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From Daggett, a forsaken station of the Santa Fé Railroad, a "jerkwater" road, as it is called, extends northward to Goldfield and Tonopah, and this road takes one almost as the crow flies to the edge of the valley of the ominous name. Even in a Pullman coach the trip is trying to both body and soul. But forty years ago? well, that is a different story.
But there can't be the usual rush very well 'cause there ain't enough water. We'll have to locate the tanks and keep a guard there; we'll have to pull off a franchise for our little jerkwater railroad. "We got to build a wagon road to Mohawk, set six-horse teams to hauling water, and other teams to hauling water to stations along the road for the teams that haul water for us.
By obtaining control of a certain up-country bank, two general stores, and several logging camps, he could come into control of a certain dinky jerkwater line which shall here be nameless, but which, in his hands, would prove the key to a vastly larger situation involving more main-line mileage almost than there were spikes in the aforesaid dinky jerkwater.
On the following Saturday, all with even-handed liberality, he took Miss Weyland to another baseball game, with the same delightful purpose. The spring found West stronger and more contented with his lot as president of a jerkwater college, decidedly happier for the burning out of the fires of hot ambition which had consumed his soul six months earlier.
He would not talk to me in Latin nor throw off technical phrases about great nothings, and I would feel just as much at home with him as I did with Ol' John Burroughs the last time I saw him, leaning up against a country railroad-station in shirt-sleeves, chewing a straw, exchanging salutes with the engineer on a West Shore jerkwater.
"Miss Wharton is no more fitted for the position of dean at Overton College than I am for the presidency of the United States. She may have been successful in some little, out-of-the-way academy in a jerkwater town, but she's sadly out of place here. She has about as much tact as a rhinoceros, and possesses the æsthetic perceptions of a coal shoveler.
Mr. Scobell relighted his cigar. "Well, I'm in that line. I'm going to put this island on the map just like old Doctor Blonk put Monte Carlo. I've been studying up all about the old man, and I know just what he did and how he did it. Monte Carlo was just such another jerkwater little place as this is before he hit it.
Milt was tactfully beginning to refuse when Gene Gilson at last exploded, turned purple, covered his dripping, too-red lips with his handkerchief. Then, abruptly, Milt hurled at Mrs. Gilson, "All right. We'll come. Bill'll be awfully funny. He's never been out of a jerkwater burg in his life, hardly. He's an amusing cuss. He thinks I'm smart! He loves me like a dog. Oh, he's rich! Ha, ha, ha!"
Mr. Richard Bartholomew was just that a "big-little man." In the railroad world, both in construction and management, he had made an enviable name for himself. He had actually built up the Hendrickton and Pas Alos from a narrow-gauge, "jerkwater" road into a part of a great cross-continent system that tapped a wonderfully rich territory on both sides of the Pas Alos Range.
But for the most part the crowd generated its own excitement through its great numbers and consequent rivalry, as it entered the dark streets with their glaring lights, the mad confusion of shouting and band playing. They came from Chicago and jerkwater towns in Nebraska, from farms and steel mills, from the stage and the pulpit.
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