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"Of course, by and by the country settled up a little more but even then nobody ever thought of timber. You see, there was no market to amount to anything out here; and a few little jerk-water mills could supply the whole layout easy. East, the lumber in Michigan and Wisconsin and Minnesota never was going to give out. In those days you could hardly give away land up in this country.
But so far nothing but failures seem to have rewarded my search—no, I’m wrong, there is one man out west—out in the little jerk-water town of Grave Stone, who insists that there is a wild man living in a lonely, almost inaccessible valley in the mountains, who shoots a gun which looks like the one for which I am searching.
Something in the steady, business-like tone, or in the shrewdly appraisive eyes, turned Bradford the potential mutineer into Bradford the possible partisan. "I reckon we are needing a rodeo over here on this jerk-water mighty bad, Mr. Lidgerwood," he said, half humorously. "Take us coming and going, about half of us never had the sure-enough railroad brand put onto us, nohow.
"Oh, well," thought the culprit, savagely, "as I walk I can plan newer and newer things. I'll go into the Army, and you, Prescott, may become a freight clerk on a jerk-water railroad." Unknown to either Jordan or Prescott at that moment, other storm-clouds were gathering swiftly over the head of the popular young cadet captain.
It looked dead, deserted, a typical river town, unprodded even by the hoot of a jerk-water railroad. As the launch chortled toward the wharf, Peter Siner stood trying to orient himself to this unexpected and amazing minifying of Hooker's Bend. He had left a metropolis; he was coming back to a tumble-down village. Yet nothing was changed.
Go forward and tell your engineer to speed up and get out of the way." "I got my clearance at the summit, and I ain't despatchin' trains on this jerk-water railroad," observed the conductor coolly. Then he added, with a shade less of the belligerent disinterest: "Williams can't speed up. That housin' under the tender is about ready to blaze up and set the woods afire again, right now."
A very brief experience in a regiment that had a gruff old quartermaster would take that tuck out of that Beau Brummell, in short order. Sometimes I have been, at a late hour on a stormy night, at a way-station on some "jerk-water" railroad, waiting for a belated train, with others in the same predicament.
He recalled shudderingly brother engineers whose wives dragged about with them, living on the edge of construction camps under canvas in summer, in rough-boarded, tar-papered shacks in the winter; or perhaps in half-furnished cottages in some nearby jerk-water town. He had pitied the men, fought shy of the women.
"Some little jerk-water builder puts up a six-penny cement culvert down East and gets half a column. There ain't enough newspapers in the East to do justice to my trestle." He was as frank in his self-appreciation as in his passions. Now, so far as Big Jim Torrance was concerned, there was not an obstacle in the line from Montreal to the Pacific.
"Another one of the boys a big, strong, good-natured comrade until then a stranger to me and myself were the only ones left at the little depot when the jerk-water train pulled away. It was the first trip to this town for both of us. There was no 'bus at the depot and we did not know just how to get up to the hotel.
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