is its
official railroad name, pulls into Homeburg from Chicago each
afternoon, loaded with mail, news, passengers, home-comers, adventurers,
mysterious strangers, friends, brides, heroes, widows and coffins, you
can just bet we're there to see her.

It's the town pastime. We all do it. Whenever a Homeburg man has nothing
else to do at four o'clock, he steps over to the depot and joins the
long line which leans up against the depot wall and keeps it in place
during the crisis. Some of them haven't missed a roll-call in years. Old
Bill Dorgan, the drayman, has stood on the platform every day since the
line was built, rain or shine. Josh James, the colored porter of the
Cosmopolitan Hotel, knows more traveling men than William J. Bryan. If
he was absent from his post, the engineer wouldn't know where to stop
the train. The old men come crawling down on nice days and sun
themselves for an hour before the train arrives. The boys sneak slyly
down on their way from school and stand in flocks worshiping the train
butcher, who is bigger than the Washington Monument to them. Sometimes a
few girls come down too, and hang around, giggling. But that doesn't
last long. We won't stand for it in our town. Some missionary tells the
girls' parents, and then they suddenly disappear from the ranks and look
pouty and insulted for a month, and we know, without being told, that a
couple of grown-up young ladies of sixteen or more have been spanked in
the good old-fashioned way. Homeburg is a good town, and it makes its
girls behave even if it has to half kill them.

You haven't any idea, Jim, how much bustle and noise and excitement and
general enthusiasm a passenger train can put into a small town for a few
minutes. Just imagine yourself in Homeburg on a cold winter afternoon.
It's four o'clock. The sun has stood the climate as long as it can and
is getting ready to duck for shelter behind the dreary fields to the
west. If you ran an automobile a mile a minute down the walk on Main
Street you wouldn't have to toot for a soul. Now and then a farmer comes
out of a store, takes a half hitch on the muffler around his neck, puts
on his bearskin gloves and unties his rig. You watch him drive off, the
wheels yelling on the hard snow, and wonder if it isn't more cheerful
out in the frozen country with the corn shocks for company. It's the
terrible half hour of bleak, fading light before the electricity is
turned on and the cozy dark comes down--t