Aladdin & Co.: A Romance of Yankee Magic
we could find some blithesome ass to pay him for the _Herald_ enough
money to take him out of our scrambled Bedlam of a town, bring the idiot
on, and he (Giddings) would arrange things so we could have our touting
done as we liked it!
Now the _Herald_ had become a very valuable property, and of all men
Giddings had the least reason to speak despitefully of Lattimore; and
his frame of mind was a mystery to me, until I remembered that there was
supposed to be something amiss between him and Laura Addison. Craftily
leading the conversation to the point where confidences were easy, I was
rewarded by a passionate disclosure on his part, which would have
amounted to an outburst, had it not been restrained by the presence of
Cornish, Hinckley, and Trescott at the other end of the compartment.
"Oh, pshaw!" said I, "you've no cause for despair. On your own showing,
there's every reason for you to hope."
"You don't know the situation, Barslow," he insisted, shaking his head
gloomily, "and there's no use in trying to tell you. She's too exalted
in her ideals ever to accept me. She's told me things about the
qualities she must have in the one who should be nearest to her that
just simply shut me out; and I haven't called since. Oh, I tell you,
Barslow, sometimes I feel as if I could--Yes, sir, it'll be accepted as
the best piece of railroad building for years!"
I was surprised at the sudden transition, until I saw that our fellow
passengers were crowding to our end of the car in response to the
conductor's announcement that we were coming into Elkins Junction. I
made a note of Giddings's state of mind, as the subject of a conference
with Jim. The _Herald_ was of too much importance to us for this to be
neglected. The disciple of Iago must in some way be restored to his
normal view of things. I could not help smiling at the vast difference
between his view of Laura and mine. I, wrongly perhaps, thought her
affectedly pietistic, with ideals likely to be yielding in spirit if the
letter were preserved.
Elkins Junction was a platform, a depot, an eating-house, and a Y; and
it was nothing else.
"We've come up here," said Jim, "to show you probably the smallest town
in the state, and the only one in the world named after me. We wanted to
show you the whole line, and Mr. Schwartz felt as if he'd prefer to turn
his engine around for the return trip. The last two towns we came
through, and hence the first two going back, are old places. The third
station is a new town, and Conductor Corcoran will take us back there,
where we'll unveil the name of the station, and permit the people to
know where they live. While we're doing the sponsorial act, lunch will
be prepared and ready for us to discuss during the next run."
On the way back there was a stir of suppressed excitement among the
passengers.
"It's about this name," said Miss Addison to her seat-mate. "The town is
on the shore of Mirror Lake, and they say it will be an important one,
and a summer resort; and no one knows what the name is to be but Mr.
Elkins."
"Really, a very odd affair!" said Miss Allen, of Fairchild, Antonia's
college friend. "It makes a social function of the naming of a town!"
"Yes," said Mr. Elkins, "and it is one of the really enduring things we
can do. Long after the memory of every one here is departed, these
villages will still bear the names we give them to-day. If there's any
truth in the belief that some people have, that names have an influence
for good or evil, the naming of the towns may be important as building
the railroad."
I was sitting with Antonia. Miss Allen and Captain Tolliver were with
us, our faces turned toward one another. General Lattimore, with Josie
and her father, was on the opposite side of the car. Most of the company
were sitting or standing near, and the conversation was quite general.
"Oh, it's like a romance!" half whispered Antonia to us. "I envy you men
who build roads and make towns. Look at Mr. Elkins, Sadie, as he stands
there! He is master of everything; to me he seems as great as Napoleon!"
She neither blushed nor sought to conceal from us her adoration for Jim.
It was the day of his triumph, and a fitting time to acknowledge his
kinghood; and her admission that she thought him the greatest, the most
excellent of men did not surprise me. Yet, because he was older than
she, and had never put himself in a really loverlike attitude toward
her, I thought it was simply an exalted girlish regard, and not at all
what we usually understand by an affair of the heart. Moreover, at that
time such praise as she gave him would not have been thought
extravagant in almost any social gathering in Lattimore. Let me confess
that to me it does not now seem so ... Cecil Barr-Smith walked out and
stood on the platform.
General Lattimore was apparently thinking of the features of the
situation which had struck Antonia as romantic.
"You young men," said he, "are among the last of the city-builders and
road-makers. My generation did these things differently. We went out
with arms in our hands, and hewed out spaces in savagery for homes. You
don't seem to see it; but you are straining every nerve merely to shift
people from many places to one, and there to exploit them. You wind your
coils about an inert mass, you set the dynamo of your power of
organization at work, and the inert mass becomes a great magnet. People
come flying to it from the four quarters of the earth, and the
first-comers levy tribute upon them, as the price of standing-room on
the magnet!"
"I nevah hea'd the real merit and strength and safety of ouah
real-estate propositions bettah stated, suh!" said Captain Tolliver
ecstatically.
Jim stood looking at the General with sober regard.
"Go on, General," said he.
"Not only that," went on the General, "but people begin forestalling the
standing-room, so as to make it scarcer. They gamble on the power of the
magnet, and the length of time it will draw. They buy to-day and sell
to-morrow; or cast up what they imagine they might sell for, and call
the increase profit. Then comes the time when the magnet ceases to draw,
or the forestallers, having, in their greed, grasped more than they can
keep, offer too much for the failing market, and all at once the thing
stops, and the dervish-dance ends in coma, in cold forms and still
hands, in misery and extinction!"
There was a pause, during which the old soldier sat looking out of the
widow, no one else finding aught to say. Elkins remained standing, and
once or twice gave that little movement of the head which precedes
speech, but said nothing. Cornish smiled sardonically. Josie looked
anxiously at Jim, apprehensive as to how he would take it. At last it
was Ballard the conservative who broke silence.
"I hope, General," said he, "that our little movement won't develop into
a dervish-dance. Anyhow, you will join in our congratulations upon the
completion of the railroad. You know you once did some railroad-building
yourself, down there in Tennessee--I know, for I was there. And I've
always taken an interest in track-laying ever since."
"So have I," said the General; "that's what brought me out to-day."
"Oh, tell us about it," said Josie, evidently pleased at the change of
subject; "tell us about it, please."
"No, no!" he protested, "you may read it better in the histories,
written by young fellows who know more about it than we who were there.
You'll find, when you read it, that it was something like this: Grant's
host was over around Chattanooga, starving for want of means for
carrying in provisions. We were marching eastward to join him, when a
message came telling us to stop at Decatur and rebuild the railroad to
Nashville. So, without a thought that there was such a thing as an
impossibility, we stopped--we seven or eight thousand common Americans,
volunteer soldiers, picked at random from the legions of heroes who
saved liberty to the world--and without an engineering corps, without
tools or implements, with nothing except what any like number of our
soldiers had, we stopped and built the road. That is all. The rails had
been heated, and wound about trees and stumps. The cross-ties were
burned to heat the rails. The cars had been destroyed by fire, and their
warped ironwork thrown into ditches. The engines lay in scrap-heaps at
the bottoms of ravines and rivers. The bridges were gone. Out of the
chaos to which the structure had been resolved, there was nothing left
but the road-bed.
"When I think of what we did, I know that with liberty and intelligence
men with their naked hands could, in short space, re-create the
destroyed wealth of the world. We made tools of the scraps of iron and
steel we found along the line. We felled trees. We impressed little
sawmills and sawed the logs into timbers for bridges and cars. Out of
the battle-scarred and march-worn ranks came creative and constructive
genius in such profusion as to astound us, who thought we knew them so
well. Those blue-coated fellows, enlisted and serving as food for
powder, and used to destruction, rejoiced in once more feeling the
thrill there is in making things."
"Out of the ranks came millers, and ground the grain the foragers
brought in; came woodmen, and cut the trees; came sawyers, and sawed the
lumber. We asked for blacksmiths; and they stepped from the ranks, and
made their own tools and the tools of the machinists. We called for
machinists; and out of the ranks they stepped, and rebuilt the engines,
and made the cars ready for the carpenters. When we wanted carpenters,
out of the same ranks of common soldiers they walked, and made the cars.
From the ranks came other men, who took the twisted rails, unwound them
from the stumps and unsnarled them from one another, as women unwind
yarn, and laid them down fit to carry our trains. And in forty days our
message went back to Grant that we had 'stopped and built the road,' and
that our engines were even then drawing supplies to his hungry army.
Such was the incomparable army which was commanded by that silent genius
of war; and to have been one of such an army is to have lived!"
The withered old hand trembled, as the great past surged back through
his mind. We all sat in silence; and I looked at Captain Tolliver,
doubtful as to how he would take the old Union general's speech. What
the Captain's history had been none of us knew, except that he was a
Southerner. When the general ceased, Tolliver was sitting still, with no
indication of being conscious of anything special in the conversation,
except that a red spot burned in each dark cheek. As the necessity for
speech grew with the lengthening silence, he rose and faced General
Lattimore.
"Suh," said he, "puhmit a man who was with the victohs of Manasses; who
chahged with mo' sand than sense at Franklin; and who cried like a child
aftah Nashville, and isn't ashamed of it, by gad! to offah his hand, and
to say that he agrees with you, suh, in youah tribute to the soldiers of
the wah, and honahs you, suh, as a fohmah foe, and a worthy one, and he
hopes, a future friend!"
Somehow, the Captain's swelling phrases, his sonorous allusions to
himself in the third person, had for the moment ceased to be ridiculous.
The environment fitted the expression. The general grasped his hand and
shook it. Then Ballard claimed the right, as one of the survivors of
Franklin, to a share in the reunion, and they at once removed the strain
which had fallen upon us with the General's first speech, by relating
stories and fraternizing soldierwise, until Conductor Corcoran called in
at the door, "Mystery Number One! All out for the christening!"
As we gathered on the platform, we saw that the signboard on the