of his party were Ohio school-teachers. Anywhere except in Utah I doubt
if he could have fooled me, either, for he had the kind of whiskers
that go with the banking profession. For some reason whiskers are
associated with the practice of banking all over this country; hallowed
by custom, they have come to stand for financial responsibility. A New
York banker wears those little jib-boom whiskers on the sides of his
head and sometimes a pennon on his chin, whereas a country banker
usually has a full-rigged face. This man's whiskers were of the old
square barkentine cut. I should have known who he was by his sailing
gear.
And so, disappointed in my dreams of seeing Indians on the hoof and
Mormon households taking the air in family groups, I left Salt Lake
City, with its fine wide streets and its handsome business district and
its pure air and its background of snow-topped mountains, and started on
the long homebound hike. It was late in the afternoon. We had quit Utah,
with its flat plains, its garden spots reclaimed from the desert, and
its endless succession of trim red-brick farmhouses, which seem to be
the universal dwelling-places of the prosperous Mormon farmer.
We had departed from the old trail that Mark Twain crawled over in a
stage-coach and afterward wrote about in his immortal Roughing It. The
Limited, traveling forty-odd miles an hour, was skipping through the
lower part of Wyoming before turning southward into Colorado. We were in
the midst of an expanse of desolation and emptiness, fifteen miles from
anywhere, and I was sitting on the observation platform of the rear car,
watching how the shafts of the setting sun made the colors shift and
deepen in the canyons and upon the sides of the tall red mesas, when I
became aware that the train was slowing down.
Through the car came the conductor, with a happy expression upon his
face. Behind him was a pleased-looking flagman leading by the arm a
ragged tramp who had been caught, up forward somewhere, stealing a free
ride.
The tramp was not resisting exactly, but at every step he said:
"You can't put me off the train between stations! It's the law that you
can't put me off the train between stations!"
Neither the conductor nor the flagman said a word in answer. As the
conductor reached up and jerked the bellcord the tramp, in the tone and
manner of one who advances an absolutely unanswerable argument, said:
"You know, don't you, you can't put me off the train between stations?"
The train halted. The conductor unfastened a tail-gate in the
guard-rail, and the flagman dropped his prisoner out through the
opening. As the tramp flopped off into space I caught this remark:
"You can't put me off the train between stations."
The conductor tugged another signal on the bellcord, and the wheels
began to turn faster and faster. The tramp picked himself up from
between the rails. He brushed some adhering particles of roadbed off
himself and, facing us, made a megaphone of his hands and sent a message
after our diminishing shapes. By straining my ears I caught his words.
He spoke as follows:
"You can't put me off the train between stations!"
In my whole life I never saw a man who was so hard to convince of a
thing as that tramp was.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Note:
Minor spelling, hyphenation, and punctuation errors have been corrected.
For this text version, the word canon (with a tilde over the first n) has
been changed to canyon.