CHAPTER IV

Bennie and Spider Cross the Continent

It certainly did seem a long while to both the scouts between the time of getting Uncle Bill’s letter and the closing of school in June. But it was a pretty busy time, too. Bennie had to keep on studying, so he could make sure of passing his examinations, and Spider had to put in an hour or two every day in his father’s store. Beside that, they had to have another go at the Monument Mountain cliffs as soon as the snow was gone in the spring, and at about every other rock, big or little, within tramping radius of home. They took the rest of the scouts along on these expeditions, but as nobody but Bennie and Spider were going to Oregon, the others didn’t get so excited about climbing as they did, and soon everybody was playing baseball, leaving Bennie and Spider to practice rock scaling alone.

June came at last, and so did examinations. Bennie passed them easily, for the first time in his life—just because he had got his work from day to day. Then the time came to buy their railroad tickets and get their berths reserved. Before they knew it, their trunks were packed, and they were ready to start on the long journey.

Bennie noticed that his mother didn’t say very much the night before, but just sat and looked at him, while he was going over the tickets with his father, and folding them into a new pocketbook, with $100 in new bills, which Mr. Capen had brought home from the bank. Bennie put the purse into an inside pocket, and went over to his mother.

“Gee, Ma,” he said, “you’d think I was going to the North Pole or somewhere, instead of just to visit Uncle Bill. Nobody’s going to speak cross to your little Bennie, or make him take any wooden money, or hit him over the bean. Don’t you worry. I guess me ’n’ Spider can take a railroad trip without anybody needing to worry.”

But though he spoke with a laugh, Bennie didn’t feel very much like laughing, because when his mother looked at him, and tried to smile, he saw the tears behind her eyes, and he knew, somehow, that it wasn’t because she was afraid for him, but because he was going to be away from her so long. He couldn’t quite understand this, but he loved his mother tremendously, and it made him want to weep, too. In about one minute he was weeping, and so was his mother, with an arm about his shoulder.

Mr. Capen looked up in surprise.

“Hello!” he said. “Hello! So you don’t want to go, eh?”

Bennie straightened up, and gulped hard, trying to swallow his sob in a grin.

“Where—where do you get that stuff?” he demanded.

“Well, you don’t seem very _cheerful_ about going.”

“It was ’cause Ma wasn’t cheerful,” said Bennie.

“I’m cheerful, dear,” said his mother, smiling at him. “I wasn’t crying because I was sad, but just because—because—well, you won’t understand, but because you’re so big and grown up now, and can go away by yourself.”

“Well, I don’t see’s that’s anything to cry about, for a fact,” said Bennie.

“Bennie,” his father remarked, “you have never been a mother.”

“You said a mouth——”

“Bennie! slang, to your father!” said his mother.

“You have uttered a truthful remark, sir,” grinned Bennie.

The next day Mr. and Mrs. Capen and Spider’s father and mother came down to the depot with the two scouts. Half a dozen of their troop were there, too, and the last thing they heard as they waved from the car window, was the scout yell. The last thing Bennie saw was his mother’s face. She was smiling bravely at him, and keeping the tears back.

In about an hour the boys had to change to a through train, which took them to Chicago. At Chicago they would have to spend the afternoon and early evening, and then take the Northwest Limited on the Union Pacific, which took them right to Portland, Oregon. They had their tickets in their pockets, and their berth checks, and about once in fifteen minutes they felt of themselves, to see if the precious pocketbooks were still there.

Neither Bennie nor Spider had ever been West before, and as long as daylight lasted they sat close to the window. But it was dark all too soon. When the train entered Syracuse, and traveled, apparently, right down the main street, the two scouts looked right into the lighted shop-windows, but out in the country they saw nothing. So they went to bed, each with his precious pocketbook under his pillow.

They were up at daylight, and dressed long before the other passengers began to come into the washroom. Now they saw the Great Lakes beside the track, like the ocean, and rolled through the smoke of Gary, where the great steel mills are, and saw Lake Michigan, and almost before they knew it, were in Chicago.

The boys had careful directions what they were to do in Chicago. They were to get right aboard the transfer ’bus and ride over to the Northwestern station, checking their suitcases there. Then they could walk around the city, if they liked. It is a queer sensation to arrive in a great city which you have never seen before. Bennie and Spider, after the ’bus had rolled them quickly across the bridge to the other station, and they had checked their bags, walked out into the street, without any idea where they were, and turned east to see the town. They recrossed the bridge, walked a few blocks, and were suddenly in the Loop. The streets were none too wide. The elevated railroad roared and thundered overhead. The great buildings towered into the air. Trolleys, motors, thousands of people crowded the way from wall to wall.

“Some burg!” Bennie exclaimed. “Little old New York hasn’t got much on this village. I didn’t know Chicago was so big.”

“Guess we haven’t got everything in the East,” Spider answered.

They walked on till they reached Michigan Boulevard, that splendid great avenue which sweeps down by the lake shore, and they wondered how Chicago stands for the smoke of the trains between the Boulevard and the beach.

“Why don’t they _make_ the old railroad electrify itself?” Spider asked. “Gee, it’s turned all the marble sooty black.”

It was a hot day, and getting hotter, so they finally went out on a pier and sat in the breeze till it was time to hunt up a place for supper.

After supper they walked around the Loop, which was now filled with theatre crowds, and then back to the station, got their bags, and hunted out the track their train was to go on. The rear observation platform had an illuminated red sign hung out behind, with the name of the train—“Northwest Limited.” It gave them a thrill to see those words! And that train for three days would be their home. As soon as the gates were open, they got aboard and hunted out their berths.

The next morning, when they woke, the train was rushing through Iowa. Mile after mile after mile of rolling country, dotted with farmhouses, great red barns, little wood lots close beside them, and endless acres of sprouting corn, and tall wheat, as far as the eye could see. Mile after mile, and never a town, but always the fields of corn and wheat, the herds of cattle, the great red barns.

“Golly!” Bennie exclaimed. “We don’t know what a farm is, do we?”

“I never saw so much corn in my life—I didn’t know there _was_ so much,” Spider answered.

That day they passed through Omaha, and were still bowling along through the endless oceans of corn in Nebraska when night came. It was terribly hot now, and dusty and dirty. Spider wiped his face, and when he looked at his handkerchief, it was black! Bennie said he felt as if somebody had poured cinders down his back.

“Wait till you wake up tomorrow,” said the brakeman, who overheard them, “and you’ll see snow.”

“You look sort of honest,” Bennie laughed, “but I don’t believe you.”

“All right,” said the brakeman. “Want to bet?”

“Can’t,” said Bennie. “All my money’s in hundred dollar bills.”

“We cross the height of land in Wyoming before you’re awake,” the trainman went on. “We’re up 7,000 feet or more there—in Wyoming.”

“You mean the Rocky Mountains? Do we cross ’em at night?” cried Spider. “Gee, what tough luck.”

“Not much mountains where we cross. But you’ll see mountains, all right, if you don’t sleep all the morning—and snow, too.”

“Bring me some now, I want to take it to bed with me,” said Bennie.

Spider, whose turn it was to sleep in the lower berth that night, pulled up the curtain as soon as it was daylight, and looked out. He gave a jump, reached up and poked Bennie awake, and began to dress. In ten minutes the boys were out on the observation platform, staring hard. The train was in Wyoming now, on a vast, high plateau, a country that didn’t look like anything they had ever seen. It rolled away to the horizon in every direction, like a tossing, oily gray sea, without a tree on it, apparently without any grass on it worth mentioning, but covered with pale green sage bushes in clumps here and there. It was a naked, desolate looking land, and yet they saw great droves of cattle wandering over it, and now and then a white strip of road, and finally, all of a sudden as the train rounded a bend, seemingly right beside the track a couple of miles away, a huge blue mountain covered completely on top with a cap of white snow, and streaked with snow all down the ravines on its northern side.

The scouts gave a yell of joy at the sight. “A snow mountain!” they cried.

“Do I win or not?” said the brakeman, appearing behind them. “That’s the mountain. Pretty soon, off south, you’ll see some higher ones, down in Utah.”

“How far is it to that mountain—about five miles?” Bennie asked.

It looked two, but he thought he’d add a few.

The trainman grinned. “I wouldn’t try to walk it before breakfast,” said he. “It’s about twenty or thirty, I reckon.”

That day they rolled along through endless miles of the naked cattle country, that in the East would have seemed like a desert. No New England cow could have lived on it, Spider declared. Then they began to get into the Idaho mountains, on the branch line, and turned and twisted down cañons with the naked red hills folding up in front of and behind the train. They went to sleep in Idaho and woke up in Oregon—woke up to see more mountains, and more snow—long ranges of mountains to left and right with snow on the summits, though it was now almost July first, and hot as Tophet in the train.

The train presently began to climb an endless grade, up and up and up, getting over the pass of the Blue Mountains, and into heavily timbered country—real woods at last, after the long ride through the prairie and the sage brush. On and on went the train, till at last it reached the Columbia River, and the excited boys, braving the cinders that swirled in on the observation platform, sat out there and saw at last below them the great green river rushing swiftly along, cutting its way through the high, rocky banks.

These banks began to get higher and steeper. They were entering the gorge of the Columbia, where it cuts through the Cascade range. Soon the banks were real precipices, 1,000, 2,000 feet high. At The Dalles, they picked up the Columbia Highway, the most wonderful motor road in America, and could see where it was cut right out of the sides of the cliffs in places. When the train stopped at Hood River, a lot of people got off to stretch, the boys with them, and a man took them down the platform and said, “Look!”

They looked to the south, and there it was! Shooting up apparently right behind the depot, shaped like a cone, dazzling white, tall, stately, beautiful against the sky—Mount Hood! These were the eternal snows! There was a real climb!

Bennie just gasped for a second. Then he found his tongue. “It—it’s just as big as I thought it would be!” he said.

“It’s the finest thing in the world,” said the man. “I live in Portland, and every clear day I look at it, sixty miles away, and it’s like a friend.”

“Is it hard to climb?” Spider asked.

“No,” said the man. “It’s a cinch. If you’re looking for a climb, go down and tackle Jefferson.”

“Never even heard of it,” said Bennie.

“There are a lot of things out here you eastern folks never heard of,” the man answered.

The boys wanted to ask him more, but just then the conductor called “All aboard,” and they lost him in the rush.

For the next hour they were busy looking at the scenery, at the great river on one side, and the great cliff walls on the other, with thousand-foot waterfalls leaping down almost on the train, and the Columbia Highway running alongside of the track in places, in other places disappearing and coming into sight again far up on top of some headland.

“Gee, I wish we were in a motor!” Spider sighed.

“Maybe Uncle Bill will take us this way in his,” said Bennie.

Now the cliffs grew lower. The river was through the gorge. Presently the river disappeared, and the train ran through level land a little way, and the houses began to get thicker and thicker. They crossed another river on a drawbridge, and saw tramp ships lying up to the docks, and on the other side rolled into the Portland depot.

At the train gate, looming up above the crowd, Bennie spied the head of his uncle, and in another minute he had him by the hand, and was introducing Spider, and Uncle Billy was putting the dress suitcases into his car, and then they were off through the streets of Portland, with the lights coming on, the darkness falling.

“I guess you boys are pretty hot and tired, eh?” said Uncle Bill. “Of course, you never have any hot weather in the East.”

“It’s about like this Christmas time at home,” Bennie answered. “I was just wishing I had an overcoat.”

“You’ll wish you had a couple before I get through with you,” said Uncle Bill. “I heard to-day there are seven feet of snow yet on the rim of Crater Lake. We’ve got to camp up there. It’ll be pretty slippery, too, getting down to the water. Guess we’ll have to fry a couple of ropes.”

“Boil mine—about four minutes,” said Bennie.

His uncle laughed as he put the car up a steep grade out of the business section to the heights overlooking the city. The residences look right out over the town, and now they could see the checkerboard squares of the streets, marked out with electric lights. They stopped at the doctor’s house, and he showed them in, his housekeeper meeting them.

“Now beat it and get a bath,” he said, “and then grub! Hurry up, for I’m all ready to eat, and if you keep me waiting, I’ll have to begin on one of those ropes.”

“Say, he’s a regular scout,” said Spider, as they were cleaning up.

“Boy, I got a hunch we’re going to have some good time!” answered Bennie from the tub.