"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

that put us on the four o'clock to Pittsburgh, and from there one of the trains to Buffalo.
Down to Cleveland the next morning, then back up to Gary, Indiana, and over to
Davenport, Iowa, where we would pick up the Rock Island Line and get off at Kansas
City. From there, we could take a stagecoach to Dodge, if there was no local passenger
line. (I knew that Dodge owed its existence to a freight line, laid down originally for the
buffalo hunters, and then used for cattle.)
Daniel drew a careful map, with times. I talked about how fun it would be to see
Niagara Falls and the Mississippi, which confused him for a moment. "But aren't we just
trying to keep Father from catching us?" I told him we could do two things at once, and
resolved to be as frank with him as possible.
That frankness never extended to the incident that had precipitated our flight. We
never referred to it directly for many years. In fact, my only diary reference about it, my
final diary entry of many thousand in Philadelphia, was Edward has done the
unspeakable. We learn tomorrow, come what may. God protect us.
Jersey City Station was crowded and noisy but agreeably free of smoke and
cinders. They "coasted" the trains in, without power, which was quiet and eerie until the
shriek of brakes.
I booked us on the four o'clock, declining to have our luggage checked through, in
case we had to change plans quickly. Then I sat with our things and sent Daniel off with
a dollar to buy some fruit and something to read. He came back with two apples and a
number of magazines of a type Edward did not allow in the house— story papers like
Saturday Night and The Argosy. (I used to get that one almost every week when Daniel
was younger, back when it was The Golden Argosy. But now it was hardly a magazine
for children.) He also had a couple of dime novels that I supposed qualified as "research"
for our ultimate destination.
(I had recently read about Dodge City and knew that it was no longer so wild and
wooly as it had been in the seventies—"the Beautiful Bibulous Babylon of the
Frontier"—because the cattle drives that had provided the town with all those rowdy
cowboys were long a thing of the past. I was less worried about gunfights than about
finding a job.)
I had picked a corner to wait in where I would be inconspicuous, partially hidden
by a row of potted ferns, but where I could command a view of most of the waiting room.
It was just possible that Edward might have taken the next train, or contacted some agent,
though I wasn't sure what to look for in that case. Some sort of Pinkerton man,
scrutinizing faces.
We got aboard the train without incident, though the porter was grouchy about
accommodating our "rather large" trunks to the "rather small" Pullman room. In fact it
was no real problem— Daniel was so excited about his magazines that he could have
read them standing up, so having to sit on the trunk was no burden.
I got little enough reading done myself, since Daniel had to read out to me every
stirring passage about Dodge City. I could have listened to him babbling on about
anything, though, forever, so full of pity and love I was and so relieved at our escape.
We had an adequate meal of roast chicken in the dining car, seated with two
traveling men who extolled the virtues of their lines of shoes and bicycles. The bicycle
man was actually interesting, and on my request repaired back to his seat to fetch me a
brochure.
Daniel had grown through two bicycles in Philadelphia, the large-wheeled penny-
farthings that nowadays you only see in museums and parades. The "safety" bicycles this
man was promoting looked much more practical, and he assured us they were much
simpler to ride—the difference between riding a horse and being drawn in a carriage.