PART I._The Song of the Lark

III

VII

VIII

XII

XIII

XIV

XVI

XVII

XVIII

XIX

PART II. THE SONG OF THE LARK

III

VII

VIII

PART III. STUPID FACES

III

PART IV. THE ANCIENT PEOPLE

III

VII

VIII

PART V. DR. ARCHIE’S VENTURE

III

PART VI. KRONBORG

III

VII

VIII

EPILOGUE

PART I.

FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD

Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish

clothier and two traveling men who happened to be staying overnight in

Moonstone. His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug store.

Larry, the doctor’s man, had lit the overhead light in the waiting-room

and the double student’s lamp on the desk in the study. The isinglass

sides of the hard-coal burner were aglow, and the air in the study was

so hot that as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little

operating-room, where there was no stove. The waiting room was carpeted

and stiffly furnished, something like a country parlor. The study had

worn, unpainted floors, but there was a look of winter comfort about

it. The doctor’s flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were

in orderly piles, under glass weights. Behind the stove a wide

bookcase, with double glass doors, reached from the floor to the

ceiling. It was filled with medical books of every thickness and color.

On the top shelf stood a long row of thirty or forty volumes, bound all

alike in dark mottled board covers, with imitation leather backs.

As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially old, so the

doctor in small Colorado towns twenty-five years ago was generally

young. Dr. Archie was barely thirty. He was tall, with massive

shoulders which he held stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head. He was

a distinguished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.

There was something individual in the way in which his reddish-brown

hair, parted cleanly at the side, bushed over his high forehead. His

nose was straight and thick, and his eyes were intelligent. He wore a

curly, reddish mustache and an imperial, cut trimly, which made him

look a little like the pictures of Napoleon III. His hands were large

and well kept, but ruggedly formed, and the backs were shaded with

crinkly reddish hair. He wore a blue suit of woolly, wide-waled serge;

the traveling men had known at a glance that it was made by a Denver

tailor. The doctor was always well dressed.

Dr. Archie turned up the student’s lamp and sat down in the swivel

chair before his desk. He sat uneasily, beating a tattoo on his knees

with his fingers, and looked about him as if he were bored. He glanced

at his watch, then absently took from his pocket a bunch of small keys,

selected one and looked at it. A contemptuous smile, barely

perceptible, played on his lips, but his eyes remained meditative.

Behind the door that led into the hall, under his buffalo-skin

driving-coat, was a locked cupboard. This the doctor opened

mechanically, kicking aside a pile of muddy overshoes. Inside, on the

shelves, were whiskey glasses and decanters, lemons, sugar, and

bitters. Hearing a step in the empty, echoing hall without, the doctor

closed the cupboard again, snapping the Yale lock. The door of the

waiting-room opened, a man entered and came on into the

consulting-room.

“Good-evening, Mr. Kronborg,” said the doctor carelessly. “Sit down.”

His visitor was a tall, loosely built man, with a thin brown beard,

streaked with gray. He wore a frock coat, a broad-brimmed black hat, a

white lawn necktie, and steel rimmed spectacles. Altogether there was a

pretentious and important air about him, as he lifted the skirts of his

coat and sat down.

“Good-evening, doctor. Can you step around to the house with me? I

think Mrs. Kronborg will need you this evening.” This was said with

profound gravity and, curiously enough, with a slight embarrassment.

“Any hurry?” the doctor asked over his shoulder as he went into his

operating-room.

Mr. Kronborg coughed behind his hand, and contracted his brows. His

face threatened at every moment to break into a smile of foolish

excitement. He controlled it only by calling upon his habitual pulpit

manner. “Well, I think it would be as well to go immediately. Mrs.

Kronborg will be more comfortable if you are there. She has been

suffering for some time.”

The doctor came back and threw a black bag upon his desk. He wrote some

instructions for his man on a prescription pad and then drew on his

overcoat. “All ready,” he announced, putting out his lamp. Mr. Kronborg

rose and they tramped through the empty hall and down the stairway to

the street. The drug store below was dark, and the saloon next door was

just closing. Every other light on Main Street was out.

On either side of the road and at the outer edge of the board sidewalk,

the snow had been shoveled into breastworks. The town looked small and

black, flattened down in the snow, muffled and all but extinguished.

Overhead the stars shone gloriously. It was impossible not to notice

them. The air was so clear that the white sand hills to the east of

Moonstone gleamed softly. Following the Reverend Mr. Kronborg along the

narrow walk, past the little dark, sleeping houses, the doctor looked

up at the flashing night and whistled softly. It did seem that people

were stupider than they need be; as if on a night like this there ought

to be something better to do than to sleep nine hours, or to assist

Mrs. Kronborg in functions which she could have performed so admirably

unaided. He wished he had gone down to Denver to hear Fay Templeton

sing “See-Saw.” Then he remembered that he had a personal interest in

this family, after all. They turned into another street and saw before

them lighted windows; a low story-and-a-half house, with a wing built

on at the right and a kitchen addition at the back, everything a little

on the slant—roofs, windows, and doors. As they approached the gate,

Peter Kronborg’s pace grew brisker. His nervous, ministerial cough

annoyed the doctor. “Exactly as if he were going to give out a text,”

he thought. He drew off his glove and felt in his vest pocket. “Have a

troche, Kronborg,” he said, producing some. “Sent me for samples. Very

good for a rough throat.”

“Ah, thank you, thank you. I was in something of a hurry. I neglected

to put on my overshoes. Here we are, doctor.” Kronborg opened his front

door—seemed delighted to be at home again.

The front hall was dark and cold; the hatrack was hung with an

astonishing number of children’s hats and caps and cloaks. They were

even piled on the table beneath the hatrack. Under the table was a heap

of rubbers and overshoes. While the doctor hung up his coat and hat,

Peter Kronborg opened the door into the living-room. A glare of light

greeted them, and a rush of hot, stale air, smelling of warming

flannels.

At three o’clock in the morning Dr. Archie was in the parlor putting on

his cuffs and coat—there was no spare bedroom in that house. Peter

Kronborg’s seventh child, a boy, was being soothed and cosseted by his

aunt, Mrs. Kronborg was asleep, and the doctor was going home. But he

wanted first to speak to Kronborg, who, coatless and fluttery, was

pouring coal into the kitchen stove. As the doctor crossed the

dining-room he paused and listened. From one of the wing rooms, off to

the left, he heard rapid, distressed breathing. He went to the kitchen

door.

“One of the children sick in there?” he asked, nodding toward the

partition.

Kronborg hung up the stove-lifter and dusted his fingers. “It must be

Thea. I meant to ask you to look at her. She has a croupy cold. But in

my excitement—Mrs. Kronborg is doing finely, eh, doctor? Not many of

your patients with such a constitution, I expect.”

“Oh, yes. She’s a fine mother.” The doctor took up the lamp from the

kitchen table and unceremoniously went into the wing room. Two chubby

little boys were asleep in a double bed, with the coverlids over their

noses and their feet drawn up. In a single bed, next to theirs, lay a

little girl of eleven, wide awake, two yellow braids sticking up on the

pillow behind her. Her face was scarlet and her eyes were blazing.

The doctor shut the door behind him. “Feel pretty sick, Thea?” he asked

as he took out his thermometer. “Why didn’t you call somebody?”

She looked at him with greedy affection. “I thought you were here,” she

spoke between quick breaths. “There is a new baby, isn’t there? Which?”

“Which?” repeated the doctor.

“Brother or sister?”

He smiled and sat down on the edge of the bed. “Brother,” he said,

taking her hand. “Open.”

“Good. Brothers are better,” she murmured as he put the glass tube

under her tongue.

“Now, be still, I want to count.” Dr. Archie reached for her hand and

took out his watch. When he put her hand back under the quilt he went

over to one of the windows—they were both tight shut—and lifted it a

little way. He reached up and ran his hand along the cold, unpapered

wall. “Keep under the covers; I’ll come back to you in a moment,” he

said, bending over the glass lamp with his thermometer. He winked at

her from the door before he shut it.

Peter Kronborg was sitting in his wife’s room, holding the bundle which

contained his son. His air of cheerful importance, his beard and

glasses, even his shirt-sleeves, annoyed the doctor. He beckoned

Kronborg into the living-room and said sternly:—

“You’ve got a very sick child in there. Why didn’t you call me before?

It’s pneumonia, and she must have been sick for several days. Put the

baby down somewhere, please, and help me make up the bed-lounge here in

the parlor. She’s got to be in a warm room, and she’s got to be quiet.

You must keep the other children out. Here, this thing opens up, I

see,” swinging back the top of the carpet lounge. “We can lift her

mattress and carry her in just as she is. I don’t want to disturb her

more than is necessary.”

Kronborg was all concern immediately. The two men took up the mattress

and carried the sick child into the parlor. “I’ll have to go down to my

office to get some medicine, Kronborg. The drug store won’t be open.

Keep the covers on her. I won’t be gone long. Shake down the stove and

put on a little coal, but not too much; so it’ll catch quickly, I mean.

Find an old sheet for me, and put it there to warm.”

The doctor caught his coat and hurried out into the dark street. Nobody

was stirring yet, and the cold was bitter. He was tired and hungry and

in no mild humor. “The idea!” he muttered; “to be such an ass at his

age, about the seventh! And to feel no responsibility about the little

girl. Silly old goat! The baby would have got into the world somehow;

they always do. But a nice little girl like that—she’s worth the whole

litter. Where she ever got it from—” He turned into the Duke Block and

ran up the stairs to his office.

Thea Kronborg, meanwhile, was wondering why she happened to be in the

parlor, where nobody but company—usually visiting preachers—ever slept.

She had moments of stupor when she did not see anything, and moments of

excitement when she felt that something unusual and pleasant was about

to happen, when she saw everything clearly in the red light from the

isinglass sides of the hard-coal burner—the nickel trimmings on the

stove itself, the pictures on the wall, which she thought very

beautiful, the flowers on the Brussels carpet, Czerny’s “Daily Studies”

which stood open on the upright piano. She forgot, for the time being,

all about the new baby.

When she heard the front door open, it occurred to her that the

pleasant thing which was going to happen was Dr. Archie himself. He

came in and warmed his hands at the stove. As he turned to her, she

threw herself wearily toward him, half out of her bed. She would have

tumbled to the floor had he not caught her. He gave her some medicine

and went to the kitchen for something he needed. She drowsed and lost

the sense of his being there. When she opened her eyes again, he was

kneeling before the stove, spreading something dark and sticky on a

white cloth, with a big spoon; batter, perhaps. Presently she felt him

taking off her nightgown. He wrapped the hot plaster about her chest.

There seemed to be straps which he pinned over her shoulders. Then he

took out a thread and needle and began to sew her up in it. That, she

felt, was too strange; she must be dreaming anyhow, so she succumbed to

her drowsiness.

Thea had been moaning with every breath since the doctor came back, but

she did not know it. She did not realize that she was suffering pain.

When she was conscious at all, she seemed to be separated from her

body; to be perched on top of the piano, or on the hanging lamp,

watching the doctor sew her up. It was perplexing and unsatisfactory,

like dreaming. She wished she could waken up and see what was going on.

The doctor thanked God that he had persuaded Peter Kronborg to keep out

of the way. He could do better by the child if he had her to himself.

He had no children of his own. His marriage was a very unhappy one. As

he lifted and undressed Thea, he thought to himself what a beautiful

thing a little girl’s body was,—like a flower. It was so neatly and

delicately fashioned, so soft, and so milky white. Thea must have got

her hair and her silky skin from her mother. She was a little Swede,

through and through. Dr. Archie could not help thinking how he would

cherish a little creature like this if she were his. Her hands, so

little and hot, so clever, too,—he glanced at the open exercise book on

the piano. When he had stitched up the flaxseed jacket, he wiped it

neatly about the edges, where the paste had worked out on the skin. He

put on her the clean nightgown he had warmed before the fire, and

tucked the blankets about her. As he pushed back the hair that had

fuzzed down over her eyebrows, he felt her head thoughtfully with the

tips of his fingers. No, he couldn’t say that it was different from any

other child’s head, though he believed that there was something very

different about her. He looked intently at her wide, flushed face,

freckled nose, fierce little mouth, and her delicate, tender chin—the

one soft touch in her hard little Scandinavian face, as if some fairy

godmother had caressed her there and left a cryptic promise. Her brows

were usually drawn together defiantly, but never when she was with Dr.

Archie. Her affection for him was prettier than most of the things that

went to make up the doctor’s life in Moonstone.

The windows grew gray. He heard a tramping on the attic floor, on the

back stairs, then cries: “Give me my shirt!” “Where’s my other

stocking?”

“I’ll have to stay till they get off to school,” he reflected, “or

they’ll be in here tormenting her, the whole lot of them.”

For the next four days it seemed to Dr. Archie that his patient might

slip through his hands, do what he might. But she did not. On the

contrary, after that she recovered very rapidly. As her father

remarked, she must have inherited the “constitution” which he was never

tired of admiring in her mother.

One afternoon, when her new brother was a week old, the doctor found

Thea very comfortable and happy in her bed in the parlor. The sunlight

was pouring in over her shoulders, the baby was asleep on a pillow in a

big rocking-chair beside her. Whenever he stirred, she put out her hand

and rocked him. Nothing of him was visible but a flushed, puffy

forehead and an uncompromisingly big, bald cranium. The door into her

mother’s room stood open, and Mrs. Kronborg was sitting up in bed

darning stockings. She was a short, stalwart woman, with a short neck

and a determined-looking head. Her skin was very fair, her face calm

and unwrinkled, and her yellow hair, braided down her back as she lay

in bed, still looked like a girl’s. She was a woman whom Dr. Archie

respected; active, practical, unruffled; goodhumored, but determined.

Exactly the sort of woman to take care of a flighty preacher. She had

brought her husband some property, too,—one fourth of her father’s

broad acres in Nebraska,—but this she kept in her own name. She had

profound respect for her husband’s erudition and eloquence. She sat

under his preaching with deep humility, and was as much taken in by his

stiff shirt and white neckties as if she had not ironed them herself by

lamplight the night before they appeared correct and spotless in the

pulpit. But for all this, she had no confidence in his administration

of worldly affairs. She looked to him for morning prayers and grace at

table; she expected him to name the babies and to supply whatever

parental sentiment there was in the house, to remember birthdays and

anniversaries, to point the children to moral and patriotic ideals. It

was her work to keep their bodies, their clothes, and their conduct in

some sort of order, and this she accomplished with a success that was a

source of wonder to her neighbors. As she used to remark, and her

husband admiringly to echo, she “had never lost one.” With all his

flightiness, Peter Kronborg appreciated the matter-of-fact, punctual

way in which his wife got her children into the world and along in it.

He believed, and he was right in believing, that the sovereign State of

Colorado was much indebted to Mrs. Kronborg and women like her.

Mrs. Kronborg believed that the size of every family was decided in

heaven. More modern views would not have startled her; they would

simply have seemed foolish—thin chatter, like the boasts of the men who

built the tower of Babel, or like Axel’s plan to breed ostriches in the

chicken yard. From what evidence Mrs. Kronborg formed her opinions on

this and other matters, it would have been difficult to say, but once

formed, they were unchangeable. She would no more have questioned her

convictions than she would have questioned revelation. Calm and even

tempered, naturally kind, she was capable of strong prejudices, and she

never forgave.

When the doctor came in to see Thea, Mrs. Kronborg was reflecting that

the washing was a week behind, and deciding what she had better do

about it. The arrival of a new baby meant a revision of her entire

domestic schedule, and as she drove her needle along she had been

working out new sleeping arrangements and cleaning days. The doctor had

entered the house without knocking, after making noise enough in the

hall to prepare his patients. Thea was reading, her book propped up

before her in the sunlight.

“Mustn’t do that; bad for your eyes,” he said, as Thea shut the book

quickly and slipped it under the covers.

Mrs. Kronborg called from her bed: “Bring the baby here, doctor, and

have that chair. She wanted him in there for company.”

Before the doctor picked up the baby, he put a yellow paper bag down on

Thea’s coverlid and winked at her. They had a code of winks and

grimaces. When he went in to chat with her mother, Thea opened the bag

cautiously, trying to keep it from crackling. She drew out a long bunch

of white grapes, with a little of the sawdust in which they had been

packed still clinging to them. They were called Malaga grapes in

Moonstone, and once or twice during the winter the leading grocer got a

keg of them. They were used mainly for table decoration, about

Christmas-time. Thea had never had more than one grape at a time

before. When the doctor came back she was holding the almost

transparent fruit up in the sunlight, feeling the pale-green skins

softly with the tips of her fingers. She did not thank him; she only

snapped her eyes at him in a special way which he understood, and, when

he gave her his hand, put it quickly and shyly under her cheek, as if

she were trying to do so without knowing it—and without his knowing it.

Dr. Archie sat down in the rocking-chair. “And how’s Thea feeling

to-day?”

He was quite as shy as his patient, especially when a third person

overheard his conversation. Big and handsome and superior to his fellow

townsmen as Dr. Archie was, he was seldom at his ease, and like Peter

Kronborg he often dodged behind a professional manner. There was

sometimes a contraction of embarrassment and self consciousness all

over his big body, which made him awkward—likely to stumble, to kick up

rugs, or to knock over chairs. If any one was very sick, he forgot

himself, but he had a clumsy touch in convalescent gossip.

Thea curled up on her side and looked at him with pleasure. “All right.

I like to be sick. I have more fun then than other times.”

“How’s that?”

“I don’t have to go to school, and I don’t have to practice. I can read

all I want to, and have good things,”—she patted the grapes. “I had

lots of fun that time I mashed my finger and you wouldn’t let Professor

Wunsch make me practice. Only I had to do left hand, even then. I think

that was mean.”

The doctor took her hand and examined the forefinger, where the nail

had grown back a little crooked. “You mustn’t trim it down close at the

corner there, and then it will grow straight. You won’t want it crooked

when you’re a big girl and wear rings and have sweethearts.”

She made a mocking little face at him and looked at his new scarf-pin.

“That’s the prettiest one you ev-ER had. I wish you’d stay a long while

and let me look at it. What is it?”

Dr. Archie laughed. “It’s an opal. Spanish Johnny brought it up for me

from Chihuahua in his shoe. I had it set in Denver, and I wore it

to-day for your benefit.”

Thea had a curious passion for jewelry. She wanted every shining stone

she saw, and in summer she was always going off into the sand hills to

hunt for crystals and agates and bits of pink chalcedony. She had two

cigar boxes full of stones that she had found or traded for, and she

imagined that they were of enormous value. She was always planning how

she would have them set.

“What are you reading?” The doctor reached under the covers and pulled

out a book of Byron’s poems. “Do you like this?”

She looked confused, turned over a few pages rapidly, and pointed to

“My native land, good-night.” “That,” she said sheepishly.

“How about ‘Maid of Athens’?”

She blushed and looked at him suspiciously. “I like ‘There was a sound

of revelry,’” she muttered.

The doctor laughed and closed the book. It was clumsily bound in padded

leather and had been presented to the Reverend Peter Kronborg by his

Sunday-School class as an ornament for his parlor table.

“Come into the office some day, and I’ll lend you a nice book. You can

skip the parts you don’t understand. You can read it in vacation.

Perhaps you’ll be able to understand all of it by then.”

Thea frowned and looked fretfully toward the piano. “In vacation I have

to practice four hours every day, and then there’ll be Thor to take

care of.” She pronounced it “Tor.”

“Thor? Oh, you’ve named the baby Thor?” exclaimed the doctor.

Thea frowned again, still more fiercely, and said quickly, “That’s a

nice name, only maybe it’s a little—old fashioned.” She was very

sensitive about being thought a foreigner, and was proud of the fact

that, in town, her father always preached in English; very bookish

English, at that, one might add.

Born in an old Scandinavian colony in Minnesota, Peter Kronborg had

been sent to a small divinity school in Indiana by the women of a

Swedish evangelical mission, who were convinced of his gifts and who

skimped and begged and gave church suppers to get the long, lazy youth

through the seminary. He could still speak enough Swedish to exhort and

to bury the members of his country church out at Copper Hole, and he

wielded in his Moonstone pulpit a somewhat pompous English vocabulary

he had learned out of books at college. He always spoke of “the infant

Saviour,” “our Heavenly Father,” etc. The poor man had no natural,

spontaneous human speech. If he had his sincere moments, they were

perforce inarticulate. Probably a good deal of his pretentiousness was

due to the fact that he habitually expressed himself in a book learned

language, wholly remote from anything personal, native, or homely. Mrs.

Kronborg spoke Swedish to her own sisters and to her sister-in-law

Tillie, and colloquial English to her neighbors. Thea, who had a rather

sensitive ear, until she went to school never spoke at all, except in

monosyllables, and her mother was convinced that she was tongue-tied.

She was still inept in speech for a child so intelligent. Her ideas

were usually clear, but she seldom attempted to explain them, even at

school, where she excelled in “written work” and never did more than

mutter a reply.

“Your music professor stopped me on the street to-day and asked me how

you were,” said the doctor, rising. “He’ll be sick himself, trotting

around in this slush with no overcoat or overshoes.”

“He’s poor,” said Thea simply.

The doctor sighed. “I’m afraid he’s worse than that. Is he always all

right when you take your lessons? Never acts as if he’d been drinking?”

Thea looked angry and spoke excitedly. “He knows a lot. More than

anybody. I don’t care if he does drink; he’s old and poor.” Her voice

shook a little.

Mrs. Kronborg spoke up from the next room. “He’s a good teacher,

doctor. It’s good for us he does drink. He’d never be in a little place

like this if he didn’t have some weakness. These women that teach music

around here don’t know nothing. I wouldn’t have my child wasting time

with them. If Professor Wunsch goes away, Thea’ll have nobody to take

from. He’s careful with his scholars; he don’t use bad language. Mrs.

Kohler is always present when Thea takes her lesson. It’s all right.”

Mrs. Kronborg spoke calmly and judicially. One could see that she had

thought the matter out before.

“I’m glad to hear that, Mrs. Kronborg. I wish we could get the old man

off his bottle and keep him tidy. Do you suppose if I gave you an old

overcoat you could get him to wear it?” The doctor went to the bedroom

door and Mrs. Kronborg looked up from her darning.

“Why, yes, I guess he’d be glad of it. He’ll take most anything from

me. He won’t buy clothes, but I guess he’d wear ’em if he had ’em. I’ve

never had any clothes to give him, having so many to make over for.”

“I’ll have Larry bring the coat around to-night. You aren’t cross with

me, Thea?” taking her hand.

Thea grinned warmly. “Not if you give Professor Wunsch a coat—and

things,” she tapped the grapes significantly. The doctor bent over and

kissed her.

III

Being sick was all very well, but Thea knew from experience that

starting back to school again was attended by depressing difficulties.

One Monday morning she got up early with Axel and Gunner, who shared

her wing room, and hurried into the back living-room, between the

dining-room and the kitchen. There, beside a soft-coal stove, the

younger children of the family undressed at night and dressed in the

morning. The older daughter, Anna, and the two big boys slept upstairs,

where the rooms were theoretically warmed by stovepipes from below. The

first (and the worst!) thing that confronted Thea was a suit of clean,

prickly red flannel, fresh from the wash. Usually the torment of

breaking in a clean suit of flannel came on Sunday, but yesterday, as

she was staying in the house, she had begged off. Their winter

underwear was a trial to all the children, but it was bitterest to Thea

because she happened to have the most sensitive skin. While she was

tugging it on, her Aunt Tillie brought in warm water from the boiler

and filled the tin pitcher. Thea washed her face, brushed and braided

her hair, and got into her blue cashmere dress. Over this she buttoned

a long apron, with sleeves, which would not be removed until she put on

her cloak to go to school. Gunner and Axel, on the soap box behind the

stove, had their usual quarrel about which should wear the tightest

stockings, but they exchanged reproaches in low tones, for they were

wholesomely afraid of Mrs. Kronborg’s rawhide whip. She did not

chastise her children often, but she did it thoroughly. Only a somewhat

stern system of discipline could have kept any degree of order and

quiet in that overcrowded house.

Mrs. Kronborg’s children were all trained to dress themselves at the

earliest possible age, to make their own beds,—the boys as well as the

girls,—to take care of their clothes, to eat what was given them, and

to keep out of the way. Mrs. Kronborg would have made a good chess

player; she had a head for moves and positions.

Anna, the elder daughter, was her mother’s lieutenant. All the children

knew that they must obey Anna, who was an obstinate contender for

proprieties and not always fair minded. To see the young Kronborgs

headed for Sunday School was like watching a military drill. Mrs.

Kronborg let her children’s minds alone. She did not pry into their

thoughts or nag them. She respected them as individuals, and outside of

the house they had a great deal of liberty. But their communal life was

definitely ordered.

In the winter the children breakfasted in the kitchen; Gus and Charley

and Anna first, while the younger children were dressing. Gus was

nineteen and was a clerk in a dry-goods store. Charley, eighteen months

younger, worked in a feed store. They left the house by the kitchen

door at seven o’clock, and then Anna helped her Aunt Tillie get the

breakfast for the younger ones. Without the help of this sister-in-law,

Tillie Kronborg, Mrs. Kronborg’s life would have been a hard one. Mrs.

Kronborg often reminded Anna that “no hired help would ever have taken

the same interest.”

Mr. Kronborg came of a poorer stock than his wife; from a lowly,

ignorant family that had lived in a poor part of Sweden. His

great-grandfather had gone to Norway to work as a farm laborer and had

married a Norwegian girl. This strain of Norwegian blood came out

somewhere in each generation of the Kronborgs. The intemperance of one

of Peter Kronborg’s uncles, and the religious mania of another, had

been alike charged to the Norwegian grandmother. Both Peter Kronborg

and his sister Tillie were more like the Norwegian root of the family

than like the Swedish, and this same Norwegian strain was strong in

Thea, though in her it took a very different character.

Tillie was a queer, addle-pated thing, as flighty as a girl at

thirty-five, and overweeningly fond of gay clothes—which taste, as Mrs.

Kronborg philosophically said, did nobody any harm. Tillie was always

cheerful, and her tongue was still for scarcely a minute during the

day. She had been cruelly overworked on her father’s Minnesota farm

when she was a young girl, and she had never been so happy as she was

now; had never before, as she said, had such social advantages. She

thought her brother the most important man in Moonstone. She never

missed a church service, and, much to the embarrassment of the

children, she always “spoke a piece” at the Sunday-School concerts. She

had a complete set of “Standard Recitations,” which she conned on

Sundays. This morning, when Thea and her two younger brothers sat down

to breakfast, Tillie was remonstrating with Gunner because he had not

learned a recitation assigned to him for George Washington Day at

school. The unmemorized text lay heavily on Gunner’s conscience as he

attacked his buckwheat cakes and sausage. He knew that Tillie was in

the right, and that “when the day came he would be ashamed of himself.”

“I don’t care,” he muttered, stirring his coffee; “they oughtn’t to

make boys speak. It’s all right for girls. They like to show off.”

“No showing off about it. Boys ought to like to speak up for their

country. And what was the use of your father buying you a new suit, if

you’re not going to take part in anything?”

“That was for Sunday-School. I’d rather wear my old one, anyhow. Why

didn’t they give the piece to Thea?” Gunner grumbled.

Tillie was turning buckwheat cakes at the griddle. “Thea can play and

sing, she don’t need to speak. But you’ve got to know how to do

something, Gunner, that you have. What are you going to do when you git

big and want to git into society, if you can’t do nothing? Everybody’ll

say, ‘Can you sing? Can you play? Can you speak? Then git right out of

society.’ An’ that’s what they’ll say to you, Mr. Gunner.”

Gunner and Alex grinned at Anna, who was preparing her mother’s

breakfast. They never made fun of Tillie, but they understood well

enough that there were subjects upon which her ideas were rather

foolish. When Tillie struck the shallows, Thea was usually prompt in

turning the conversation.

“Will you and Axel let me have your sled at recess?” she asked.

“All the time?” asked Gunner dubiously.

“I’ll work your examples for you to-night, if you do.”

“Oh, all right. There’ll be a lot of ’em.”

“I don’t mind, I can work ’em fast. How about yours, Axel?”

Axel was a fat little boy of seven, with pretty, lazy blue eyes. “I

don’t care,” he murmured, buttering his last buckwheat cake without

ambition; “too much trouble to copy ’em down. Jenny Smiley’ll let me

have hers.”

The boys were to pull Thea to school on their sled, as the snow was

deep. The three set off together. Anna was now in the high school, and

she no longer went with the family party, but walked to school with

some of the older girls who were her friends, and wore a hat, not a

hood like Thea.

“And it was Summer, beautiful Summer!” Those were the closing words of

Thea’s favorite fairy tale, and she thought of them as she ran out into

the world one Saturday morning in May, her music book under her arm.

She was going to the Kohlers’ to take her lesson, but she was in no

hurry.

It was in the summer that one really lived. Then all the little

overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the wind blew through them

with sweet, earthy smells of garden-planting. The town looked as if it

had just been washed. People were out painting their fences. The

cottonwood trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves, and

the feathery tamarisks were in pink bud. With the warm weather came

freedom for everybody. People were dug up, as it were. The very old

people, whom one had not seen all winter, came out and sunned

themselves in the yard. The double windows were taken off the houses,

the tormenting flannels in which children had been encased all winter

were put away in boxes, and the youngsters felt a pleasure in the cool

cotton things next their skin.

Thea had to walk more than a mile to reach the Kohlers’ house, a very

pleasant mile out of town toward the glittering sand hills,—yellow this

morning, with lines of deep violet where the clefts and valleys were.

She followed the sidewalk to the depot at the south end of the town;

then took the road east to the little group of adobe houses where the

Mexicans lived, then dropped into a deep ravine; a dry sand creek,

across which the railroad track ran on a trestle. Beyond that gulch, on

a little rise of ground that faced the open sandy plain, was the

Kohlers’ house, where Professor Wunsch lived. Fritz Kohler was the town

tailor, one of the first settlers. He had moved there, built a little

house and made a garden, when Moonstone was first marked down on the

map. He had three sons, but they now worked on the railroad and were

stationed in distant cities. One of them had gone to work for the Santa

Fé, and lived in New Mexico.

Mrs. Kohler seldom crossed the ravine and went into the town except at

Christmas-time, when she had to buy presents and Christmas cards to

send to her old friends in Freeport, Illinois. As she did not go to

church, she did not possess such a thing as a hat. Year after year she

wore the same red hood in winter and a black sunbonnet in summer. She

made her own dresses; the skirts came barely to her shoe-tops, and were

gathered as full as they could possibly be to the waistband. She

preferred men’s shoes, and usually wore the cast-offs of one of her

sons. She had never learned much English, and her plants and shrubs

were her companions. She lived for her men and her garden. Beside that

sand gulch, she had tried to reproduce a bit of her own village in the

Rhine Valley. She hid herself behind the growth she had fostered, lived

under the shade of what she had planted and watered and pruned. In the

blaze of the open plain she was stupid and blind like an owl. Shade,

shade; that was what she was always planning and making. Behind the

high tamarisk hedge, her garden was a jungle of verdure in summer.

Above the cherry trees and peach trees and golden plums stood the

windmill, with its tank on stilts, which kept all this verdure alive.

Outside, the sage-brush grew up to the very edge of the garden, and the

sand was always drifting up to the tamarisks.

Every one in Moonstone was astonished when the Kohlers took the

wandering music-teacher to live with them. In seventeen years old Fritz

had never had a crony, except the harness-maker and Spanish Johnny.

This Wunsch came from God knew where,—followed Spanish Johnny into town

when that wanderer came back from one of his tramps. Wunsch played in

the dance orchestra, tuned pianos, and gave lessons. When Mrs. Kohler

rescued him, he was sleeping in a dirty, unfurnished room over one of

the saloons, and he had only two shirts in the world. Once he was under

her roof, the old woman went at him as she did at her garden. She sewed

and washed and mended for him, and made him so clean and respectable

that he was able to get a large class of pupils and to rent a piano. As

soon as he had money ahead, he sent to the Narrow Gauge lodging-house,

in Denver, for a trunkful of music which had been held there for unpaid

board. With tears in his eyes the old man—he was not over fifty, but

sadly battered—told Mrs. Kohler that he asked nothing better of God

than to end his days with her, and to be buried in the garden, under

her linden trees. They were not American basswood, but the European

linden, which has honey-colored blooms in summer, with a fragrance that

surpasses all trees and flowers and drives young people wild with joy.

Thea was reflecting as she walked along that had it not been for

Professor Wunsch she might have lived on for years in Moonstone without

ever knowing the Kohlers, without ever seeing their garden or the

inside of their house. Besides the cuckoo clock,—which was wonderful

enough, and which Mrs. Kohler said she kept for “company when she was

lonesome,”—the Kohlers had in their house the most wonderful thing Thea

had ever seen—but of that later.

Professor Wunsch went to the houses of his other pupils to give them

their lessons, but one morning he told Mrs. Kronborg that Thea had

talent, and that if she came to him he could teach her in his slippers,

and that would be better. Mrs. Kronborg was a strange woman. That word

“talent,” which no one else in Moonstone, not even Dr. Archie, would

have understood, she comprehended perfectly. To any other woman there,

it would have meant that a child must have her hair curled every day

and must play in public. Mrs. Kronborg knew it meant that Thea must

practice four hours a day. A child with talent must be kept at the

piano, just as a child with measles must be kept under the blankets.

Mrs. Kronborg and her three sisters had all studied piano, and all sang

well, but none of them had talent. Their father had played the oboe in

an orchestra in Sweden, before he came to America to better his

fortunes. He had even known Jenny Lind. A child with talent had to be

kept at the piano; so twice a week in summer and once a week in winter

Thea went over the gulch to the Kohlers’, though the Ladies’ Aid

Society thought it was not proper for their preacher’s daughter to go

“where there was so much drinking.” Not that the Kohler sons ever so

much as looked at a glass of beer. They were ashamed of their old folks

and got out into the world as fast as possible; had their clothes made

by a Denver tailor and their necks shaved up under their hair and

forgot the past. Old Fritz and Wunsch, however, indulged in a friendly

bottle pretty often. The two men were like comrades; perhaps the bond

between them was the glass wherein lost hopes are found; perhaps it was

common memories of another country; perhaps it was the grapevine in the

garden—knotty, fibrous shrub, full of homesickness and sentiment, which

the Germans have carried around the world with them.

As Thea approached the house she peeped between the pink sprays of the

tamarisk hedge and saw the Professor and Mrs. Kohler in the garden,

spading and raking. The garden looked like a relief-map now, and gave

no indication of what it would be in August; such a jungle! Pole beans

and potatoes and corn and leeks and kale and red cabbage—there would

even be vegetables for which there is no American name. Mrs. Kohler was

always getting by mail packages of seeds from Freeport and from the old

country. Then the flowers! There were big sunflowers for the canary

bird, tiger lilies and phlox and zinnias and lady’s-slippers and

portulaca and hollyhocks,—giant hollyhocks. Beside the fruit trees

there was a great umbrella-shaped catalpa, and a balm-of-Gilead, two

lindens, and even a ginka,—a rigid, pointed tree with leaves shaped

like butterflies, which shivered, but never bent to the wind.

This morning Thea saw to her delight that the two oleander trees, one

white and one red, had been brought up from their winter quarters in

the cellar. There is hardly a German family in the most arid parts of

Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, but has its oleander trees. However loutish

the American-born sons of the family may be, there was never one who

refused to give his muscle to the back-breaking task of getting those

tubbed trees down into the cellar in the fall and up into the sunlight

in the spring. They may strive to avert the day, but they grapple with

the tub at last.

When Thea entered the gate, her professor leaned his spade against the

white post that supported the turreted dove-house, and wiped his face

with his shirt-sleeve; someway he never managed to have a handkerchief

about him. Wunsch was short and stocky, with something rough and

bear-like about his shoulders. His face was a dark, bricky red, deeply

creased rather than wrinkled, and the skin was like loose leather over

his neck band—he wore a brass collar button but no collar. His hair was

cropped close; iron-gray bristles on a bullet-like head. His eyes were

always suffused and bloodshot. He had a coarse, scornful mouth, and

irregular, yellow teeth, much worn at the edges. His hands were square

and red, seldom clean, but always alive, impatient, even sympathetic.

“_Morgen_,” he greeted his pupil in a businesslike way, put on a black

alpaca coat, and conducted her at once to the piano in Mrs. Kohler’s

sitting-room. He twirled the stool to the proper height, pointed to it,

and sat down in a wooden chair beside Thea.

“The scale of B flat major,” he directed, and then fell into an

attitude of deep attention. Without a word his pupil set to work.

To Mrs. Kohler, in the garden, came the cheerful sound of effort, of

vigorous striving. Unconsciously she wielded her rake more lightly.

Occasionally she heard the teacher’s voice. “Scale of E minor....

_Weiter, weiter!... Immer_ I hear the thumb, like a lame foot.

_Weiter... weiter_, once... _Schön!_ The chords, quick!”

The pupil did not open her mouth until they began the second movement

of the Clementi sonata, when she remonstrated in low tones about the

way he had marked the fingering of a passage.

“It makes no matter what you think,” replied her teacher coldly. “There

is only one right way. The thumb there. _Ein, zwei, drei, vier_,” etc.

Then for an hour there was no further interruption.

At the end of the lesson Thea turned on her stool and leaned her arm on

the keyboard. They usually had a little talk after the lesson.

Herr Wunsch grinned. “How soon is it you are free from school? Then we

make ahead faster, eh?”

“First week in June. Then will you give me the ‘Invitation to the

Dance’?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It makes no matter. If you want him, you

play him out of lesson hours.”

“All right.” Thea fumbled in her pocket and brought out a crumpled slip

of paper. “What does this mean, please? I guess it’s Latin.”

Wunsch blinked at the line penciled on the paper. “Wherefrom you get

this?” he asked gruffly.

“Out of a book Dr. Archie gave me to read. It’s all English but that.

Did you ever see it before?” she asked, watching his face.

“Yes. A long time ago,” he muttered, scowling. “Ovidius!” He took a

stub of lead pencil from his vest pocket, steadied his hand by a

visible effort, and under the words:

“Lente currite, lente currite, noctis equi,”

he wrote in a clear, elegant Gothic hand,—

“Go slowly, go slowly, ye steeds of the night.”

He put the pencil back in his pocket and continued to stare at the

Latin. It recalled the poem, which he had read as a student, and

thought very fine. There were treasures of memory which no

lodging-house keeper could attach. One carried things about in one’s

head, long after one’s linen could be smuggled out in a tuning-bag. He

handed the paper back to Thea. “There is the English, quite elegant,”

he said, rising.

Mrs. Kohler stuck her head in at the door, and Thea slid off the stool.

“Come in, Mrs. Kohler,” she called, “and show me the piece-picture.”

The old woman laughed, pulled off her big gardening gloves, and pushed

Thea to the lounge before the object of her delight. The

“piece-picture,” which hung on the wall and nearly covered one whole

end of the room, was the handiwork of Fritz Kohler. He had learned his

trade under an old-fashioned tailor in Magdeburg who required from each

of his apprentices a thesis: that is, before they left his shop, each

apprentice had to copy in cloth some well known German painting,

stitching bits of colored stuff together on a linen background; a kind

of mosaic. The pupil was allowed to select his subject, and Fritz

Kohler had chosen a popular painting of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.

The gloomy Emperor and his staff were represented as crossing a stone

bridge, and behind them was the blazing city, the walls and fortresses

done in gray cloth with orange tongues of flame darting about the domes

and minarets. Napoleon rode his white horse; Murat, in Oriental dress,

a bay charger. Thea was never tired of examining this work, of hearing

how long it had taken Fritz to make it, how much it had been admired,

and what narrow escapes it had had from moths and fire. Silk, Mrs.

Kohler explained, would have been much easier to manage than woolen

cloth, in which it was often hard to get the right shades. The reins of

the horses, the wheels of the spurs, the brooding eyebrows of the

Emperor, Murat’s fierce mustaches, the great shakos of the Guard, were

all worked out with the minutest fidelity. Thea’s admiration for this

picture had endeared her to Mrs. Kohler. It was now many years since

she used to point out its wonders to her own little boys. As Mrs.

Kohler did not go to church, she never heard any singing, except the

songs that floated over from Mexican Town, and Thea often sang for her

after the lesson was over. This morning Wunsch pointed to the piano.

“On Sunday, when I go by the church, I hear you sing something.”

Thea obediently sat down on the stool again and began, “_Come, ye

Disconsolate_.” Wunsch listened thoughtfully, his hands on his knees.

Such a beautiful child’s voice! Old Mrs. Kohler’s face relaxed in a

smile of happiness; she half closed her eyes. A big fly was darting in

and out of the window; the sunlight made a golden pool on the rag

carpet and bathed the faded cretonne pillows on the lounge, under the

piece-picture. “_Earth has no sorrow that Heaven cannot heal_,” the

song died away.

“That is a good thing to remember,” Wunsch shook himself. “You believe

that?” looking quizzically at Thea.

She became confused and pecked nervously at a black key with her middle

finger. “I don’t know. I guess so,” she murmured.

Her teacher rose abruptly. “Remember, for next time, thirds. You ought

to get up earlier.”

That night the air was so warm that Fritz and Herr Wunsch had their

after-supper pipe in the grape arbor, smoking in silence while the

sound of fiddles and guitars came across the ravine from Mexican Town.

Long after Fritz and his old Paulina had gone to bed, Wunsch sat

motionless in the arbor, looking up through the woolly vine leaves at

the glittering machinery of heaven.

“Lente currite, noctis equi.”

That line awoke many memories. He was thinking of youth; of his own, so

long gone by, and of his pupil’s, just beginning. He would even have

cherished hopes for her, except that he had become superstitious. He

believed that whatever he hoped for was destined not to be; that his

affection brought ill-fortune, especially to the young; that if he held

anything in his thoughts, he harmed it. He had taught in music schools

in St. Louis and Kansas City, where the shallowness and complacency of

the young misses had maddened him. He had encountered bad manners and

bad faith, had been the victim of sharpers of all kinds, was dogged by

bad luck. He had played in orchestras that were never paid and

wandering opera troupes which disbanded penniless. And there was always

the old enemy, more relentless than the others. It was long since he

had wished anything or desired anything beyond the necessities of the

body. Now that he was tempted to hope for another, he felt alarmed and

shook his head.

It was his pupil’s power of application, her rugged will, that

interested him. He had lived for so long among people whose sole

ambition was to get something for nothing that he had learned not to

look for seriousness in anything. Now that he by chance encountered it,

it recalled standards, ambitions, a society long forgot. What was it

she reminded him of? A yellow flower, full of sunlight, perhaps. No; a

thin glass full of sweet-smelling, sparkling Moselle wine. He seemed to

see such a glass before him in the arbor, to watch the bubbles rising

and breaking, like the silent discharge of energy in the nerves and

brain, the rapid florescence in young blood—Wunsch felt ashamed and

dragged his slippers along the path to the kitchen, his eyes on the

ground.

The children in the primary grades were sometimes required to make

relief maps of Moonstone in sand. Had they used colored sands, as the

Navajo medicine men do in their sand mosaics, they could easily have

indicated the social classifications of Moonstone, since these

conformed to certain topographical boundaries, and every child

understood them perfectly.

The main business street ran, of course, through the center of the

town. To the west of this street lived all the people who were, as

Tillie Kronborg said, “in society.” Sylvester Street, the third

parallel with Main Street on the west, was the longest in town, and the

best dwellings were built along it. Far out at the north end, nearly a

mile from the court-house and its cottonwood grove, was Dr. Archie’s

house, its big yard and garden surrounded by a white paling fence. The

Methodist Church was in the center of the town, facing the court-house

square. The Kronborgs lived half a mile south of the church, on the

long street that stretched out like an arm to the depot settlement.

This was the first street west of Main, and was built up only on one

side. The preacher’s house faced the backs of the brick and frame store

buildings and a draw full of sunflowers and scraps of old iron. The

sidewalk which ran in front of the Kronborgs’ house was the one

continuous sidewalk to the depot, and all the train men and roundhouse

employees passed the front gate every time they came uptown. Thea and

Mrs. Kronborg had many friends among the railroad men, who often paused

to chat across the fence, and of one of these we shall have more to

say.

In the part of Moonstone that lay east of Main Street, toward the deep

ravine which, farther south, wound by Mexican Town, lived all the

humbler citizens, the people who voted but did not run for office. The

houses were little story-and-a-half cottages, with none of the fussy

architectural efforts that marked those on Sylvester Street. They

nestled modestly behind their cottonwoods and Virginia creeper; their

occupants had no social pretensions to keep up. There were no

half-glass front doors with doorbells, or formidable parlors behind

closed shutters. Here the old women washed in the back yard, and the

men sat in the front doorway and smoked their pipes. The people on

Sylvester Street scarcely knew that this part of the town existed. Thea

liked to take Thor and her express wagon and explore these quiet, shady

streets, where the people never tried to have lawns or to grow elms and

pine trees, but let the native timber have its way and spread in

luxuriance. She had many friends there, old women who gave her a yellow

rose or a spray of trumpet vine and appeased Thor with a cooky or a

doughnut. They called Thea “that preacher’s girl,” but the

demonstrative was misplaced, for when they spoke of Mr. Kronborg they

called him “the Methodist preacher.”

Dr. Archie was very proud of his yard and garden, which he worked

himself. He was the only man in Moonstone who was successful at growing

rambler roses, and his strawberries were famous. One morning when Thea

was downtown on an errand, the doctor stopped her, took her hand and

went over her with a quizzical eye, as he nearly always did when they

met.

“You haven’t been up to my place to get any strawberries yet, Thea.

They’re at their best just now. Mrs. Archie doesn’t know what to do

with them all. Come up this afternoon. Just tell Mrs. Archie I sent

you. Bring a big basket and pick till you are tired.”

When she got home Thea told her mother that she didn’t want to go,

because she didn’t like Mrs. Archie.

“She is certainly one queer woman,” Mrs. Kronborg assented, “but he’s

asked you so often, I guess you’ll have to go this time. She won’t bite

you.”

After dinner Thea took a basket, put Thor in his baby buggy, and set

out for Dr. Archie’s house at the other end of town. As soon as she

came within sight of the house, she slackened her pace. She approached

it very slowly, stopping often to pick dandelions and sand-peas for

Thor to crush up in his fist.

It was his wife’s custom, as soon as Dr. Archie left the house in the

morning, to shut all the doors and windows to keep the dust out, and to

pull down the shades to keep the sun from fading the carpets. She

thought, too, that neighbors were less likely to drop in if the house

was closed up. She was one of those people who are stingy without

motive or reason, even when they can gain nothing by it. She must have

known that skimping the doctor in heat and food made him more

extravagant than he would have been had she made him comfortable. He

never came home for lunch, because she gave him such miserable scraps

and shreds of food. No matter how much milk he bought, he could never

get thick cream for his strawberries. Even when he watched his wife

lift it from the milk in smooth, ivory-colored blankets, she managed,

by some sleight-of-hand, to dilute it before it got to the breakfast

table. The butcher’s favorite joke was about the kind of meat he sold

Mrs. Archie. She felt no interest in food herself, and she hated to

prepare it. She liked nothing better than to have Dr. Archie go to

Denver for a few days—he often went chiefly because he was hungry—and

to be left alone to eat canned salmon and to keep the house shut up

from morning until night.

Mrs. Archie would not have a servant because, she said, “they ate too

much and broke too much”; she even said they knew too much. She used

what mind she had in devising shifts to minimize her housework. She

used to tell her neighbors that if there were no men, there would be no

housework. When Mrs. Archie was first married, she had been always in a

panic for fear she would have children. Now that her apprehensions on

that score had grown paler, she was almost as much afraid of having

dust in the house as she had once been of having children in it. If

dust did not get in, it did not have to be got out, she said. She would

take any amount of trouble to avoid trouble. Why, nobody knew.

Certainly her husband had never been able to make her out. Such little,

mean natures are among the darkest and most baffling of created things.

There is no law by which they can be explained. The ordinary incentives

of pain and pleasure do not account for their behavior. They live like

insects, absorbed in petty activities that seem to have nothing to do

with any genial aspect of human life.

Mrs. Archie, as Mrs. Kronborg said, “liked to gad.” She liked to have

her house clean, empty, dark, locked, and to be out of it—anywhere. A

church social, a prayer meeting, a ten-cent show; she seemed to have no

preference. When there was nowhere else to go, she used to sit for

hours in Mrs. Smiley’s millinery and notion store, listening to the

talk of the women who came in, watching them while they tried on hats,

blinking at them from her corner with her sharp, restless little eyes.

She never talked much herself, but she knew all the gossip of the town

and she had a sharp ear for racy anecdotes—“traveling men’s stories,”

they used to be called in Moonstone. Her clicking laugh sounded like a

typewriting machine in action, and, for very pointed stories, she had a

little screech.

Mrs. Archie had been Mrs. Archie for only six years, and when she was

Belle White she was one of the “pretty” girls in Lansing, Michigan. She

had then a train of suitors. She could truly remind Archie that “the

boys hung around her.” They did. They thought her very spirited and

were always saying, “Oh, that Belle White, she’s a case!” She used to

play heavy practical jokes which the young men thought very clever.

Archie was considered the most promising young man in “the young

crowd,” so Belle selected him. She let him see, made him fully aware,

that she had selected him, and Archie was the sort of boy who could not

withstand such enlightenment. Belle’s family were sorry for him. On his

wedding day her sisters looked at the big, handsome boy—he was

twenty-four—as he walked down the aisle with his bride, and then they

looked at each other. His besotted confidence, his sober, radiant face,

his gentle, protecting arm, made them uncomfortable. Well, they were

glad that he was going West at once, to fulfill his doom where they

would not be onlookers. Anyhow, they consoled themselves, they had got

Belle off their hands.

More than that, Belle seemed to have got herself off her hands. Her

reputed prettiness must have been entirely the result of determination,

of a fierce little ambition. Once she had married, fastened herself on

some one, come to port,—it vanished like the ornamental plumage which

drops away from some birds after the mating season. The one aggressive

action of her life was over. She began to shrink in face and stature.

Of her harum-scarum spirit there was nothing left but the little

screech. Within a few years she looked as small and mean as she was.

Thor’s chariot crept along. Thea approached the house unwillingly. She

didn’t care about the strawberries, anyhow. She had come only because

she did not want to hurt Dr. Archie’s feelings. She not only disliked

Mrs. Archie, she was a little afraid of her. While Thea was getting the

heavy baby-buggy through the iron gate she heard some one call, “Wait a

minute!” and Mrs. Archie came running around the house from the back

door, her apron over her head. She came to help with the buggy, because

she was afraid the wheels might scratch the paint off the gateposts.

She was a skinny little woman with a great pile of frizzy light hair on

a small head.

“Dr. Archie told me to come up and pick some strawberries,” Thea

muttered, wishing she had stayed at home.

Mrs. Archie led the way to the back door, squinting and shading her

eyes with her hand. “Wait a minute,” she said again, when Thea

explained why she had come.

She went into her kitchen and Thea sat down on the porch step. When

Mrs. Archie reappeared she carried in her hand a little wooden

butter-basket trimmed with fringed tissue paper, which she must have

brought home from some church supper. “You’ll have to have something to

put them in,” she said, ignoring the yawning willow basket which stood

empty on Thor’s feet. “You can have this, and you needn’t mind about

returning it. You know about not trampling the vines, don’t you?”

Mrs. Archie went back into the house and Thea leaned over in the sand

and picked a few strawberries. As soon as she was sure that she was not

going to cry, she tossed the little basket into the big one and ran

Thor’s buggy along the gravel walk and out of the gate as fast as she

could push it. She was angry, and she was ashamed for Dr. Archie. She

could not help thinking how uncomfortable he would be if he ever found

out about it. Little things like that were the ones that cut him most.

She slunk home by the back way, and again almost cried when she told

her mother about it.

Mrs. Kronborg was frying doughnuts for her husband’s supper. She

laughed as she dropped a new lot into the hot grease. “It’s wonderful,

the way some people are made,” she declared. “But I wouldn’t let that

upset me if I was you. Think what it would be to live with it all the

time. You look in the black pocketbook inside my handbag and take a

dime and go downtown and get an ice-cream soda. That’ll make you feel

better. Thor can have a little of the ice-cream if you feed it to him

with a spoon. He likes it, don’t you, son?” She stooped to wipe his

chin. Thor was only six months old and inarticulate, but it was quite

true that he liked ice-cream.

Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked like a Noah’s ark town

set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and

cottonwoods. A few people were trying to make soft maples grow in their

turfed lawns, but the fashion of planting incongruous trees from the

North Atlantic States had not become general then, and the frail,

brightly painted desert town was shaded by the light-reflecting,

wind-loving trees of the desert, whose roots are always seeking water

and whose leaves are always talking about it, making the sound of rain.

The long porous roots of the cottonwood are irrepressible. They break

into the wells as rats do into granaries, and thieve the water.

The long street which connected Moonstone with the depot settlement

traversed in its course a considerable stretch of rough open country,

staked out in lots but not built up at all, a weedy hiatus between the

town and the railroad. When you set out along this street to go to the

station, you noticed that the houses became smaller and farther apart,

until they ceased altogether, and the board sidewalk continued its

uneven course through sunflower patches, until you reached the

solitary, new brick Catholic Church. The church stood there because the

land was given to the parish by the man who owned the adjoining waste

lots, in the hope of making them more salable—“Farrier’s Addition,”

this patch of prairie was called in the clerk’s office. An eighth of a

mile beyond the church was a washout, a deep sand-gully, where the

board sidewalk became a bridge for perhaps fifty feet. Just beyond the

gully was old Uncle Billy Beemer’s grove,—twelve town lots set out in

fine, well-grown cottonwood trees, delightful to look upon, or to

listen to, as they swayed and rippled in the wind. Uncle Billy had been

one of the most worthless old drunkards who ever sat on a store box and

told filthy stories. One night he played hide-and-seek with a switch

engine and got his sodden brains knocked out. But his grove, the one

creditable thing he had ever done in his life, rustled on. Beyond this

grove the houses of the depot settlement began, and the naked board

walk, that had run in out of the sunflowers, again became a link

between human dwellings.

One afternoon, late in the summer, Dr. Howard Archie was fighting his

way back to town along this walk through a blinding sandstorm, a silk

handkerchief tied over his mouth. He had been to see a sick woman down

in the depot settlement, and he was walking because his ponies had been

out for a hard drive that morning.

As he passed the Catholic Church he came upon Thea and Thor. Thea was

sitting in a child’s express wagon, her feet out behind, kicking the

wagon along and steering by the tongue. Thor was on her lap and she

held him with one arm. He had grown to be a big cub of a baby, with a

constitutional grievance, and he had to be continually amused. Thea

took him philosophically, and tugged and pulled him about, getting as

much fun as she could under her encumbrance. Her hair was blowing about

her face, and her eyes were squinting so intently at the uneven board

sidewalk in front of her that she did not see the doctor until he spoke

to her.

“Look out, Thea. You’ll steer that youngster into the ditch.”

The wagon stopped. Thea released the tongue, wiped her hot, sandy face,

and pushed back her hair. “Oh, no, I won’t! I never ran off but once,

and then he didn’t get anything but a bump. He likes this better than a

baby buggy, and so do I.”

“Are you going to kick that cart all the way home?”

“Of course. We take long trips; wherever there is a sidewalk. It’s no

good on the road.”

“Looks to me like working pretty hard for your fun. Are you going to be

busy to-night? Want to make a call with me? Spanish Johnny’s come home

again, all used up. His wife sent me word this morning, and I said I’d

go over to see him to-night. He’s an old chum of yours, isn’t he?”

“Oh, I’m glad. She’s been crying her eyes out. When did he come?”

“Last night, on Number Six. Paid his fare, they tell me. Too sick to

beat it. There’ll come a time when that boy won’t get back, I’m afraid.

Come around to my office about eight o’clock,—and you needn’t bring

that!”

Thor seemed to understand that he had been insulted, for he scowled and

began to kick the side of the wagon, shouting, “Go-go, go-go!” Thea

leaned forward and grabbed the wagon tongue. Dr. Archie stepped in

front of her and blocked the way. “Why don’t you make him wait? What do

you let him boss you like that for?”

“If he gets mad he throws himself, and then I can’t do anything with

him. When he’s mad he’s lots stronger than me, aren’t you, Thor?” Thea

spoke with pride, and the idol was appeased. He grunted approvingly as

his sister began to kick rapidly behind her, and the wagon rattled off

and soon disappeared in the flying currents of sand.

That evening Dr. Archie was seated in his office, his desk chair tilted

back, reading by the light of a hot coal-oil lamp. All the windows were

open, but the night was breathless after the sandstorm, and his hair

was moist where it hung over his forehead. He was deeply engrossed in

his book and sometimes smiled thoughtfully as he read. When Thea

Kronborg entered quietly and slipped into a seat, he nodded, finished

his paragraph, inserted a bookmark, and rose to put the book back into

the case. It was one out of the long row of uniform volumes on the top

shelf.

“Nearly every time I come in, when you’re alone, you’re reading one of

those books,” Thea remarked thoughtfully. “They must be very nice.”

The doctor dropped back into his swivel chair, the mottled volume still

in his hand. “They aren’t exactly books, Thea,” he said seriously.

“They’re a city.”

“A history, you mean?”

“Yes, and no. They’re a history of a live city, not a dead one. A

Frenchman undertook to write about a whole cityful of people, all the

kinds he knew. And he got them nearly all in, I guess. Yes, it’s very

interesting. You’ll like to read it some day, when you’re grown up.”

Thea leaned forward and made out the title on the back, “A

Distinguished Provincial in Paris.”

“It doesn’t sound very interesting.”

“Perhaps not, but it is.” The doctor scrutinized her broad face, low

enough to be in the direct light from under the green lamp shade.

“Yes,” he went on with some satisfaction, “I think you’ll like them

some day. You’re always curious about people, and I expect this man

knew more about people than anybody that ever lived.”

“City people or country people?”

“Both. People are pretty much the same everywhere.”

“Oh, no, they’re not. The people who go through in the dining-car

aren’t like us.”

“What makes you think they aren’t, my girl? Their clothes?”

Thea shook her head. “No, it’s something else. I don’t know.” Her eyes

shifted under the doctor’s searching gaze and she glanced up at the row

of books. “How soon will I be old enough to read them?”

“Soon enough, soon enough, little girl.” The doctor patted her hand and

looked at her index finger. “The nail’s coming all right, isn’t it? But

I think that man makes you practice too much. You have it on your mind

all the time.” He had noticed that when she talked to him she was

always opening and shutting her hands. “It makes you nervous.”

“No, he don’t,” Thea replied stubbornly, watching Dr. Archie return the

book to its niche.

He took up a black leather case, put on his hat, and they went down the

dark stairs into the street. The summer moon hung full in the sky. For

the time being, it was the great fact in the world. Beyond the edge of

the town the plain was so white that every clump of sage stood out

distinct from the sand, and the dunes looked like a shining lake. The

doctor took off his straw hat and carried it in his hand as they walked

toward Mexican Town, across the sand.

North of Pueblo, Mexican settlements were rare in Colorado then. This

one had come about accidentally. Spanish Johnny was the first Mexican

who came to Moonstone. He was a painter and decorator, and had been

working in Trinidad, when Ray Kennedy told him there was a “boom” on in

Moonstone, and a good many new buildings were going up. A year after

Johnny settled in Moonstone, his cousin, Famos Serreños, came to work

in the brickyard; then Serreños’ cousins came to help him. During the

strike, the master mechanic put a gang of Mexicans to work in the

roundhouse. The Mexicans had arrived so quietly, with their blankets

and musical instruments, that before Moonstone was awake to the fact,

there was a Mexican quarter; a dozen families or more.

As Thea and the doctor approached the ’dobe houses, they heard a

guitar, and a rich barytone voice—that of Famos Serreños—singing “La

Golandrina.” All the Mexican houses had neat little yards, with

tamarisk hedges and flowers, and walks bordered with shells or

whitewashed stones. Johnny’s house was dark. His wife, Mrs.

Tellamantez, was sitting on the doorstep, combing her long, blue-black

hair. (Mexican women are like the Spartans; when they are in trouble,

in love, under stress of any kind, they comb and comb their hair.) She

rose without embarrassment or apology, comb in hand, and greeted the

doctor.

“Good-evening; will you go in?” she asked in a low, musical voice. “He

is in the back room. I will make a light.” She followed them indoors,

lit a candle and handed it to the doctor, pointing toward the bedroom.

Then she went back and sat down on her doorstep.

Dr. Archie and Thea went into the bedroom, which was dark and quiet.

There was a bed in the corner, and a man was lying on the clean sheets.

On the table beside him was a glass pitcher, half-full of water.

Spanish Johnny looked younger than his wife, and when he was in health

he was very handsome: slender, gold-colored, with wavy black hair, a

round, smooth throat, white teeth, and burning black eyes. His profile

was strong and severe, like an Indian’s. What was termed his “wildness”

showed itself only in his feverish eyes and in the color that burned on

his tawny cheeks. That night he was a coppery green, and his eyes were

like black holes. He opened them when the doctor held the candle before

his face.

“_Mi testa!_” he muttered, “_mi testa_,” doctor. “_La fiebre!_” Seeing

the doctor’s companion at the foot of the bed, he attempted a smile.

“_Muchacha!_” he exclaimed deprecatingly.

Dr. Archie stuck a thermometer into his mouth. “Now, Thea, you can run

outside and wait for me.”

Thea slipped noiselessly through the dark house and joined Mrs.

Tellamantez. The somber Mexican woman did not seem inclined to talk,

but her nod was friendly. Thea sat down on the warm sand, her back to

the moon, facing Mrs. Tellamantez on her doorstep, and began to count

the moon flowers on the vine that ran over the house. Mrs. Tellamantez

was always considered a very homely woman. Her face was of a strongly

marked type not sympathetic to Americans. Such long, oval faces, with a

full chin, a large, mobile mouth, a high nose, are not uncommon in

Spain. Mrs. Tellamantez could not write her name, and could read but

little. Her strong nature lived upon itself. She was chiefly known in

Moonstone for her forbearance with her incorrigible husband.

Nobody knew exactly what was the matter with Johnny, and everybody

liked him. His popularity would have been unusual for a white man, for

a Mexican it was unprecedented. His talents were his undoing. He had a

high, uncertain tenor voice, and he played the mandolin with

exceptional skill. Periodically he went crazy. There was no other way

to explain his behavior. He was a clever workman, and, when he worked,

as regular and faithful as a burro. Then some night he would fall in

with a crowd at the saloon and begin to sing. He would go on until he

had no voice left, until he wheezed and rasped. Then he would play his

mandolin furiously, and drink until his eyes sank back into his head.

At last, when he was put out of the saloon at closing time, and could

get nobody to listen to him, he would run away—along the railroad

track, straight across the desert. He always managed to get aboard a

freight somewhere. Once beyond Denver, he played his way southward from

saloon to saloon until he got across the border. He never wrote to his

wife; but she would soon begin to get newspapers from La Junta,

Albuquerque, Chihuahua, with marked paragraphs announcing that Juan

Tellamantez and his wonderful mandolin could be heard at the Jack

Rabbit Grill, or the Pearl of Cadiz Saloon. Mrs. Tellamantez waited and

wept and combed her hair. When he was completely wrung out and burned

up,—all but destroyed,—her Juan always came back to her to be taken

care of,—once with an ugly knife wound in the neck, once with a finger

missing from his right hand,—but he played just as well with three

fingers as he had with four.

Public sentiment was lenient toward Johnny, but everybody was disgusted

with Mrs. Tellamantez for putting up with him. She ought to discipline

him, people said; she ought to leave him; she had no self-respect. In

short, Mrs. Tellamantez got all the blame. Even Thea thought she was

much too humble. To-night, as she sat with her back to the moon,

looking at the moon flowers and Mrs. Tellamantez’s somber face, she was

thinking that there is nothing so sad in the world as that kind of

patience and resignation. It was much worse than Johnny’s craziness.

She even wondered whether it did not help to make Johnny crazy. People

had no right to be so passive and resigned. She would like to roll over

and over in the sand and screech at Mrs. Tellamantez. She was glad when

the doctor came out.

The Mexican woman rose and stood respectful and expectant. The doctor

held his hat in his hand and looked kindly at her.

“Same old thing, Mrs. Tellamantez. He’s no worse than he’s been before.

I’ve left some medicine. Don’t give him anything but toast water until

I see him again. You’re a good nurse; you’ll get him out.” Dr. Archie

smiled encouragingly. He glanced about the little garden and wrinkled

his brows. “I can’t see what makes him behave so. He’s killing himself,

and he’s not a rowdy sort of fellow. Can’t you tie him up someway?

Can’t you tell when these fits are coming on?”

Mrs. Tellamantez put her hand to her forehead. “The saloon, doctor, the

excitement; that is what makes him. People listen to him, and it

excites him.”

The doctor shook his head. “Maybe. He’s too much for my calculations. I

don’t see what he gets out of it.”

“He is always fooled,”—the Mexican woman spoke rapidly and tremulously,

her long under lip quivering.

“He is good at heart, but he has no head. He fools himself. You do not

understand in this country, you are progressive. But he has no

judgment, and he is fooled.” She stooped quickly, took up one of the

white conch-shells that bordered the walk, and, with an apologetic

inclination of her head, held it to Dr. Archie’s ear. “Listen, doctor.

You hear something in there? You hear the sea; and yet the sea is very

far from here. You have judgment, and you know that. But he is fooled.

To him, it is the sea itself. A little thing is big to him.” She bent

and placed the shell in the white row, with its fellows. Thea took it

up softly and pressed it to her own ear. The sound in it startled her;

it was like something calling one. So that was why Johnny ran away.

There was something awe-inspiring about Mrs. Tellamantez and her shell.

Thea caught Dr. Archie’s hand and squeezed it hard as she skipped along

beside him back toward Moonstone. She went home, and the doctor went

back to his lamp and his book. He never left his office until after

midnight. If he did not play whist or pool in the evening, he read. It

had become a habit with him to lose himself.

VII

Thea’s twelfth birthday had passed a few weeks before her memorable

call upon Mrs. Tellamantez. There was a worthy man in Moonstone who was

already planning to marry Thea as soon as she should be old enough. His

name was Ray Kennedy, his age was thirty, and he was conductor on a

freight train, his run being from Moonstone to Denver. Ray was a big

fellow, with a square, open American face, a rock chin, and features

that one would never happen to remember. He was an aggressive idealist,

a freethinker, and, like most railroad men, deeply sentimental. Thea

liked him for reasons that had to do with the adventurous life he had

led in Mexico and the Southwest, rather than for anything very

personal. She liked him, too, because he was the only one of her

friends who ever took her to the sand hills. The sand hills were a

constant tantalization; she loved them better than anything near

Moonstone, and yet she could so seldom get to them. The first dunes

were accessible enough; they were only a few miles beyond the Kohlers’,

and she could run out there any day when she could do her practicing in

the morning and get Thor off her hands for an afternoon. But the real

hills—the Turquoise Hills, the Mexicans called them—were ten good miles

away, and one reached them by a heavy, sandy road. Dr. Archie sometimes

took Thea on his long drives, but as nobody lived in the sand hills, he

never had calls to make in that direction. Ray Kennedy was her only

hope of getting there.

This summer Thea had not been to the hills once, though Ray had planned

several Sunday expeditions. Once Thor was sick, and once the organist

in her father’s church was away and Thea had to play the organ for the

three Sunday services. But on the first Sunday in September, Ray drove

up to the Kronborgs’ front gate at nine o’clock in the morning and the

party actually set off. Gunner and Axel went with Thea, and Ray had

asked Spanish Johnny to come and to bring Mrs. Tellamantez and his

mandolin. Ray was artlessly fond of music, especially of Mexican music.

He and Mrs. Tellamantez had got up the lunch between them, and they

were to make coffee in the desert.

When they left Mexican Town, Thea was on the front seat with Ray and

Johnny, and Gunner and Axel sat behind with Mrs. Tellamantez. They

objected to this, of course, but there were some things about which

Thea would have her own way. “As stubborn as a Finn,” Mrs. Kronborg

sometimes said of her, quoting an old Swedish saying. When they passed

the Kohlers’, old Fritz and Wunsch were cutting grapes at the arbor.

Thea gave them a businesslike nod. Wunsch came to the gate and looked

after them. He divined Ray Kennedy’s hopes, and he distrusted every

expedition that led away from the piano. Unconsciously he made Thea pay

for frivolousness of this sort.

As Ray Kennedy’s party followed the faint road across the sagebrush,

they heard behind them the sound of church bells, which gave them a

sense of escape and boundless freedom. Every rabbit that shot across

the path, every sage hen that flew up by the trail, was like a runaway

thought, a message that one sent into the desert. As they went farther,

the illusion of the mirage became more instead of less convincing; a

shallow silver lake that spread for many miles, a little misty in the

sunlight. Here and there one saw reflected the image of a heifer,

turned loose to live upon the sparse sand-grass. They were magnified to

a preposterous height and looked like mammoths, prehistoric beasts

standing solitary in the waters that for many thousands of years

actually washed over that desert;—the mirage itself may be the ghost of

that long-vanished sea. Beyond the phantom lake lay the line of

many-colored hills; rich, sun-baked yellow, glowing turquoise,

lavender, purple; all the open, pastel colors of the desert.

After the first five miles the road grew heavier. The horses had to

slow down to a walk and the wheels sank deep into the sand, which now

lay in long ridges, like waves, where the last high wind had drifted

it. Two hours brought the party to Pedro’s Cup, named for a Mexican

desperado who had once held the sheriff at bay there. The Cup was a

great amphitheater, cut out in the hills, its floor smooth and packed

hard, dotted with sagebrush and greasewood.

On either side of the Cup the yellow hills ran north and south, with

winding ravines between them, full of soft sand which drained down from

the crumbling banks. On the surface of this fluid sand, one could find

bits of brilliant stone, crystals and agates and onyx, and petrified

wood as red as blood. Dried toads and lizards were to be found there,

too. Birds, decomposing more rapidly, left only feathered skeletons.

After a little reconnoitering, Mrs. Tellamantez declared that it was

time for lunch, and Ray took his hatchet and began to cut greasewood,

which burns fiercely in its green state. The little boys dragged the

bushes to the spot that Mrs. Tellamantez had chosen for her fire.

Mexican women like to cook out of doors.

After lunch Thea sent Gunner and Axel to hunt for agates. “If you see a

rattlesnake, run. Don’t try to kill it,” she enjoined.

Gunner hesitated. “If Ray would let me take the hatchet, I could kill

one all right.”

Mrs. Tellamantez smiled and said something to Johnny in Spanish.

“Yes,” her husband replied, translating, “they say in Mexico, kill a

snake but never hurt his feelings. Down in the hot country,

_muchacha_,” turning to Thea, “people keep a pet snake in the house to

kill rats and mice. They call him the house snake. They keep a little

mat for him by the fire, and at night he curl up there and sit with the

family, just as friendly!”

Gunner sniffed with disgust. “Well, I think that’s a dirty Mexican way

to keep house; so there!”

Johnny shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps,” he muttered. A Mexican learns

to dive below insults or soar above them, after he crosses the border.

By this time the south wall of the amphitheater cast a narrow shelf of

shadow, and the party withdrew to this refuge. Ray and Johnny began to

talk about the Grand Canyon and Death Valley, two places much shrouded

in mystery in those days, and Thea listened intently. Mrs. Tellamantez

took out her drawn-work and pinned it to her knee. Ray could talk well

about the large part of the continent over which he had been knocked

about, and Johnny was appreciative.

“You been all over, pretty near. Like a Spanish boy,” he commented

respectfully.

Ray, who had taken off his coat, whetted his pocketknife thoughtfully

on the sole of his shoe. “I began to browse around early. I had a mind

to see something of this world, and I ran away from home before I was

twelve. Rustled for myself ever since.”

“Ran away?” Johnny looked hopeful. “What for?”

“Couldn’t make it go with my old man, and didn’t take to farming. There

were plenty of boys at home. I wasn’t missed.”

Thea wriggled down in the hot sand and rested her chin on her arm.

“Tell Johnny about the melons, Ray, please do!”

Ray’s solid, sunburned cheeks grew a shade redder, and he looked

reproachfully at Thea. “You’re stuck on that story, kid. You like to

get the laugh on me, don’t you? That was the finishing split I had with

my old man, John. He had a claim along the creek, not far from Denver,

and raised a little garden stuff for market. One day he had a load of

melons and he decided to take ’em to town and sell ’em along the

street, and he made me go along and drive for him. Denver wasn’t the

queen city it is now, by any means, but it seemed a terrible big place

to me; and when we got there, if he didn’t make me drive right up

Capitol Hill! Pap got out and stopped at folkses houses to ask if they

didn’t want to buy any melons, and I was to drive along slow. The

farther I went the madder I got, but I was trying to look unconscious,

when the end-gate came loose and one of the melons fell out and

squashed. Just then a swell girl, all dressed up, comes out of one of

the big houses and calls out, ‘Hello, boy, you’re losing your melons!’

Some dudes on the other side of the street took their hats off to her

and began to laugh. I couldn’t stand it any longer. I grabbed the whip

and lit into that team, and they tore up the hill like jack-rabbits,

them damned melons bouncing out the back every jump, the old man

cussin’ an’ yellin’ behind and everybody laughin’. I never looked

behind, but the whole of Capitol Hill must have been a mess with them

squashed melons. I didn’t stop the team till I got out of sight of

town. Then I pulled up an’ left ’em with a rancher I was acquainted

with, and I never went home to get the lickin’ that was waitin’ for me.

I expect it’s waitin’ for me yet.”

Thea rolled over in the sand. “Oh, I wish I could have seen those

melons fly, Ray! I’ll never see anything as funny as that. Now, tell

Johnny about your first job.”

Ray had a collection of good stories. He was observant, truthful, and

kindly—perhaps the chief requisites in a good story-teller.

Occasionally he used newspaper phrases, conscientiously learned in his

efforts at self-instruction, but when he talked naturally he was always

worth listening to. Never having had any schooling to speak of, he had,

almost from the time he first ran away, tried to make good his loss. As

a sheep-herder he had worried an old grammar to tatters, and read

instructive books with the help of a pocket dictionary. By the light of

many camp-fires he had pondered upon Prescott’s histories, and the

works of Washington Irving, which he bought at a high price from a

book-agent. Mathematics and physics were easy for him, but general

culture came hard, and he was determined to get it. Ray was a

freethinker, and inconsistently believed himself damned for being one.

When he was braking, down on the Santa Fé, at the end of his run he

used to climb into the upper bunk of the caboose, while a noisy gang

played poker about the stove below him, and by the roof-lamp read

Robert Ingersoll’s speeches and “The Age of Reason.”

Ray was a loyal-hearted fellow, and it had cost him a great deal to

give up his God. He was one of the stepchildren of Fortune, and he had

very little to show for all his hard work; the other fellow always got

the best of it. He had come in too late, or too early, on several

schemes that had made money. He brought with him from all his

wanderings a good deal of information (more or less correct in itself,

but unrelated, and therefore misleading), a high standard of personal

honor, a sentimental veneration for all women, bad as well as good, and

a bitter hatred of Englishmen. Thea often thought that the nicest thing

about Ray was his love for Mexico and the Mexicans, who had been kind

to him when he drifted, a homeless boy, over the border. In Mexico, Ray

was Señor Ken-áy-dy, and when he answered to that name he was somehow a

different fellow. He spoke Spanish fluently, and the sunny warmth of

that tongue kept him from being quite as hard as his chin, or as narrow

as his popular science.

While Ray was smoking his cigar, he and Johnny fell to talking about

the great fortunes that had been made in the Southwest, and about

fellows they knew who had “struck it rich.”

“I guess you been in on some big deals down there?” Johnny asked

trustfully.

Ray smiled and shook his head. “I’ve been out on some, John. I’ve never

been exactly in on any. So far, I’ve either held on too long or let go

too soon. But mine’s coming to me, all right.” Ray looked reflective.

He leaned back in the shadow and dug out a rest for his elbow in the

sand. “The narrowest escape I ever had, was in the Bridal Chamber. If I

hadn’t let go there, it would have made me rich. That was a close

call.”

Johnny looked delighted. “You don’ say! She was silver mine, I guess?”

“I guess she was! Down at Lake Valley. I put up a few hundred for the

prospector, and he gave me a bunch of stock. Before we’d got anything

out of it, my brother-in-law died of the fever in Cuba. My sister was

beside herself to get his body back to Colorado to bury him. Seemed

foolish to me, but she’s the only sister I got. It’s expensive for dead

folks to travel, and I had to sell my stock in the mine to raise the

money to get Elmer on the move. Two months afterward, the boys struck

that big pocket in the rock, full of virgin silver. They named her the

Bridal Chamber. It wasn’t ore, you remember. It was pure, soft metal

you could have melted right down into dollars. The boys cut it out with

chisels. If old Elmer hadn’t played that trick on me, I’d have been in

for about fifty thousand. That was a close call, Spanish.”

“I recollec’. When the pocket gone, the town go bust.”

“You bet. Higher’n a kite. There was no vein, just a pocket in the rock

that had sometime or another got filled up with molten silver. You’d

think there would be more somewhere about, but _nada_. There’s fools

digging holes in that mountain yet.”

When Ray had finished his cigar, Johnny took his mandolin and began

Kennedy’s favorite, “Ultimo Amor.” It was now three o’clock in the

afternoon, the hottest hour in the day. The narrow shelf of shadow had

widened until the floor of the amphitheater was marked off in two

halves, one glittering yellow, and one purple. The little boys had come

back and were making a robbers’ cave to enact the bold deeds of Pedro

the bandit. Johnny, stretched gracefully on the sand, passed from

“Ultimo Amor” to “Fluvia de Oro,” and then to “Noches de Algeria,”

playing languidly.

Every one was busy with his own thoughts. Mrs. Tellamantez was thinking

of the square in the little town in which she was born; of the white

church steps, with people genuflecting as they passed, and the

round-topped acacia trees, and the band playing in the plaza. Ray

Kennedy was thinking of the future, dreaming the large Western dream of

easy money, of a fortune kicked up somewhere in the hills,—an oil well,

a gold mine, a ledge of copper. He always told himself, when he

accepted a cigar from a newly married railroad man, that he knew enough

not to marry until he had found his ideal, and could keep her like a

queen. He believed that in the yellow head over there in the sand he

had found his ideal, and that by the time she was old enough to marry,

he would be able to keep her like a queen. He would kick it up from

somewhere, when he got loose from the railroad.

Thea, stirred by tales of adventure, of the Grand Canyon and Death

Valley, was recalling a great adventure of her own. Early in the summer

her father had been invited to conduct a reunion of old frontiersmen,

up in Wyoming, near Laramie, and he took Thea along with him to play

the organ and sing patriotic songs. There they stayed at the house of

an old ranchman who told them about a ridge up in the hills called

Laramie Plain, where the wagon-trails of the Forty-niners and the

Mormons were still visible. The old man even volunteered to take Mr.

Kronborg up into the hills to see this place, though it was a very long

drive to make in one day. Thea had begged frantically to go along, and

the old rancher, flattered by her rapt attention to his stories, had

interceded for her.

They set out from Laramie before daylight, behind a strong team of

mules. All the way there was much talk of the Forty-niners. The old

rancher had been a teamster in a freight train that used to crawl back

and forth across the plains between Omaha and Cherry Creek, as Denver

was then called, and he had met many a wagon train bound for

California. He told of Indians and buffalo, thirst and slaughter,

wanderings in snowstorms, and lonely graves in the desert.

The road they followed was a wild and beautiful one. It led up and up,

by granite rocks and stunted pines, around deep ravines and echoing

gorges. The top of the ridge, when they reached it, was a great flat

plain, strewn with white boulders, with the wind howling over it. There

was not one trail, as Thea had expected; there were a score; deep

furrows, cut in the earth by heavy wagon wheels, and now grown over

with dry, whitish grass. The furrows ran side by side; when one trail

had been worn too deep, the next party had abandoned it and made a new

trail to the right or left. They were, indeed, only old wagon ruts,

running east and west, and grown over with grass. But as Thea ran about

among the white stones, her skirts blowing this way and that, the wind

brought to her eyes tears that might have come anyway. The old rancher

picked up an iron ox-shoe from one of the furrows and gave it to her

for a keepsake. To the west one could see range after range of blue

mountains, and at last the snowy range, with its white, windy peaks,

the clouds caught here and there on their spurs. Again and again Thea

had to hide her face from the cold for a moment. The wind never slept

on this plain, the old man said. Every little while eagles flew over.