what you might call broke—a couple of thousand dollars all I had in the world. I said to my wife, ‘I’m done