Roughing it De Luxe | Page 2

were going West to see the country and rough
it--rough it on overland trains better equipped and more luxurious than
any to be found in the East; rough it at ten-dollar-a-day hotels; rough it
by touring car over the most magnificent automobile roads to be found
on this continent. We were a daring lot and resolute; each and every
one of us was brave and blithe to endure the privations that such an
expedition must inevitably entail. Let the worst come; we were
prepared! If there wasn't any of the hothouse lamb, with imported green
peas, left, we'd worry along on a little bit of the fresh shad roe, and a
few conservatory cucumbers on the side. That's the kind of hardy
adventurers we were!
Conspicuous among us was a distinguished surgeon of Chicago; in fact,
so distinguished that he has had a very rare and expensive disease
named for him, which is as distinguished as a physician ever gets to be
in this country. Abroad he would be decorated or knighted. Here we
name something painful after him and it seems to fill the bill just as

well. This surgeon was very distinguished and also very exclusive.
After you scaled down from him, riding in solitary splendor in his
drawing room, with kitbags full of symptoms and diagnoses scattered
round, we became a mixed tourist outfit. I would not want to say that
any of the persons on our train were impossible, because that sounds
snobbish; but I will say this--some of them were highly improbable.
There was the bride, who put on her automobile goggles and her
automobile veil as soon as we pulled out of the Chicago yards and
never took them off again--except possibly when sleeping. I presume
she wanted to show the rest of us that she was accustomed to traveling
at a high rate of speed. If the bridegroom had only bethought him to
carry one of those siren horns under his arm, and had tooted it
whenever we went around a curve, the illusion would have been
complete.
There was also the middle-aged lady with the camera habit. Any time
the train stopped, or any time it behaved as though it thought of
stopping, out on the platform would pop this lady, armed with her little
accordion-plaited camera, with the lens focused and the little atomizer
bulb dangling down, all ready to take a few pictures. She snapshotted
watertanks, whistling posts, lunch stands, section houses, grade
crossings and holes in the snowshed--also scenery, people and climate.
A two-by-four photograph of a mountain that's a mile high must be a
most splendid reminder of the beauties of Nature to take home with you
from a trip.
There was the conversational youth in the Norfolk jacket, who was
going out West to fill an important vacancy in a large business
house--he told us so himself. It was a good selection, too. If I had a
vacancy that I wanted filled in such a way that other people would
think the vacancy was still there, this youth would have been my
candidate.
[Illustration: EVIDENTLY HE BELIEVED THE CONSPIRACY
AGAINST HIM WAS WIDESPREAD]
And finally there was the corn-doctor from a town somewhere in

Indiana, who had the upper berth in Number Ten. It seemed to take a
load off his mind, on the second morning out, when he learned that he
would not have to spend the day up there, but could come down and
mingle with the rest of us on a common footing; but right up to the
finish of the journey he was uncertain on one or two other points. Every
time a conductor came through--Pullman conductor, train conductor or
dining-car conductor--he would hail him and ask him this question:
"Do I or do I not have to change at Williams for the Grand Cañon?"
The conductor--whichever conductor it was--always said, Yes, he
would have to change at Williams. But he kept asking them--he seemed
to regard a conductor as a functionary who would deliberately go out of
his way to mislead a passenger in regard to an important matter of this
kind. After a while the conductors took to hiding out from him and then
he began cross-examining the porters, and the smoking-room attendant,
and the baggageman, and the flagmen, and the passengers who got
aboard down the line in Colorado and New Mexico.
At breakfast in the dining car you would hear his plaintive, patient
voice lifted. "Yes, waiter," he would say; "fry 'em on both sides, please.
And say, waiter, do you know for sure whether we change at Williams
for the Grand Cañon?" He put a world of entreaty into it; evidently he
believed the conspiracy against him was widespread. At Albuquerque I
saw him leading off on one side a