Our fellow passengers were among the best and worst men I have ever met, the latter outnumbering the former by a fair throw.
We introduced ourselves to a few of them as Bad Jump receded behind us. I “kept my mouth shut,” for the most part, as Sam had suggested, speaking only the polite minimum; but I was tempted to curiosity now and then. I had never seen such folks as these. There were a dozen indentured men from a cruelly-managed California Estate, for instance, who spoke the Spanish language, and wore tattoos in the shape of weeping roses on their arms. There were cattle-herders and shepherds who were evasive about their origins. There were manual laborers aiming for work in the East, and many single sullen men who growled insults when spoken to, or confined their sociability to the card games that sprang up as soon as the train left Bad Jump.
There was at least one well-spoken and literate man aboard. His name was Langers, and he described himself as a “colporteur,” that is, a salesman of religious tracts. As soon as the train was in motion Langers opened the large sample case he carried and began to offer his wares at what he called “discount prices.” At first I was astonished that he would bother attempting such sales, since the great majority of the passengers was almost certainly illiterate. But on closer examination his pamphlets proved to be little more than picture-books got up to resemble sacred literature. [The Song of Solomon, Frankly Illustrated, was one title; another was Acts Condemned by Leviticus, Explained and Described, with Diagrams. They did not bear the Dominion Stamp of Approval.]
These were offensive, and I put a distance between myself and the colporteur; but he did a brisk trade among the laborers and refugees, whose appetite for religious instruction seemed nearly insatiable.
Many of the men had been wage-workers, and during the afternoon we were treated to massed choruses of Piston, Loom, and Anvil, the popular anthem of the industrial laborer. This was the first time I had heard the chorus of that song:
By Piston, Loom, and Anvil, boys,
We clothe and arm the nation,
And sweat all day for a pauper’s pay,
And half a soldier’s ration…
(though I have heard it many times since), and it struck me as awkwardly rhymed and, in its later verses, seditious. I asked Julian about the bellicosity of the song, and he explained that the ongoing War in Labrador had engendered new industries that employed mechanics and wage-laborers in large number. The complaints of that emerging class had lately become vocal; and these discontents, Julian said, might eventually transform the traditional rural economy of Estate and Indenture.
I was feeling homesick, however, and I didn’t much relish the company of militant mechanics anxious to overturn the existing order. Williams Ford, for all its inequities, had been a less raucous place than Bad Jump or the Phantom Car, and I wished I had not been forced to leave it.
That feeling deepened as the afternoon passed into evening. Passengers lined up to take a hot meal from the bubbling pot atop the stove, while the Travel Agent doled out rations from the whiskey barrel to anyone who could pay. I sat at the rear of the car sipping snowmelt water from a canteen and nursing my unhappiness. [Whiskey was the word he used, but experienced drinkers, of whom there were many in the crowd, expressed the opinion that the fiery fluid was in fact “Idaho Velvet,” or Potato-Jack.]
After a time Julian came to sit with me.
Much of his Eupatridian softness had been worked out of him over the last few days, and he was beginning to grow the sparse beard that would eventually become his trademark. His hands and face were dirty―shockingly so, given his fondness for bathing. He had endured all the same trials I had lately endured; and yet he was able to smile and ask what it was that had got the worse of me.
“Do you have to ask?” I waved my hand at the raucous passengers, the smoky stove, the grim Travel Agent, and the noisome hole in the floor that served as a privy. “We’re in a terrible place, among terrible men.”
“Temporary companions,” Julian said carelessly, “all bound for a better life.” [A statement too optimistic by half, as it turned out.]
“It wouldn’t be so bad if they would conduct themselves like Christians.”
“Perhaps it would or perhaps it wouldn’t. My father served among men just like these, and led them into battle, where their manners mattered less than their courage. And that’s a quality not apportioned by one’s station in life―it exists or not, to the same proportion, among all men, regardless of origin. In Panama my father’s life was often enough saved by men who used to be called beggars or thieves, and he took that lesson to heart.”
It was a sentiment I had also encountered in the literary works of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, where (admittedly) I had liked it better. “Do I have to tolerate vulgarity, though, on the chance that a hooligan might save my life?”
“True vulgarity is obviously not to be tolerated. But the point, Adam, is that the standards by which we judge these things are pliable, or ought to be, and they expand or contract from place to place and time to time.”
“I suppose they evolve,” I said, grimly.
“In fact they do, and if you want to make a success of your travels you’d do well to remember that fact.”
I said I would try, though my heart wasn’t in it. But an incident that evening served as a painful illustration of the truth of Julian’s lesson. The Caribou-Horn Train stopped at a coaling station, and two more Travel Agents came aboard to relieve the one who had guarded us through the day’s journey. During that exchange I caught a glimpse of the world outside, which in the darkness looked just like Bad Jump: tin-roofed shacks and a prairie horizon. A few flakes of snow swirled into the Phantom Car along with the two Agents in hide coats, who carried battered rifles and wore ammunition belts over their shoulders. Then the door was closed again, and the stove stoked up to a simmering redness. Our new overseers took their place at the front of the car, and we were docile under their surveillance, until it became obvious that the Agents had no especial interest in our behavior beyond preventing a full-scale riot. Then the revelries resumed.
Sam and Julian called me forward to join a circle of men around the stove. I did so reluctantly. There was a song in progress, which Julian accompanied on the choruses. Perhaps I should have joined in, too, just to be companionable. But it wasn’t a suitable song. It was about a young woman who lost her shawl on the way to church―but that was only the beginning of her misfortune, for on each succeeding day the unlucky female lost yet another article of clothing, culminating on a Saturday night on which she lost “that which a virtuous woman values above all else,” her downfall being minutely described. The song provoked much laughter and gaiety, but I failed to find the humor in it.
Then a flask was passed around the circle. It came eventually to the person on my left, who swilled from it enthusiastically and offered it to me.
“No thank you,” I said.
The man who made the offer wasn’t much older than myself. He was tall, and raggedly dressed, and he wore a threadbare woolen cap pulled down around his ears. His face was ruddy, and he had seemed genial enough during the singing, but my refusal of the liquor caused him to squint in bewilderment. “What’s that mean, no thank you?”