_July 23rd. Cheyenne, Wyoming._
Alas, for our dreams of a comfortable journey home; alas for our
expectation of seeing the country; alas, too, for our hopes of saving
money for a fresh start in the world. We face mountains and desert with
nothing but a grim determination to win or die.
After we left Sydney, Mrs. Adams abandoned herself to a mounting
jealousy, which became increasingly evident to us all. The hours that I
was forced to spend with her behind the ambling mules, were torture. She
took advantage of every opportunity to annoy and humiliate me, so that
every atom of my patience and control was needed to avoid a scene. But
my best efforts availed nothing with the woman. We had been travelling
through a very sparsely settled region some twenty-five or thirty miles
east of Cheyenne when the affair came to a climax. About eleven o’clock
I left Mrs. Adams waiting in the country road while I called at a farm
house, which stood some distance away in a clump of trees. She had
refused to drive in as usual, but had ordered me to go in and trade for
or purchase some fresh eggs. When I reached the house no one was at
home, and after considerable search in the outbuildings, I returned
empty handed to the road, only to find the wagon gone. Dust was rising
in the distance and I could just see the black wagon top as the mules
pulled slowly over a rise.
My blood was boiling as I set off down the road at a jog trot, expecting
to overtake the slow-going mules in the first mile or so. I was within
hailing distance of the team when Mrs. Adams glanced back, whipped the
animals into a lively trot, and with an insulting gesture coolly
outdistanced me.
“Very well,” I said to myself, steadying my pace. “I’ll walk no further
than the first water. Then I’ll rest until night. Dan will come into
camp and miss me. He’ll take the buckboard and start hunting. And when
we finally come up with that woman there will be something doing.”
But water is scarce in that country, and at last I sat down in the
sparse shade of a clump of bushes to wait for a rescue. It came much
sooner than I expected, for it was not more than three o’clock when I
was roused from a light doze by a cheerful halloo and sprang up to see
Mr. Adams reining in the horses. He leaped down in a jiffy, brought out
the oozing canvas bag of water that he always carried in this desert
country and handed me a delicious draught.
“Get right into the rig, and I’ll unpack your lunch,” he exclaimed
solicitously, assisting me over the wheel. “I only learned of this
infernal outrage by accident. I landed a rather unusual order this
morning and, leaving your husband on the job to sketch the
preliminaries, drove back to meet the wagon and rush along the necessary
supplies. What was my surprise to find you missing. My wife and I had a
beautiful row while I was putting up this lunch and starting back to
look for you. She’s gone ahead now, to take that new lot of letters to
your husband.”
He had turned the team around as he spoke and was driving rapidly along
the western track. Then I looked up from my meal in surprise, for he had
swung into a narrow trail leading away to the north.
“What’s the idea?” I inquired. “Aren’t you taking the wrong turning?”
“There is a little spring up here a mile or so where we’ll stop to feed
and water the horses. They’ve been jogging pretty steadily since early
this morning.”
It was true. The poor beasts were in need of food and water, and I was
glad when we drew up at a tiny stream, which flowed through the bottom
of a ravine, where we could enjoy the protecting shade of a few
straggling willows. Mr. Adams unharnessed the sweat-stained animals,
allowed them a swallow or two of water and spread a flake of baled hay
for them to munch until cool enough to eat their grain. I had settled
myself beneath a tree and had just finished my lunch when he threw
himself down beside me.
“Ethel,” he began, “you are too fine a woman for the kind of life you
are leading. I love you, dear. Won’t you let me take you away and give
you all the beautiful things that belong to you?”
I gazed at him a moment in silence. “Aren’t you forgetting yourself, Mr.
Adams?” I inquired coldly. “How about your wife?”
“Oh, that woman. She is not my wife, and she has no hold on me whatever.
Why she was running an assignation house in Detroit when I picked her
up. Let her go back where she came from.”
“And you can live with a woman for more than two years, share the
burdens of the road, eat at the same campfire, travel with her as your
wife, and then dismiss her with a wave of the hand? You may consider
yourself free perhaps, but I am a married woman and, besides, I love my
husband.”
“You think you love him, no doubt, and maybe you do—now. But who knows
how long that love will last? You yourself admit that love is the only
legitimate basis for marriage. Your love for your husband may die
to-morrow as the love of thousands of other women has done. Love is free
as the wind, it comes and goes without reason, without warning, without
restraint.
“Now, I am rich. I flatter myself that I know the world. I will aid you
to a divorce and obtain one myself. After marriage we will travel, visit
Florence, Naples, drink in all the myriad beauties of the Old World. If
you have ambitions, I will help you to achieve. I will gratify your
tastes for music, art, literature; I will free those wonderful impulses
that throb beneath that calm exterior—those sensuous instincts to which
your lout of a husband is so totally oblivious.”
I sprang to my feet. “That will be all, if you please. Don’t say another
word.”
I busied myself with the horses. He placed their grain, then drew close
to me.
“My God, Ethel. I love you, girl, love you, do you hear? Give me just a
little chance, won’t you?”
He caught my hand and pressed it to his lips. I wrenched it away
roughly, and looked about in desperation. The long shadows of late
afternoon lay among the hills; the country was wild and rugged—not a
human habitation in sight. I was absolutely alone with this maniac. I
turned with resolute mien.
“See here, my friend. If you love me even half as much as you say you
do, you will cease your insulting proposals, hitch up this team and take
me back to civilisation. You will make me hate you, if you keep on as
you are doing.”
He stood motionless, staring at me with sombre eyes. Then, as I began to
place the harness on the horses, he came to my assistance, and together
we watered them and hitched them to the buckboard.
We drove home in silence and reached camp just as Dan came whistling
down the road. It was plain that my husband knew nothing of my desertion
by Mrs. Adams that morning, and I was in no condition to tell him
anything coherent. I stood like a wooden Indian as he seized me around
the waist with a bearlike hug.
“Good news,” he cried. “To-day’s work brings our credit with the old man
up to an even fifty dollars. Not so bad for a poor hobo, is it, now?”
He caught sight of my face and became all sympathy. “Why, sweetheart,
what’s the matter? Are you sick?”
“N-no, not sick exactly,” I faltered, with lips that persisted in
quivering a trifle.
“Well, you look awfully queer, some way. Has that old cat been bothering
you again?”
“Yes,” I murmured. “She’s pretty mean, and it’s been so hot, and I—oh, I
guess I’m about played out.”
He gently led me to a spot as far removed from the Adams’ camp as
possible, made a couple of trips to the wagons and brought back our
bedding, a few cooking utensils and some food for supper. Then he
induced me to lie down, while he built a fire and prepared the meal.
“Poor little girl,” he murmured. “I know all this is mighty rough on
you, but if I can only keep on as I’ve been doing for the past three
weeks, it won’t be so very long till we can ride the cushions home in
comfort. Meantime, leave the old cat alone as much as possible, and try
not to take the situation too seriously.”
It seemed that I had scarcely fallen asleep when I was awakened by a
consciousness of something wrong. The night was dark, but judging from
the stars, it was about midnight. What was it that had aroused me? I lay
still and listened.
There came a tinkling of trace chains from the other side of the big
cattle pen where the Adams’ camp lay. Pshaw, it was only one of the
mules, nosing around the camp in search of fruit parings, as he often
did. I lay back reassured and dozed once more.
Again that premonition came; that peculiar instinct that thrills one
into vivid wakefulness in the midst of quiet slumber. Again I sat up
with a start. Again I heard mysterious noises from the direction of the
other camp. I took my husband by the arm.
“Dan, Dan,” I hissed. “Wake up. I hear something.”
He grunted, groaned, stretched himself and sat up. “What’s the matter,
Ethel?” he muttered sleepily.
“I don’t know what it is, but I feel sure there is something wrong. This
is the second time I’ve waked up feeling this way.”
“Something wrong! What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know what it is, but there is something the
matter at the Adams’ camp.”
“I don’t hear anything—you must have been dreaming——Don’t you feel well?
I’ll get you a drink of water.” He jumped up and searched around for a
cup.
“What’s the matter, folks? Did the noise disturb you?” It was the
cheerful voice of Mr. Adams.
“Oh, Ethel’s got a notion that the bugaboos are after her,” answered
Dan.
“She heard that mule, I suppose. Jack tried to get into the grain as
usual and got tangled in the harness. I just finished straightening him
out.”
“Anything I can do to help you, old man?” Dan called.
“No, thank you. Everything is all right now. Go back to bylo land and
never mind if you hear me fussing around. I’m going to take a
high-ball.”
Once more we lay down, and this time I slept soundly. I was awakened by
a shout from Dan, who had risen and dressed without disturbing me. The
sun was well up, but the camping ground was unaccountably silent. There
was no sound of cackling hens, or of stamping, munching horses and
mules; no smoke rose from the other side of the cattle pen.
“Ethel, Ethel,” Dan was calling. “Come here, quick.”
I wrapped a blanket about me and ran to him, then stopped in
consternation.
The California outfit was gone.
Gone also were our odds and ends of equipment, saved from the wreck of
the wheel, my emergency case, a change of clothing, all the groceries
and provisions that I had worked so hard to accumulate, and last, but
not least, gone were the fifty dollars, left in Mr. Adams’ hands for
safe keeping, over which we had been rejoicing the night before.
Dan was stamping about like a madman shouting, “I’ll kill the —— I’ll
get the law on him.”
He followed the wagon tracks to the main road, but it was impossible to
tell in which direction they had gone. As he returned, he picked up the
old battered canteen, given me by the ex-soldier as a keepsake, which
had evidently slipped from the wagon as it jolted over the uneven
ground.
Together we wandered back to our little camp. We still had our blankets,
a few cooking utensils, a partly used box of cocoa, a little sugar, part
of a can of sweetened condensed milk, and a few scrappy remains of the
evening meal.
After making an unsatisfactory breakfast, we cast up accounts to
determine our line of action. I had nearly five dollars in silver in a
concealed pocket in my clothing, and Dan had a few dollars also.
We were camped near the loading pen of a large cattle corral placed
beside a lonely railroad siding. We had no means of knowing where Adams
had gone; no way of pursuing him. We had no idea where to find the
sheriff of that county or other officer of the law. If we should succeed
in capturing the thieves, what sort of a case could we make against
them? We had no written agreement—not the scratch of a pen to show that
they owed us anything at all. And possession is nine points of the law.
Then, how could we live while waiting for results from the slow-moving
legal machinery? The case looked hopeless from every angle.
I told Dan about Mrs. Adams’ conduct the day before and something of the
affair with the man. He read me quite a lecture and then advised me to
forget the whole episode as quickly as possible. We had but one object
in life—to reach California as soon as fate would let us. We must
dismiss the California outfit from our minds—not speak of it again. But
one road lay open to us. We must have recourse to a “side-door Pullman.”
Bundles on backs, we struck out for a water tank, there to await the
coming of a freight. A long string of coal cars pulled in and stopped
for water. Dan’s request for a ride to Cheyenne was granted with the
proviso that we drop off before we reached the city. The brakeman spoke
to the engineer, who agreed to take advantage of a steep grade a few
miles east of town to slow down sufficiently for us to jump in safety,
adding that this would be our only chance, as trains always ran down the
further slope into the city at a high speed. We were forced to ride in a
gondola, which is a fairly warm place in a blazing sun. Mile after mile
we rode, and at last were warned of the approach to the hill. Crouching
at the end of the car, we waited for the speed to slacken.
Suddenly I noticed that the speed was increasing instead of diminishing,
and a glance ahead showed the engineer waving his arms frantically. The
brakeman bounded into the car.
“My God!” he yelled. “The super’s on behind and Buck daren’t slow down.
We’re over the hill. You’ll be pinched in Cheyenne, sure, and we’ll get
a sixty-day layoff, if we don’t all get the bounce.”
“We must jump for it, Dan,” I said. “There is no other way. And we’ll
have to be quick about it, too.”
Gathering my skirts in one hand, I clung to the side of the car with the
other and leaned far out and down. Dan begged me not to try it, but
followed my lead when he saw that I was determined to go. The earth
reeled by at a frightful speed, the wind lashed my face, the heavy
freight lurched from side to side with crash and roar, gathering
momentum with every turn of the wheels.
For a moment my courage failed and I hung motionless. Then with a
violent outward thrust of hand and arm, I made a sidelong leap. My feet
struck the gravelled path at the side of the rails with a thud, and
catching my stride, I ran clear. Dan was not so fortunate, but rolled
headlong down the embankment, landing in a clump of brush. In an instant
I reached his side and found him unhurt, but pale as a ghost from the
strain. Together we darted into the tall bushes and sank down, just as
the caboose swept by, with a man, evidently the superintendent referred
to by the brakeman, standing on the rear platform beside the conductor.
We were still a couple of miles from town, so, adjusting our packs, we
set off down the hot and dusty road. We had not walked far when a
teamster gave us a lift to our destination.
The only possible camping place was beside a small stream in a group of
trees at the south side of the town. While I made camp Dan went into
Cheyenne. About dusk he returned, whistling cheerfully, with the welcome
news of a job in the morning. He had also made a trip to the reservation
and delivered the note sent by our wayside acquaintance to his friend.
This man sent us a little brown tent, made in two pieces with folding
supports for convenience in carrying. It is called a “dog tent” by the
soldiers and formed a valuable addition to our equipment. It shelters
two persons comfortably and is so light that I could carry half besides
my usual load without serious inconvenience.
For a week now I have had leisure to wash and mend our clothes and
purchase a few necessities for the coming struggle with deserts and
mountains. Work is too scarce and wages too low to tempt us to remain
here in the hope of accumulating enough to take us home in proper
fashion.