Produced by Juliet Sutherland, William Bumgarner and the PG Online
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There are words which have careers as well as men, or, perhaps it may bemore happily said, as well as women. Mere words breathed on by Fancy,and sent forth not so much to serve man's ordinary colloquial uses,apparently, as to fascinate his mind, have their débuts. their season,their vogue, and finally a period in which it is really too bad if theyhave not the consolation of reflecting upon their conquests; forconquests they certainly have. The great captivators—the Cleopatras ofthe vocabulary—one easily recognizes; but besides these there is a hostof small flirts and every-day coquettes, whom one hardly suspects tillthey have a little carried him away. Almost every one remembers how inthis light company he first came across the little word ranch. It hadin its youth distinctly the cachet of the verbal flying squadron, the"nameless something," the oenanthic whiff which flies to the head. Thereare signs that its best days as a word are now over, and incontemplating it at present one has a vision of a passée brunette, inthe costume of Fifine at the Fair, solacing herself with thoughts ofearly triumphs. "Would a farm have served?" she murmurs. "Would aplantation, an orange-grove, have satisfied the desperate young man? No,no; he must have his ranch! There was no charm could soothe hismelancholy, and wring for him the public bosom, save mine."
I made this reflection during a period of incarceration in asleeping-car,—a form of confinement which, like any other, throws theprisoner considerably on his fancy; and a vision somewhat like the abovesmoothed for a moment the pillow of an "upper berth," and pleased betterthan the negro porter. Half a dozen of those days of too many papernovels, of too much tobacco, of too little else, followed each otherwith the sameness of so many raw oysters. Then there came a chill nightof wide moonlit vacuity passed on the prairie by the side of the driverof a "jumper,"—a driver who slumbered, happy man!—and at peep of dawnI found myself standing, stiff and shivering, in a certain little Texastown. A much-soiled, white little street, a bit of greenish-yellow,treeless plain soft in the morning mist, a rosy fringe at the edge ofthe sky,—it was of these things, together with a disagreeable sense ofimponderability of body from the cold and sleepless ride, that I wasvaguely aware as the jumper—rigorous vehicle!—disappeared round acorner. Frontier towns are not lovely, and the death-like peace whichseemed properly to accompany the chalky pallor of the buildings wassomewhat uncanny; but it proved to be only what sleep can do for avillage with railroad influences one hundred miles away. We enteredboldly the adobe before which we had been dropped, and found a geniallandlord in an impromptu costume justified by the hour, an inn-album ofquite cosmopolitan range of inscriptions, and a breakfast for which aweek of traveller's fare had amply fortified the spirit.
The village was the chief, indeed, wellnigh the only, town of a greatwest-by-north county, in which Rhode Island would be lost andMassachusetts find elbow-room. It was an irregular little bunch ofbuildings gathered along an arterial street which, after a run of threehundred yards or so, broke to pieces and scattered its dispersedshanties about a high, barren plain. It stood on the steep bank of alittle river, and over against it, on a naked hill, was Uncle Sam'smilitary village,—a fort by courtesy,—where, when not sleeping