The night telegraph-operator at the railroad station was the most melodramatic figure in town:  awake at three in the morning, alone in a room hectic with clatter of the telegraph key.  All night he “talked” to operators twenty, fifty, a hundred miles away.  It was always to be expected that he would be held up by robbers.  He never was, but round him was a suggestion of masked faces at the window, revolvers, cords binding him to a chair, his struggle to crawl to the key before he fainted.

During blizzards everything about the railroad was melodramatic.  There were days when the town was completely shut off, when they had no mail, no express, no fresh meat, no newspapers.  At last the rotary snow-plow came through, bucking the drifts, sending up a geyser, and the way to the Outside was open again.  The brakemen, in mufflers and fur caps, running along the tops of ice-coated freight-cars; the engineers scratching frost from the cab windows and looking out, inscrutable, self-contained, pilots of the prairie sea—­they were heroism, they were to Carol the daring of the quest in a world of groceries and sermons.

To the small boys the railroad was a familiar playground.  They climbed the iron ladders on the sides of the box-cars; built fires behind piles of old ties; waved to favorite brakemen.  But to Carol it was magic.

She was motoring with Kennicott, the car lumping through darkness, the lights showing mud-puddles and ragged weeds by the road.  A train coming!  A rapid chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck, chuck-a-chuck.  It was hurling past—­the Pacific Flyer, an arrow of golden flame.  Light from the fire-box splashed the under side of the trailing smoke.  Instantly the vision was gone; Carol was back in the long darkness; and Kennicott was giving his version of that fire and wonder:  “No. 19.  Must be ’bout ten minutes late.”

In town, she listened from bed to the express whistling in the cut a mile north.  Uuuuuuu!—­faint, nervous, distrait, horn of the free night riders journeying to the tall towns where were laughter and banners and the sound of bells—­Uuuuu!  Uuuuu!—­the world going by—­Uuuuuuu!—­fainter, more wistful, gone.

Down here there were no trains.  The stillness was very great.  The prairie encircled the lake, lay round her, raw, dusty, thick.  Only the train could cut it.  Some day she would take a train; and that would be a great taking.

VII

She turned to the Chautauqua as she had turned to the dramatic association, to the library-board.