It had been a revelation to Scott. His relations with the faculty had been wholly of the classroom, and he had formed the students’ usual opinion of them as a type. That night he had seen them act like human beings and he began to wonder if some of them were not almost human after all.
The fifteenth of April, the day set for the departure, arrived at last. The train left the Union Depot at nine in the morning, and the boys were eager to reach the depot. The car stopped and they hurried into the station where they found a wild and woolly looking group assembled in the corner of the waiting room. They could not wait to get to the woods and were nearly all attired in true lumberjack fashion, only the pallor of their faces betraying them. They hailed the new arrivals with that exaggerated hilarity that only a crowd of college boys can display. And that hilarity instead of subsiding grew steadily with the arrival of every new addition. They joked each other continually, riled the grouchy baggage man almost to madness and “joshed” every porter who showed himself.
When the train came in from St. Paul the crowd surged boisterously forward sweeping everyone before it. Most of the people recognized the joyous buoyancy of youth, and knowing how useless it was to oppose it, yielded good naturedly enjoying it by a sort of reflected pleasure, but a few resented it wrathfully, thereby making themselves ridiculous. On they rushed across the platform and took possession of the smoking car.
That trip to Park Rapids was a memorable one to the boys, as well as to everyone else on the train. Most travelers consider it a dull and tiresome ride but the boys seemed to find a source of never-ending enjoyment in the sameness of the little towns along the road and the long stretches of prairie, broken here and there by patches of jack pine. The almost unbroken series of practical jokes which they played on the trainmen and on each other made the miles slip pleasantly by for the other passengers. It was all done in a good-humored spirit of abandon that angered no one.
The dinner which they devoured at Sauk Center amazed some of the invalid ladies who watched them, but it was only a vague foreshadowing of the meal which they would eat in that same room on the downward trip when their appetites had been whetted by four months of strenuous work in the woods. With a cheer for the town which had fed them so well they boarded the little branch train which was to take them to their destination and resumed their old amusements. At Wadena they welcomed wildly a stray member of the class who had come across on the N. P. to join them. They immediately proceeded to work off on him all the gags which had been developed earlier in the day.