HE through express, consisting almost entirely of sleeping-cars, had just passed through Jericho Station. The station-master gazed after the rapidly receding train which, at a little distance, was nearly hidden by a following cloud of dust. Then turning to me, and dropping heavily into a chair, he remarked, "That's what people nowadays call 'comfort in travelling,' but gimme an old-fashion ordinary car every time."
"Then you don't like sleeping-cars?"
"No, sir! I don't. When I'm travelling by night I want to be my own master. If I want to smoke, I want to be where I can smoke, and if I want to sit by the window and chew tobacco, I want a window accordingly. Now when you travel in a sleeping-car at night what happens? Why you have to turn into a berth whether you want to or not, and you have to give up your boots and you can't get 'em again till morning; and you can't smoke, and you haven't got any air to breathe, and some fellow is sure to snore so loud that the seven sleepers mentioned in Ephesians couldn't get a wink if they were there.
"Why, speaking of snoring, I've known lots of what you would call tragedies to happen in sleeping-cars on account of snoring. You don't hear of 'em in the papers, for the men that do these tragedies don't care to talk about 'em, and the company naturally wants the thing kept quiet. You read in the papers every little while about the mysterious disappearance of some man who started on a railway journey and was never heard of again. The next time you read anything like that you can just make up your mind that the missing man was a snorer, and that he was rash enough to take a sleeping-car where there were a lot of other travellers. Oh! I'm not trying to hoax you. When you go back to Chicago you go to a public library, and you ask for a file of the Chicago Tribune for last year, and if you go through it carefully you will find that at least a dozen men who are missing were last seen entering a sleeping-car on such and such a road. You'll have to admit that if what I'm telling you isn't true, it is certainly a curious coincidence that the missing men were all travelling in sleeping-cars.
"The company put a sleeper on this line in the days when the Jericho mines were having their boom. It was the first sleeping-car ever seen in the North West, and for a time it was very popular; that is on the eastward bound trip. You see, miners that had made their pile at the mines always took the sleeper when they started for the east, and sometimes we'd have every berth in the car engaged. They were that anxious to spend their money that they would have taken any sort of a car that we might have put on the line and charged an extra price for. I was brake man of that sleeper, and I used to get a lot of amusement out of the miners, except when they happened to start a difficulty, and then I would bolt for the other end of the train till the shooting was over. It was curious to see how those miners that didn't care for any sort of law would knock under to the nigger porter, and obey his rules. I suppose it was because they didn't want anybody to think that they didn't know the ways and manners of sleeping-cars. The porter would come at nine o'clock, and say, 'Time to make up the beds, gemmen,' and they would stand around till the beds were made up as meek as if they were children. Then when the beds were made they had to turn in, for there wasn't any place for them to sit down, and they'd take off their boots and hand them over to the porter, without ever dreaming of telling him that they weren't in the habit of taking off their boots at night, and that if he wanted those boots he had better try and take them off himself. Take 'em by and large, those miners were generally better behaved on the sleeping-car than the average commercial traveller is nowadays, for all that he gives such airs, and lets on to be at the top of Chicago society.