more time.
Never see a feller in my life I cottoned to more'n you, Jim. First I
thought you was too smooth for my kind of traveling, but later, I see it
was only the grain of the wood. I believe in my friends, I do. Here we go
hopping around this little world for a small time, and then that's done.
S'pose you ain't got any real friends for the trip? Rotten, I say. You go
ahead and rip Plattsburg up the back. Wisht I could be there with you.
Don't you mind consequences. So long, old man! Hike! You beggar!" The
buckskin pony was off with a snort and a splashing of gravel as the irons
touched his sides, and Bud vanished down the road without a look behind
him.

The next day Jim was in Plattsburg. One does not know what an alluring
quality, what a hazy enchantment can linger around even a small town,
until an absence in a real wilderness has given man's work a new flavor.

The people coming and going, the traffic of the stores, the dwellings
with small cultivated plots around them warmed Jim like a fire. He had
been very lonely, without knowing it. In the afternoon he went down to
the depot to see the eastern train come in.

Here again absence played a part, and restored the locomotive to its
proper proportions of a miracle.

As the engine glided in, shaking the ground beneath it, it seemed
impossible to Jim that man really made it. What! Bend those mighty rods
of steel to his will? Twist and shape those others? Cast those great
drivers? And after, to drive the monster with a hand?

He drew back as the buzzing engine passed him, with something like awe.
Then the moving village came to a stop and the passengers sallied forth
to test their legs, wearied with long sitting.

There was humanity of all shades, from the haughty aristocrat of the
Pullman, to the peasant of the immigrant car.

Jim had a sense of pleasure in beholding well-dressed folk again; yet it
was merely an aesthetic pleasure, for he found, when he began to
speculate on the possibilities of the throng before him, that he was more
interested in those whose all was staked on the trip, than in those to
whom it was only an excursion.

People of widely differing nationalities occupied the immigrant car. Jim
wondered whether they would ever become Americans, according to his ideas
of Americans, a people in which he had great pride and delight; and he
shook his head doubtfully as he took them in.

Suddenly a small boy darted out of a car; an exceedingly sma