The Complete Short Stories of W.D. Howells (Illustrated Edition). William Dean Howells
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but it kept saying, ‘Pacific Express! Pacific Express!’ and it kept right on till it reached the Mississippi River. There it found a long train of freight cars before it on the bridge. It couldn't wait, and so it slipped down from the track to the edge of the river and jumped across, and then scrambled up the embankment to the track again.”
“Papa!” said the little girl, warningly.
“Truly it did,” said the papa.
“Ho! that's nothing,” said the boy. “A whole train of cars did it in that Jules Verne book.”
“Well,” the papa went on, “after that it had a little rest, for the Express had to wait for the freight train to get off the bridge, and the Pony Engine stopped at the first station for a drink of water and a mouthful of coal, and then it flew ahead. There was a kind old locomotive at Omaha that tried to find out where it belonged, and what its mother's name was, but the Pony Engine was so bewildered it couldn't tell. And the Express kept gaining on it. On the plains it was chased by a pack of prairie wolves, but it left them far behind; and the antelopes were scared half to death. But the worst of it was when the nightmare got after it.”
“The nightmare? Goodness!” said the boy.
“I've had the nightmare,” said the little girl.
“Oh yes, a mere human nightmare,” said the papa. “But a locomotive nightmare is a very different thing.”
“Why, what's it like?” asked the boy. The little girl was almost afraid to ask.
“Well, it has only one leg, to begin with.”
“Pshaw!”
“Wheel, I mean. And it has four cow-catchers, and four head-lights, and two boilers, and eight whistles, and it just goes whirling and screeching along. Of course it wobbles awfully; and as it's only got one wheel, it has to keep skipping from one track to the other.”
“I should think it would run on the cross-ties,” said the boy.
“Oh, very well, then!” said the papa. “If you know so much more about it than I do! Who's telling this story, anyway? Now I shall have to go back to the beginning. Once there was a little Pony En—”
They both put their hands over his mouth, and just fairly begged him to go on, and at last he did. “Well, it got away from the nightmare about morning, but not till the nightmare had bitten a large piece out of its tender, and then it braced up for the home-stretch. It thought that if it could once beat the Express to the Sierras, it could keep the start the rest of the way, for it could get over the mountains quicker than the Express could, and it might be in San Francisco before the Express got to Sacramento. The Express kept gaining on it. But it just zipped along the upper edge of Kansas and the lower edge of Nebraska, and on through Colorado and Utah and Nevada, and when it got to the Sierras it just stooped a little, and went over them like a goat; it did, truly; just doubled up its fore wheels under it, and jumped. And the Express kept gaining on it. By this time it couldn't say ‘Pacific Express’ any more, and it didn't try. It just said ‘Express! Express!’ and then ‘'Press! 'Press!’ and then ‘'Ess! 'Ess!’ and pretty soon only ‘'Ss! 'Ss!’ And the Express kept gaining on it. Before they reached San Francisco, the Express locomotive's cow-catcher was almost touching the Pony Engine's tender; it gave one howl of anguish as it felt the Express locomotive's hot breath on the place where the nightmare had bitten the piece out, and tore through the end of the San Francisco depot, and plunged into the Pacific Ocean, and was never seen again. There, now,” said the papa, trying to make the children get down, “that's all. Go to bed.” The little girl was crying, and so he tried to comfort her by keeping her in his lap.
The boy cleared his throat. “What is the moral, papa?” he asked, huskily.
“Children, obey your parents,” said the papa.
“And what became of the mother locomotive?” pursued the boy.
“She had a brain-fever, and never quite recovered the use of her mind again.”
The boy thought awhile. “Well, I don't see what it had to do with Christmas, anyway.”
“Why, it was Christmas Eve when the Pony Engine started from Boston, and Christmas afternoon when it reached San Francisco.”
“Ho!” said the boy. “No locomotive could get across the continent in a day and a night, let alone a little Pony Engine.”
“But this Pony Engine had to. Did you never hear of the beaver that clomb the tree?”
“No! Tell—”
“Yes, some other time.”
“But how could it get across so quick? Just one day!”
“Well, perhaps it was a year. Maybe it was the next Christmas after that when it got to San Francisco.”
The papa set the little girl down, and started to run out of the room, and both of the children ran after him, to pound him.
When they were in bed the boy called down-stairs to the papa, “Well, anyway, I didn't put up my lip.”
The Pumpkin Glory
The papa had told the story so often that the children knew just exactly what to expect the moment he began. They all knew it as well as he knew it himself, and they could keep him from making mistakes, or forgetting. Sometimes he would go wrong on purpose, or would pretend to forget, and then they had a perfect right to pound him till he quit it. He usually quit pretty soon.
The children liked it because it was very exciting, and at the same time it had no moral, so that when it was all over, they could feel that they had not been excited just for the moral. The first time the little girl heard it she began to cry, when it came to the worst part; but the boy had heard it so much by that time that he did not mind it in the least, and just laughed.
The story was in season any time between Thanksgiving and New Years; but the papa usually began to tell it in the early part of October, when the farmers were getting in their pumpkins, and the children were asking when they were going to have any squash pies, and the boy had made his first jack-o'-lantern.
“Well,” the papa said, “once there were two little pumpkin seeds, and one was a good little pumpkin seed, and the other was bad—very proud, and vain, and ambitious.”
The papa had told them what ambitious was, and so the children did not stop him when he came to that word; but sometimes he would stop of his own accord, and then if they could not tell what it meant, he would pretend that he was not going on; but he always did go on.
“Well, the farmer took both the seeds out to plant them in the home-patch, because they were a very extra kind of seeds, and he was not going to risk them in the cornfield, among the corn. So before he put them in the ground, he asked each one of them what he wanted to be when he came up, and the good little pumpkin seed said he wanted to come up a pumpkin, and be made into a pie, and be eaten at Thanksgiving dinner; and the bad little pumpkin seed said he wanted to come up a morning-glory.
“‘Morning-glory!’ says the farmer. ‘I guess you'll come up a pumpkin-glory, first thing you know,’ and then he haw-hawed, and told his son, who was helping him to plant the garden, to keep watch of that particular hill of pumpkins, and see whether that little seed came up a morning-glory or not; and the boy stuck a stick into the hill so he could tell it. But one night the cow got in, and the farmer was so mad, having to get up about one o'clock in the morning to drive the cow out, that he pulled up the stick, without noticing, to whack her over the back with it, and so they lost the place.
“But the two little pumpkin seeds, they knew where they were well enough, and they lay low,