I
Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those grey towns along the
Burlington railroad, which are so much greyer to-day than they were
then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its
hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere. Well known, that is
to say, to the railroad aristocracy of that time; men who had to do with
the railroad itself, or with one of the "land companies" which were its
by-products. In those days it was enough to say of a man that he was
"connected with the Burlington." There were the directors, the general
managers, vice-presidents, superintendents, whose names we all knew; and
their younger brothers or nephews were auditors, freight agents,
departmental assistants. Everyone "connected" with the Road, even the
large cattle and grain-shippers, had annual passes; they and their
families rode about over the line a great deal. There were then two
distinct social strata in the prairie States; the homesteaders and
hand-workers who were there to make a living, and the bankers and
gentlemen ranchers who came from the Atlantic seaboard to invest money
and to "develop our great West," as they used to tell us.
When the Burlington men were travelling back and forth on business not
very urgent, they found it agreeable to drop off the express and spend a
night in a pleasant house where their importance was delicately
recognized; and no house was pleasanter than that of Captain Daniel
Forrester, at Sweet Water. Captain Forrester was himself a railroad man,
a contractor, who had built hundreds of miles of road for the
Burlington,--over the sage brush and cattle country, and on up into the
Black Hills.
The Forrester place, as every one called it, was not at all remarkable;
the people who lived there made it seem much larger and finer than it
was. The house stood on a low round hill, nearly a mile east of town; a
white house with a wing, and sharp-sloping roofs to shed the snow. It
was encircled by porches, too narrow for modern notions of comfort,
supported by the fussy, fragile pillars of that time, when every honest
stick of timber was tortured by the turning-lathe into something
hideous. Stripped of its vines and denuded of its shrubbery, the house
would probably have been ugly enough. It stood close into a fine
cottonwood grove that threw sheltering arms to left and right and grew
all down the hillside behind it. Thus placed on the hill, against its
bristling grove, it was the first thing one saw on coming into Sweet
Water by rail, and the last thing one saw on departing.
To approach Captain Forrester's property, you had first to get over a
wide, sandy creek which flowed along the eastern edge of the town.
Crossing this by the foot-bridge or the ford, you entered the Captain's
private lane, bordered by Lombardy poplars, with wide meadows lying on
either side. Just at the foot of the hill on which the house sat, one
crossed a second creek by the stout wooden road-bridge. This stream
traced artless loops and curves through the broad meadows that were half
pasture land, half marsh. Any one but Captain Forrester would have
drained the bottom land and made it into highly productive fields. But
he had selected this place long ago because it looked beautiful to him,
and he happened to like the way the creek wound through his pasture,
with mint and joint-grass and twinkling willows along its banks. He was
well off for those times, and he had no children. He could afford to
humour his fancies.
When the Captain drove friends from Omaha or Denver over from the
station in his democrat wagon, it gratified him to hear these gentlemen
admire his fine stock, grazing in the meadows on either side of his
lane. And when they reached the top of the hill, it gratified him to see
men who were older than himself leap nimbly to the ground and run up the
front steps as Mrs. Forrester came out on the porch to greet them. Even
the hardest and coldest of his friends, a certain narrow-faced Lincoln
banker, became animated when he took her hand, tried to meet the gay
challenge in her eyes and to reply cleverly to the droll word of
greeting on her lips.
She was always there, just outside the front door, to welcome their
visitors, having been warned of their approach by the sound of hoofs and
the rumble of wheels on the wooden bridge. If she happened to be in the
kitchen, helping her Bohemian cook, she came out in her apron, waving a
buttery iron spoon, or shook cherry-stained fingers at the new arrival.
She never stopped to pin up a lock; she was attractive in dishabille,
and she knew it. She had been known to rush to the door in her
dressing-gown, brush in hand and her long black hair rippling over her
shoulders, to welcome Cyrus Dalzell, president of the Colorado & Utah;
and that great man had never felt more flattered. In his eyes, and in
the eyes of the admiring middle-aged men who visited there, whatever
Mrs. Forrester chose to do was "lady-like" because she did it. They
could not imagine her in any dress or situation in which she would not
be charming. Captain Forrester himself, a man of few words, told Judge
Pommeroy that he had never seen her look more captivating than on the
day when she was chased by the new bull in the pasture. She had
forgotten about the bull and gone into the meadow to gather wild
flowers. He heard her scream, and as he ran puffing down the hill, she
was scudding along the edge of the marshes like a hare, beside herself
with laughter, and stubbornly clinging to the crimson parasol that had
made all the trouble.
Mrs. Forrester was twenty-five years younger than her husband, and she
was his second wife. He married her in California and brought her to
Sweet Water a bride. They called the place home even then, when they
lived there but a few months out of each year. But later, after the
Captain's terrible fall with his horse in the mountains, which broke him
so that he could no longer build railroads, he and his wife retired to
the house on the hill. He grew old there,--and even she, alas! grew
older.