s got off of Number Eleven,
and made the town nearly explode with curiosity by walking out to the
Dover farm at the edge of town and pacing it off this way and that. Took
us a month to learn their business. That was the time we got the Scraper
Works. When Allison B. Unk arrived, he made a tremendous impression by
wearing a plug hat still in its first youth, and rolling ponderously
around town in a Prince Albert. We've despised Prince Alberts ever since
because the town fell for that one and deposited liberally in Unk's new
bank, which closed up a year later. And then there was the time when the
trainmen put off a scared and sick cripple, who lay in the depot
waiting-room with a ring of sympathetic incompetents around him until
Doc Simms could help him. He touched our hearts, and we shelled out
enough to send him on a hundred miles to his people. He came back ten
years later and kept Homeburg balanced magnificently in the air for a
week by showing us how much fun it is to chum with a millionaire. Even
sick cripples are likely to guess the market right in this country, you
know, and he never forgot us.

As they come in on Number Eleven, so they go. The young men come to
Homeburg full of hope, and their sons go on elsewhere loaded with the
same. Mothers weep on the station platform many times a year while their
Willies and Johns and Petes hike gaily off to chase their fortunes. And
many times a year the old boys come back from Chicago. Some of them are
rich and proud, and some of them are rich and friendly, and some of them
are just friendly. But they all get off of Number Eleven under our
keen, discriminating glare, and they all get the same greeting while we
size them up and wonder if their nobby thirty-five dollar suits are
their sole stocks-in-trade, and just how much a "lucrative position"
means in Chicago.

When the big strike was on, twenty-five years ago, Number Eleven didn't
run for two days. We might as well have been marooned on St. Helena. It
was awful. When a hand-car came sweeping into town the third day with a
big sail on, we hailed it like starving sailors. It was Number Eleven
which took on a flat-car loaded with Paynesville's fire department
twenty years ago and saved our business section. When President Banks,
of the Great F. C. & L. Railroad, rolled into Homeburg in his private
car, to become "Pudge" Banks again for a day or two and revisit the
scenes of his boyhood, he came on Number Eleven of course.