Again, you are on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fé Railway. You land at Emporia, Kansas, one hundred and twenty-eight miles from Kansas City. The locomotive breasts the prairie in panoply as glittering as anywhere. You find a brisk and busy town, well-filled stores, elegant houses, capital schools, a public library, and intelligent and hospitable people. The railroad was Pharaoh's daughter to it. It found the little Moses in the bulrushes, and made Emporia a marvel in the wilderness. You see last week's New York fashions in the streets, the latest works of literature upon the tables. The pretty dining-room girl startles your left ear at breakfast with, "Buffalo-steak or antelope?" You regard her in a dazed way, and ask "What?" "Buffalo-steak or antelope?" and you say "_Both!_" A citizen, on hospitable thoughts intent, promises to take you out antelope-hunting. You faintly enquire "Where?" and the reply is, "O, ten or a dozen miles!" You begin to understand things, and to see that the locomotive is trailing civilization along after it wherever it goes.
Again on the train: A man enters the car who toes straight out the way he is going. He has a red sash, silk, and Chinese at that, about his waist. The glitter of a silver-mounted revolver at his left side, a shady sombrero upon his head, an uncivilized nugget of gold for a breastpin, a small log-chain of the same material a-swing upon his breast, buttons up and down the side seams of his pantaloons, square-shouldered, broader at the breast than equatorially. There you have him, and _isn't_ he cool? He gives you a square look with both eyes. He seats himself upon the crimson cushions as indifferently as if he had never seen anything else. It is an American turned into a Mexican herder, arrayed in his holiday clothes, and bound for St. Louis. He is at home on horseback, is at home _any_where, and can throw a lariat like a savage. He takes an apple out of one pocket, a desperate-looking knife out of another; a little jerk of the wrist, and about eight inches of steel blade flash out, he looks at you a second, and--carves his apple! Then that cutlery becomes a toothpick of the Arkansas patent. He will tell you it is a frog-sticker.