"'Tain't hardly been on the tracks, remember," he cried, "but think of the miles and miles it has to run, through what different kinds of country. It'll be like a good soldier followin' the leader! But the engine! Oh, that's the master of 'em all!" he continued; "great, shinin', pantin' master, that's what the engine is, the master."
Rachel looked at the car as at a traveller who is about to start on a long journey. Once she had seen the wife of the owner with a party of friends, and she began filling the seats of the new coach with these people. Oh, the ladies, the softly-turned heads; the nicely-dressed children--no common folk were to ride in this car! And she imagined how they would be carried forward, the rolling of the wheels growing ever swifter and swifter; and then how they would arrive at that spot, glimmering with a million lights, tumultuous and confused, the city containing great homes.
On the drive back to the Point, she closed her eyes the better to pursue her thoughts, and her grandfather's words mingled with them like something heard in a dream.
"Sometimes, not often, I used to paint station signs," he said, "and after I'd finished the name of a place--maybe it was Kingston, or maybe it was only Smithville,--I used to think how the sign would be hung at the end of a long platform or perhaps jest posted against a little shed of a buildin' in the midst of a great prairie, and I used to think of the rain and the snow that'd blow against it, and most blot out the letters, and the little birds that would perch on it; and somehow I felt as if I had been to the places jest through paintin' of the signs."
Rachel pictured the earth webbed with tracks like veins, and she saw the ships following certain appointed routes over seas; and again, as in the past, it appeared to her that she was the one stagnant thing in an active creation.
"But the signs I liked to paint best," resumed her grandfather's tremulous voice, "were the _Stop-Look-Listen_ signs, and the _Railroad-Crossin'--Look Out For The Engine_. They are made of cast steel now and the letters are raised, but in my time they was of wood, tall white posts with a pointin' arm, like ghosts givin' warnin'."
It seemed to the girl that at all costs she must set herself free and become a part of a moving and active world. But how transgress the law that had placed her there on the Maine coast, without experience and without outlet for all the various capacities of her being? From that time she began to coax her grandfather to leave Pemoquod.