GUESTS FOR THE METROPOLE
To Comanche there came that August afternoon, when it was wearing down
to long shadows, a mixed company, drawn from the far places and the
middle distances east of Wyoming. This company had assembled in the
course of the day's acquaintance on the last long, dusty run into the
land of expectations.
At dawn these people had left their comfortable sleeping-cars at
Chadron, in the Nebraska desert, to change to the train of archaic
coaches which transported the land-seekers across the last stretch of
their journey. Before that morning the company had been pursuing its way
as individual parts--all, that is, with the exception of the miller's
wife, from near Boston; the sister of the miller's wife, who was a widow
and the mother of June; and June, who was pasty and off-color, due to
much fudge and polishing in a young ladies' school.
These three traveled together, as three of such close relationship
naturally should travel. The widow was taking June to Wyoming to see if
she could put some marketable color in her cheeks, and the miller's wife
was going along for a belated realization, at least partially, of
youthful yearnings.
Since seventeen the miller's wife had longed to see the sun set behind a
mountain with snow upon it, and to see a cowboy with dust on his
shoulders, like the cowboys of the western drama, come riding out of the
glow, a speck at first, and on, and on, until he arrived where she
waited and flung himself from his panting horse, neckerchief awry, spurs
tinkling, and swept off his broad hat in salute. Beyond that point she
had not dared to go since marrying the miller, who had dust enough on
_his_ shoulders--unromantic dust, unromantic shoulders, goodness knows!
But that was her picture, all framed in the gold of her heart. She
wanted to see the mountain with the sun behind it, and the cowboy, and
all, and then she could sigh, and go back to the miller and near Boston
to await the prosaic end.
For all of her thirty-eight years Mrs. Dorothy Mann was shy in
proportion as her miller husband, the widely known J. Milton Mann was
bold. That he was a hard-mailed knight in the lists of business, and
that he was universally known, Mrs. Mann was ready to contend and uphold
in any company. She carried with her in the black bag which always hung
upon her arm certain poems bearing her husband's confession of
authorship, which had been printed in the _Millers' Journal_, all of
them calling public attention to the noble office of his ancient trade.
Of course the miller was not of the party, so we really have nothing
more to do with him than we have with the rest of the throng that
arrived on the train with these singled-out adventurers. But his
influence traveled far, like a shadow reaching out after the heart of
his spare, pert, large-eyed wife. She was not yet so far away from him
that she dared move even her eyes as her heart longed.
In the manner of the miller's wife, there was a restraint upon the most
commonplace and necessary intercourse with strangers which seemed almost
childish. She even turned in questioning indecision toward June's mother
before taking a seat offered her by a strange man, feeling at the same
time of the black bag upon her arm, where the poems reposed, as if to
beg indulgence from their author for any liberties which she might
assume.
June's mother, Mrs. Malvina Reed, widow of that great statesman, the
Hon. Alonzo Confucius Reed, who will be remembered as the author of the
notable bill to prohibit barbers breathing on the backs of their
customers' necks, was duenna of the party. She was a dumpy, small woman,
gray, with lines in her steamed face, in which all attempts at
rejuvenation had failed.
Mrs. Reed was a severe lady when it came to respecting the conventions
of polite life, and June was her heart's deep worry. She believed that
young woman to be in the first stage of a dangerous and mysterious
malady, which belief and which malady were alike nothing in the world
but fudge. When she turned her eyes upon June's overfed face a moisture
came into them; a sigh disturbed her breast.
By one of those strange chances, such as seem to us when we meet them
nothing short of preconceived arrangement, enough seats had been left
unoccupied in the rear coach, all in one place, to accommodate a second
party, which came straggling through with hand-baggage hooked upon all
its dependent accessories. It proved very pleasant for all involved.
There the June party scraped acquaintance with the others, after the
first restraint had been dissolved in a discussion of the virtues of
canned tomatoes applied to the tongue of one famishing in the desert.
First among the others was the bright-haired young woman from Canton,
Ohio, whose gray eyes seemed older than herself, lighting as if with new
hope every time they turned to acknowledge a good wish for her luck in
the new land. It seemed at such moments as if she quickened with the
belief that she was coming upon the track of something which she had
lost, and was in a way of getting trace of it again.
She sat up straight-backed as a saint in a cathedral window, but she
unbent toward June. June was not long in finding out that she, also, was
a product of grand old Molly Bawn, that mighty institution of learning
so justly famed throughout the world for its fudge; that her name was
Agnes Horton, and that she was going to register for a piece of land.
Some five years before June had matriculated, Agnes Horton had stepped
out, finished, from the halls of Molly Bawn.
"She's old," confided June to her mother's ear. "She must be at least
twenty-five!"
Old or young, she was handsomer than any other woman on the train, and
seemingly unaware of it as she leaned her elbow upon the dusty
window-sill and gazed out in pensive introspection upon the bleak land
where glaciers had trampled and volcanoes raged, each of them leaving
its waste of worn stone and blackened ledge.
And there was the school-teacher from Iowa; a long, thin string of a
man, who combed his hair straight back from his narrow, dished forehead
and said "idear." He was thinking seriously of sheep.
And there was the commissary sergeant from Fort Sheridan, which is
within the shadow of Chicago, German-faced, towering, broad. He blushed
as if scandalized every time a woman spoke to him, and he took Limburger
cheese and onions from his cloth telescope grip for his noonday lunch.
And there was the well-mannered manufacturer of tools, who came from
Buffalo, and his bald brother with him, who followed the law. There was
the insurance man from Kansas, who grinned when he wasn't talking and
talked when he didn't grin; and the doctor from Missouri, a large-framed
man with a worn face and anxious look, traveling westward in hope; and
the lumberman from Minnesota, who wore a round hat and looked meek, like
a secretary of a Y. M. C. A., and spat tobacco-juice out of the window.
All of these men, save the school-teacher and manufacturer, were more or
less failures, one way or another. Take the sergeant--Sergeant Schaefer,
and Jake was the name in front of that--for example. He had failed in
his examination for advancement to a commission, and blamed the
aristocracy of the army for it. He was disgusted with military life; and
to him a claim, especially Claim Number One, in the Indian Reservation
of Wyoming, looked like a haven of independence and peace.
There was the bald lawyer, too; a young man old from his honest cares, a
failure in the law because he could not square his conscience with its
practices. He was ready to quit it for an alfalfa-plot and a little
bunch of fat cattle--especially if he drew Number One.
Horace Bentley sighed when he looked back upon his struggles with the
world and the law. The law had been a saddle that galled his back
through many a heavy year. And his brother William, in need of a holiday
from his busy factory, had taken a month to himself to see "the boy," as
he called Horace, established in a new calling in the high-minded,
open-faced West.
As for the insurance solicitor and lumberman, it must be owned that they
were gamblers on the drawing. They meant to register and hang around for
the lottery. Then if they should draw Number One, or even anything up to
a hundred, they would sell out for what there was to be gained.
With Dr. Warren Slavens it was quite different from the case of these
purely adventurous speculators. Dr. Slavens had been late in getting a
start. It was not a difficulty peculiar to him alone that the start
always seemed a considerable distance ahead of him. Up to that time he
had been engaged with merely the preliminaries, and they had hobbled him
and cumbered him, and heaped up continually such a mass of matter to be
smoothed out of the way of his going, that he never had struck a canter
on the highway of life.
Of all the disheartened, blue, and beaten men on that dusty train that
dusty day, Dr. Warren Slavens, late of Missouri, was without question
the deepest down in the quagmire of failure. He hated himself for the
fizzle that he had made of it, and he hated the world that would not
open the gates and give him one straight dash for the goal among men of
his size.
He went frequently to the platform of the car and took a long pull at a
big, black pipe which he carried in a formidable leather case, like a
surgical instrument, in his inner pocket. After each pull at it he
returned with a redder face and a cloudier brow, ready to snap and snarl
like an under dog that believes every foot in the world is raised to
come down on his own ribs.
But there was nobody on that train who cared an empty sardine-can for
the doctor's failures or feelings. Nobody wanted to jab him in the ribs;
nobody wanted to hear his complaint. He was wise enough to know it, in a
way. So he kept to himself, pulling his shoulders up in soldierly
fashion when he passed Agnes Horton's place, or when he felt that she
was looking at him from her station directly behind his seat.
At any rate, up to the neck as he was in the bog of failure, the doctor
was going to Wyoming with a good many practical advantages ahead of
thousands of his fellows. Before turning doctor he had been a farmer's
boy; and he told himself that, failing in his solid determination to get
up to the starting-line in his profession, he believed he could do
pretty well at his older trade. But if he drew Claim Number One he meant
to sell it for ten thousand dollars--that being the current valuation
placed on first choice--and go back home to establish himself in dignity
and build up a practice.
The school-teacher hadn't much to say, but his cast was serious. He
expected to draw Number One, not to sell, but to improve, to put sheep
on, and alfalfa, and build a long barn with his name on the roof so that
it could be read from the railroad as the trains went by.
June's mother, being a widow, was eligible for the drawing. She also
meant to register. If she drew Number One--and she hadn't yet made up
her mind about the certainty of that--she intended to sell her
relinquishment and take June to Vienna for examination by an eminent
physician.
When anybody asked Agnes Horton what she intended to do with her
winnings out of the land lottery, she only smiled with that little
jumping of hope in her eyes. It was a marvel to the whole party what a
well set-up girl like her, with her refinement and looks and clothes,
wanted to fool her time away in Wyoming for, when the world was full of
men who would wear their hands raw to smooth a way for her feet to pass
in pleasanter places. But all of them could see that in her heart the
hope of Number One was as big as a can of tomatoes--in cowboy
literature--to the eyes of a man dying of thirst in Death Valley.
Only the toolmaker, William Bentley--and he was gray at the curling hair
which turned up at his broad temples--smiled as if he held it to be a
pleasant fantasy, too nebulous and far-away to be realized upon, when
any asked him of his intentions concerning Number One. He put off his
questioners with a pleasantry when they pressed him, but there was such
a tenderness in his eyes as he looked at his pale, bald brother, old in
honest ways before his time, that it was the same as spoken words.
So it will be seen that a great deal depended on Claim Number One, not
alone among the pleasant little company of ours, but in the calculations
of every man and woman out of the forty-seven thousand who would
register, ultimately, for the chance and the hope of drawing it.
At Casper a runner for the Hotel Metropole had boarded the train. He was
a voluble young man with a thousand reasons why travelers to the end of
the world and the railroad should patronize the Hotel Metropole and no
other. He sat on the arms of passengers' seats and made his argument,
having along with him a great quantity of yellow cards, each card
bearing a number, each good for an apartment or a cot in the open. By
payment of the rate, a person could secure his bed ahead of any need for
it which, said the young man, was the precaution of a wise ginny who was
on to his job. The train conductor vouched for the genuineness of the
young man's credentials, and conditions of things at Comanche as he
pictured them.
It was due to Sergeant Jake Schaefer that the company organized to mess
together. The hotel representative fell in with the idea with great
warmth. There was a large tent on the corner, just off Main Street,
which the company could rent, said he. A partition would be put in it
for the privacy of the ladies, and the hotel would supply the guests
with a stove and utensils. June's mother liked the notion. It relieved
her of a great worry, for with a stove of her own she could still
contrive those dainties so necessary to the continued existence of the
delicate child.
So the bargain was struck, the sergeant was placed in charge of the
conduct and supply of the camp, and everybody breathed easier. They had
anticipated difficulty over the matter of lodging and food in Comanche,
for wild tales of extortion and crowding, and undesirable conditions
generally, had been traveling through the train all day.
Comanche was quiet when the train arrived, for that was the part of the
day when the lull between the afternoon's activities and the night's
frantic reaping fell. Everyone who had arrived the day previous
accounted himself an old-timer, and all such, together with all the
arrivals of all the days since the registration began, came down to see
the tenderfeet swallow their first impressions of the coming Eden.
The Hotel Metropole was the only public house in Comanche that
maintained a conveyance to meet travelers at the station, and that was
for the transportation of their baggage only. For a man will follow his
belongings and stick to them in one place as well as another, and the
proprietor of the Metropole was philosopher enough to know that. So his
men with the wagon grabbed all the baggage they could wrench from, lift
from under, or pry out of the grasp of travelers when they stepped off
the train.
The June party saw their possessions loaded into the wagon, under the
loud supervision of Sergeant Schaefer, who had been in that country
before and could be neither intimidated, out-sounded, nor bluffed. Then,
following their traveling agent-guide, they pushed through the crowds to
their quarters.
Fortunate, indeed, they considered themselves when they saw how matters
stood in Comanche. There seemed to be two men for every cot in the
place. Of women there were few, and June's mother shuddered when she
thought of what they would have been obliged to face if they hadn't been
so lucky as to get a tent to themselves.
"I never would have got off that train!" she declared. "No, I never
would have brought my daughter into any such unprotected place as
this!"
Mrs. Reed looked around her severely, for life was starting to lift its
head again in Comanche after the oppression of the afternoon's heat.
Mrs. Mann smiled. She was beginning to take a comprehensive account of
the distance between Wyoming and the town near Boston where the miller
toiled in the gloom of his mill.
"I think it's perfectly lovely and romantic!" said she.
Mrs. Reed received the outburst with disfavor.
"Remember your husband, Dorothy Ann!" warned she.
Dorothy Ann sighed, gently caressing the black bag which dangled upon
her slender arm.
"I do, Malvina," said she.