So, as the Overland Limited rushed across the prairie states, Brainard took counsel with himself, mentally sketching out his every move from the moment when he should step from the train. The readiness with which his mind reached out to this new situation surprised himself; he was already becoming in some way a new person.

The journey itself was a revelation to him and an education. With his Broadway prejudice that the United States stopped somewhere just above the Bronx and behind the Jersey hills, he was astonished to find so much habitable country beyond these horizons and so many people in it who did not seem to depend upon New York City for their livelihood or happiness. At first he was so much preoccupied with his errand and himself in his surprising new rôle that he paid little attention to the scenes spread before his eyes. Chicago impressed him only as a dirtier and more provincial New York. But the next morning when he awoke at Omaha he began to realize that America was more than a strip of land along the Atlantic seaboard, and by the time the train had left Ogden his respect for his fatherland had immensely increased.

He noticed also that the character of the people p. 29on the train was gradually changing. Large, rough-looking men, with tanned faces not too carefully shaved, and sometimes with a queer assortment of jewelry and patent leather shoes took the places of the pallid, smooth shaven business men that had been his companions from Jersey City to Chicago. There were also a number of women traveling alone, large, competent, and not overrefined. Brainard, whose ideas of Americans other than the types to be seen on the streets of New York had been drawn from the travestied figures of the stage,—the miner and the cowboy with flapping sombrero and chaps,—watched these new specimens of his fellow countrymen with keen interest. In spite of their rather uncouth speech and their familiarity with the negro porters, they were attractive. They had a vigorous air about them, indicating that they came from a big country, with big ways of doing things in it, and a broad outlook over wide horizons. The would-be dramatist began to perceive that the world was not peopled wholly by the types that the American stage had made familiar to him.

p. 29

A little way beyond Ogden the train rolled out into the bright blue inland sea of the Great Salt Lake and trundled on for mile after mile in the midst of the water on a narrow strip of rocky roadbed. Brainard had read in the newspapers p. 30of this famous “Lucin cut-off” where in an effort to save a detour of a few 

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