For reasons to appear, I recall the third more in detail.
He let me know somewhere in the give-and-take of talk that he was a
railway telegraph operator, and that, given his first long vacation, an
old impulse, come down from the days of the Hawaiian _hula_ phonograph
records, had brought him to the isle of delight. He was disappointed in
it. One could see in his candid eyes that he felt himself done out of an
illusion, an illusion of continuous dancing by girls in rope skirts on
moonlit beaches. It was an intolerable waste of money. Here, come so far
and so expensively to the romantic goal, he was disturbed to find his
imagination fleeing back to the incredible adventure of a Rock Island
station, an iron-red dot on the bald, high plain of eastern Colorado--to
the blind sun flare of the desert--to the immensity of loneliness--to
the thundering nightly crisis of the "Eleven-ten," sweeping monstrous
and one-eyed out of the cavern of the West, grating, halting,
glittering, gossiping, yawning, drinking with a rush and gurgle from the
red tank--and on again with an abrupt and always startling clangor into
the remote night of the East.
He shifted impatiently in his chair and made a dreary face at the
screening fronds.
"For the love o' Mike! Even the rags they play here are old.
Pages:
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548