University of Virginia Library

29. CHAPTER XXIX.

PHILIP Sterling was on his way to Ilium, in the state of
Pennsylvania. Ilium was the railway station nearest
to the tract of wild land which Mr. Bolton had commissioned
him to examine.

On the last day of the journey as the railway train Philip
was on was leaving a large city, a lady timidly entered the
drawing-room car, and hesitatingly took a chair that was at
the moment unoccupied. Philip saw from the window that
a gentleman had put her upon the car just as it was starting.
In a few moments the conductor entered, and without waiting
an explanation, said roughly to the lady,

“Now you can't sit there. That seat's taken. Go into
the other car.”

“I did not intend to take the seat,” said the lady rising,
“I only sat down a moment till the conductor should come
and give me a seat.”

“There aint any. Car's full. You'll have to leave.”

“But, sir,” said the lady, appealingly, “I thought—”

“Can't help what you thought—you must go into the
other car.”

“The train is going very fast, let me stand here till we
stop.”

[ILLUSTRATION]

THE MONARCH OF ALL HE SURVEYS.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 265. In-line image of two men and a woman standing in a railroad car talking.]

“The lady can have my seat,” cried Philip, springing up.
The conductor turned towards Philip, and coolly and deliberately
surveyed him from head to foot, with contempt in
every line of his face, turned his back upon him without a
word, and said to the lady,

“Come, I've got no time to talk. You must go now.”

The lady, entirely disconcerted by such rudeness, and
frightened, moved towards the door, opened it and stepped
out. The train was swinging along at a rapid rate, jarring
from side to side; the step was a long one between the cars
and there was no protecting grating. The lady attempted it,
but lost her balance, in the wind and the motion of the car,
and fell! She would inevitably have gone down under the
wheels, if Philip, who had swiftly followed her, had not

caught her arm and drawn her up. He then assisted her
across, found her a seat, received her bewildered thanks, and
returned to his ear.

The conductor was still there, taking his tickets, and growling
something about imposition. Philip marched up to him,
and burst out with,

“You are a brute, an infernal brute, to treat a woman that
way.”

“Perhaps you'd like to make a fuss about it,” sneered the
conductor.

Philip's reply was a blow, given so suddenly and planted
so squarely in the conductor's face, that it sent him reeling
over a fat passenger, who was looking up in mild wonder
that any one should dare to dispute with a conductor, and
against the side of the car.

He recovered himself, reached the bell rope, “Damn you,
I'll learn you,” stepped to the door and called a couple of
brakemen, and then, as the speed slackened, roared out,

“Get off this train.”

“I shall not get off. I have as much right here as you.”

“We'll see,” said the conductor, advancing with the brakemen.
The passengers protested, and some of them said to
each other, “That's too bad,” as they always do in such cases,
but none of them offered to take a hand with Philip. The
men seized him, wrenched him from his seat, dragged him
along the aisle, tearing his clothes, thrust him from the car,
and then flung his carpet bag, overcoat and umbrella after
him. And the train went on.

The conductor, red in the face and puffing from his exertion,
swaggered through the car, muttering “Puppy, I'll learn
him.” The passengers, when he had gone, were loud in their
indignation, and talked about signing a protest, but they did
nothing more than talk.

The next morning the Hooverville Patriot and Clarion
had this “item”:—

SLIGHTUALLY OVERBOARD.

Philip never had been before in Bascom's swamp, and
there was nothing inviting in it to detain him. After the
train got out of the way he crawled out of the briars and the
mud, and got upon the track. He was somewhat bruised,
but he was too angry to mind that. He plodded along over
the ties in a very hot condition of mind and body. In the
scuffle, his railway check had disappeared, and he grimly
wondered, as he noticed the loss, if the company would permit
him to walk over their track if they should know he
hadn't a ticket.

Philip had to walk some five miles before he reached a
little station, where he could wait for a train, and he had
ample time for reflection. At first he was full of vengeance
on the company. He would sue it. He would make it pay
roundly. But then it occurred to him that he did not know
the name of a witness he could summon, and that a personal
fight against a railway corporation was about the most hopeless
in the world. He then thought he would seek out that
conductor, lie in wait for him at some station, and thrash him,
or get thrashed himself.

But as he got cooler, that did not seem to him a project
worthy of a gentleman exactly. Was it possible for a gentleman
to get even with such a fellow as that conductor on
the latter's own plane? And when he came to this point, he
began to ask himself, if he had not acted very much like a

fool. He didn't regret striking the fellow—he hoped he had
left a mark on him. But, after all, was that the best way?
Here was he, Philip Sterling, calling himself a gentleman,
in a brawl with a vulgar conductor, about a woman he had
never seen before. Why should he have put himself in such
a ridiculous position? Wasn't it enough to have offered the
lady his seat, to have rescued her from an accident, perhaps
from death? Suppose he had simply said to the conductor,
“Sir, your conduct is brutal, I shall report you.” The passengers,
who saw the affair, might have joined in a report
against the conductor, and he might really have accomplished
something. And, now! Philip looked at his torn clothes, and
thought with disgust of his haste in getting into a fight with
such an autocrat.

At the little station where Philip waited for the next train,
he met a man who turned out to be a justice of the peace in
that neighborhood, and told him his adventure. He was a
kindly sort of man, and seemed very much interested.

“Dum 'em” said he, when he had heard the story.

“Do you think any thing can be done, sir?”

“Wal, I guess tain't no use. I hain't a mite of doubt of
every word you say. But suin's no use. The railroad company
owns all these people along here, and the judges on the
bench too. Spiled your clothes! wal, “least said's soonest
mended.” You haint no chance with the company.”

When next morning, he read
the humorous account in the
Patriot and Clarion, he saw
still more clearly what chance
he would have had before the
public in a fight with the rail-road
company.

Still Philip's conscience told
him that it was his plain duty
to carry the matter into the
courts, even with the certainty
of defeat. He confessed that neither he nor any citizen had
a right to consult his own feelings or conscience in a case

[ILLUSTRATION]

"MINE INN."

[Description: 499EAF. Page 269. In-line image of a house from the outside with a sign on it, and a man in the front yard] where a law of the land had been violated before his own
eyes. He confessed that every citizen's first duty in such a
case is to put aside his own business and devote his time and
his best efforts to seeing that the infraction is promptly punished;
and he knew that no country can be well governed
unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their
minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the
law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing
more. As a finality he was obliged to confess that he was a
bad citizen, and also that the general laxity of the time, and
the absence of a sense of duty toward any part of the community
but the individual himself were ingrained in him, and
he was no better than the rest of the people.

The result of this little adventure was that Philip did not
reach Ilium till daylight the next morning, when he descended,
sleepy and sore, from a way train, and looked about him.
Ilium was in a narrow mountain gorge, through which a
rapid stream ran. It consisted of the plank platform on which
he stood, a wooden house, half painted, with a dirty piazza
(unroofed) in front, and a sign board hung on a slanting pole
bearing the legend, “Hotel. P. Dusenheimer,” a sawmill
further down the stream, a blacksmith-shop, and a store, and
three or four unpainted dwellings of the slab variety.

As Philip approached
the hotel he saw what appeared
to be a wild beast
crouching on the piazza.
It did not stir, however,
and he soon found that
it was only a stuffed skin.
This cheerful invitation to
the tavern was the remains
of a huge panther which
had been killed in the region
a few weeks before.
Philip examined his ugly
visage and strong crooked fore-arm, as he was waiting admittance,
having pounded upon the door.

“Vait a bit. I'll shoost put on my trowsers,” shouted a
voice from the window, and the door was soon opened by
the yawning landlord.

“Morgen! Didn't hear d' drain oncet. Dem boys geeps
me up zo spate. Gom right in.”

Philip was shown into a dirty bar-room. It was a small
room, with a stove in the middle, set in a long shallow box
of sand, for the benefit of the “spitters,” a bar across one end
—a mere counter with a sliding glass-case behind it containing
a few bottles having ambitious labels, and a wash-sink in
one corner. On the walls were the bright yellow and black
handbills of a traveling circus, with pictures of acrobats in
human pyramids, horses flying in long leaps through the air,
and sylph-like women in a paradisaic costume, balancing
themselves upon the tips of their toes on the bare backs of
frantic and plunging steeds, and kissing their hands to the
spectators meanwhile.

As Philip did not desire a room at that hour, he was invited
to wash himself at the nasty sink, a feat somewhat easier
than drying his face, for the towel that hung in a roller over
the sink was evidently as much a fixture as the sink itself, and
belonged, like the suspended brush and comb, to the traveling
public. Philip managed to complete his toilet by the use of
his pocket-handkerchief, and declining the hospitality of the
landlord, implied in the remark, “You won'd dake notin'?”
he went into the open air to wait for breakfast.

The country he saw was wild but not picturesque. The
mountain before him might be eight hundred feet high, and
was only a portion of a long unbroken range, savagely wooded,
which followed the stream. Behind the hotel, and across
the brawling brook, was another level-topped, wooded range
exactly like it. Ilium itself, seen at a glance, was old enough
to be dilapidated, and if it had gained anything by being
made a wood and water station of the new railroad, it was
only a new sort of grime and rawness. P. Dusenheimer,
standing in the door of his uninviting groggery, when the
trains stopped for water, never received from the traveling public
any patronage except facetious remarks upon his personal

[ILLUSTRATION]

A PLEASING LANDLORD.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 271. In-line image of a short man standing at the head of a table addressing a man who is still sitting at the table.] appearance. Perhaps a thousand times he had heard the remark,
“Ilium fuit,” followed in most instances by a hail to himself
as “Æneas,” with the inquiry “Where is old Anchises?”
At first he had replied, “Dere ain't no such man;” but irritated
by its senseless repetition, he had latterly dropped into the
formula of, “You be dam.”

Philip was recalled from the contemplation of Ilium by the
rolling and growling of the gong within the hotel, the din
and clamor increasing till the house was apparently unable to
contain it, when it burst out of the front door and informed
the world that breakfast was on the table.

The dining room was long, low and narrow, and a narrow
table extended its whole length. Upon this was spread a
cloth which from appearance might have been as long in use
as the towel in the bar-room. Upon the table was the usual
service, the heavy, much nicked stone ware, the row of plated
and rusty castors, the sugar bowls with the zine tea-spoons
sticking up in them, the piles of yellow biscuits, the discouraged-looking
plates of butter. The landlord waited, and
Philip was pleased to observe the change in his manner. In
the bar-room he was the conciliatory landlord. Standing behind
his guests at table, he had an air of peremptory patronage,
and the voice in which he shot out the inquiry, as he seized
Philip's plate, “Beefsteak or liver?” quite took away Philip's
power of choice. He begged for a glass of milk, after trying

[ILLUSTRATION]

PHILIP HIRED THREE WOODSMEN.

[Description: 499EAF. Page 272. In-line image of men in the woods holding guns while there is a mountain off in the background.] that green hued compound called coffee, and made his breakfast
out of that and some hard crackers which seemed to have
been imported into Ilium before the introduction of the iron
horse, and to have withstood a ten years siege of regular
boarders, Greeks and others.

The land that Philip had come to look at was at least five
miles distant from Ilium station. A corner of it touched the
railroad, but the rest was pretty much an unbroken wilderness,
eight or ten thousand acres of rough country, most of it such
a mountain range as he saw at Ilium.

His first step was to hire three woodsmen to accompany
him. By their help he built a log hut, and established a
camp on the land, and then began his explorations, mapping
down his survey as
he went along, noting
the timber, and
the lay of the land,
and making superficial
observations as
to the prospect of
coal.

The landlord at
Ilium endeavored to persuade Philip to hire the services
of a witch-hazel professor of that region, who could
walk over the land with his wand and tell him infallibly
whether it contained coal, and exactly where the strata ran.
But Philip preferred to trust to his own study of the country,

and his knowledge of the geological formation. He spent a
month in traveling over the land and making calculations;
and made up his mind that a fine vein of coal ran through
the mountain about a mile from the railroad, and that the
place to run in a tunnel was half way towards its summit.

Acting with his usual promptness, Philip, with the consent
of Mr. Bolton, broke ground there at once, and, before snow
came, had some rude buildings up, and was ready for active
operations in the spring. It was true that there were no outcroppings
of coal at the place, and the people at Ilium said
he “mought as well dig for plug terbaccer there;” but Philip
had great faith in the uniformity of nature's operations in
ages past, and he had no doubt that he should strike at this
spot the rich vein that had made the fortune of the Golden
Briar Company.