Читать книгу Life of an American Workman онлайн

17 страница из 56

I was a great marble player; in a time when marbles and spinning tops were the only games common to men of Ellis and the other towns along the railroad, I was the local champion. There were several of us boys who practiced from the schoolyard games, had skill enough to hold our own and more in the big game. Where the men played was close to the stone buildings of the railroad, within the sound of its chattering telegraph instruments in the train dispatcher's office. A cinder surface there, hard packed by many feet to a smooth blackness, was the rendezvous of idling trainmen; engineers, conductors, firemen, brakemen and others gathered there before the start and at the end of all their runs. Occasionally, there was to be found in that assemblage some cowboy, a farmer, or even a soldier from Fort Hays. Scratched upon the ground we'd have a twenty-foot circle, and into the middle of this were massed twenty marbles from every player. Often there were a dozen of us playing, while other dozens watched us shoot.