At the start Westy and Rip’s interest was keenly aroused. They were
stopping at places often and long enough to keep them from getting
bored. Places that were rich in tradition failed to strike them very
forcibly, it seemed. Helping out here and there it filled in time and
they also posed at intervals to make the scenes abound with the human
touch.
To boys craving adventure, it was just a daily routine of shooting
scenes along a highway that occasionally ran through towns and hamlets
of various sizes and descriptions. Nothing exciting about it, Westy
mused. An old trail, it might have been once, but a plain, everyday,
modern-looking highway now. Time had indeed spoiled everything for him,
that was certain.
They had left the town of Great Bend in the distance after spending the
morning there taking pictures of the Court House Square, through which
place the Old Trail had run in its palmy days.
“What good does it do, Unk?” asked Rip, whose thoughts were following
the same trend as Westy’s, “to take pictures like the one in Great Bend?
How can people be interested in what’s there now? They can’t tell from
that what the Old Trail really looked like. I know I couldn’t.”
“Do you know why you couldn’t, Rip?”
“No. Why?”
“Because you lack one of the greatest assets or gifts, call it what you
like, that life could possibly endow a human being with. That gift is
commonly called Imagination.”
“Each little hill and dell hereabouts”--Mr. Wilde swept his arms wide,
indicating that he was taking the entire country surrounding them as an
example--“has its own tale of adventure and romance to tell, if we have
the mental capacity to draw out these tales from the dumb silence of
their unspoken words and hidden secrets. A silence that reveals itself.
Do you comprehend my meaning?
“Silence speaks only to those who are willing to listen. Imagination, if
you want to call it such, but my theory is that any one who is highly
spiritually attuned can hear the heart throbs in a pile of rock and
detect the anguish in the tinkling murmur of a mountain brook.
“Why do people flock to see these pictures and landmarks that are but
poor imitations of this once glorious Trail? Why? Because the sub-titles
will inform them that on the site of what is now the Court House Square
in the town of Great Bend the Old Trail ran through. And on that very
spot occurred the terrible fight of Captains Booth and Hallowell in
eighteen hundred and sixty-four. What happens? They absorb the seed and
with plenty of fertility Imagination becomes a budding flower. That gift
enables them to visualize from that peaceful picture another scene
depicting a bloody encounter. Or, again, as the film unwinds a plateau
is pictured with a herd of cows grazing and lying on its grassy slopes
in the late twilight. That which was once famous as the battleground of
a terrible conflict between the Pawnees and Cheyennes is now being used
as a corral for cattle.
“Does that knowledge so lucidly pictured before them detract one bit
from the glamor and charm that is Adventure and Romance and which even
the ravages of Time cannot mellow?
“Not if they have imagination! Try it on your piano some time!”