TOURIST NEIGHBORS
The crying of the baby across the aisle awakened Polly at dawn the next
morning. At first she could hardly think where she was, with the motion
of the train still lulling her, and her body somewhat cramped from the
night’s reclining on the seat.
The other girls were still sleeping, but she met Jean coming from the
wash-room.
“I found out from the conductor that we stop at Fort Wayne long enough
to get some cocoa and fresh fruit, if you girls want it,” Jean told her.
“We can get more in Chicago, when we change cars.”
By the time the train pulled into the Fort Wayne depot, the girls were
dressed and “freshened up,” as Ruth said, and had even helped to
“freshen up” the twins.
“Are you going ’way out to Chicago, too?” asked Sue, of the mother.
“We’re bound farther than that,” she smiled back tiredly. “We’re
homesteaders. My husband is to meet us at Omaha. His health broke down
two years ago at the wood-pulp mills down in Virginia, so he went West,
and took up a claim in Wyoming, and he’s got along so well. First he
stayed out six months, then came back home for the winter, and his
brother worked the claim. Then he went back in April. That’s a year ago.
He hasn’t even seen the baby yet, and she’s so smart! She’s got five
teeth, and can stand all by herself if you just steady her a little
bit.”
“My, won’t he be surprised,” Sue said, happily. “We’re going to Wyoming
too, just for a vacation. We go as far as Deercroft.”
“That’s northeast, isn’t it? Our place is farther along towards Cody.
Seems good to talk to somebody. I haven’t seen a soul I knew since we
left Washington. I’ve enjoyed you girls being so close to me. I like to
hear you all laughing.”
“Don’t you know any one out West here?” Polly leaned forward to say.
“Nobody except my husband and his brother Joe.”
“Aren’t women terribly brave people, Miss Murray?” Ruth said softly,
over in the far seat. “Think of her making this long trip just because
it’s the best thing to do for her husband.”
Jean smiled, and there was a dreamy look in her eyes, as she remembered
tales her own mother had told of the women who followed the long trail
West for love and duty.
“For better, for worse, Ruth,” she quoted, gently.
“Like Miss Diantha,” Ruth replied.
“Mrs. Sandy, you mean. Nobody ever calls her Miss Diantha now.”
“Don’t you suppose it would please her if we did? Maybe she still loves
Queen’s Ferry and the old Hall, Miss Murray.”
“But she loves ‘Sandy’ better, Ruth.”
“Do you know,” interrupted Isabel suddenly. “I don’t think this scenery
is so very different from ours.”
“I do,” Ted said flatly. “There are no blue mountain lines banked up
against the sky, and the earth looks kind of yellow. And where it is dry
it seems very, very dry, and where it is swampy, it is awfully swampy. I
never saw such swampy looking swamp as we passed going through these
Indiana woods.”
“Wait until we find ourselves out in the prairie lands, and the corn
fields rise around for miles and miles, and the wheat looks like a
golden ocean.”
“When will we be there, Miss Murray?”
“When you open your eyes to-morrow morning, and cross Iowa and Nebraska.
We’re cutting across Indiana now, and will reach Chicago about
eleven-twenty.”
“It all seems like a dream,” Polly exclaimed. “Isn’t it queer, the
feeling you have when things come true that you’ve always hoped might? I
love to talk to Mrs. Timony—that’s the mother of the twins, you know.”
“We didn’t know. Thank you, Polly,” murmured Sue. “Doesn’t it just suit
the twins? What are their names? I’ve been calling them Sis and Buddy
ever since we left Washington.”
“Name’s Lafayette,” explained the boy twin, soberly. “Her name’s
Columbia,” pointing a moist forefinger at his sister.
“They sort of went together,” Mrs. Timony said, peacefully. “But we do
call them Sis and Buddy ’most all the time. The baby’s name’s just
Faith.”
“I like that,” Ruth put in gravely. “I think people should be careful
how they name children. Suppose one of the twins got on a track, and you
wanted to call it away quickly. How could you say, ‘Come, Lafayette,
Lafayette, Lafayette!’ It would be run over before any one could get the
name all out. A short name is much better.”
“Maybe, but it’s something to have a name to live up to,” answered
little Mrs. Timony, smiling restfully.
“She won’t mind living out on a new three hundred and sixty acre claim,”
Miss Murray said, as they watched the little mother stroll down the
aisle, when the train halted at a station. “She will take a world of
comfort out of sentiment, girls. She will forget entirely the bother
little Buddy is, as she thinks what sort of a State Senator he’ll be
when he grows up. It’s beautiful to be built like that.”
Isabel had struck up a pleasant friendship with the invalid girl, who
was bound for Colorado, and was to change cars at Omaha. Isabel promised
to help her with her two suit-cases, when they reached Chicago, and Sue
said she would carry Isabel’s in exchange.
“Why do the little pools of water, and even the brooks, look blue and
purple along the edges?” asked Ted, who spent most of the time looking
out of the window. “They look like a gas flame.”
“We are getting into the gas country, Ted,” Jean said. “Gas and oil
wells stretch all along this northern edge of Indiana and Illinois. If
it were night, you would see the huge oil torches blazing here and there
in the darkness like the old Roman flambeaux. Wait till you see the Big
Sea Water to the north in a little while.”
“Lake Michigan?” Sue asked, eagerly. “That was what Hiawatha’s people
called it, wasn’t it? Oh, Polly, that makes me think, are you sure you
can buy those Indian baskets and things for Mrs. Yates up where we are
going?”
“Probably not around us,” Jean replied, when Polly had explained. “We
have no near-by Indian villages. You know that is all done away with
now, girls. You are coming to the new West. But Sally Lost Moon will
know about it. She is our cook at the ranch, and is an old Shoshone
squaw. Our Wyoming tribes are not as artistic as the Adirondack Indians
and the Navajos, but we may find some good bead work. It was nice of her
to offer, was it not, girls?”
“She is interested in us because she used to be a Calvert girl herself.”
“But, Polly,” protested Ted, suddenly, “she must be about forty. Maybe
she knew Miss Diantha Calvert.”
Jean laughed.
“You girls will persist in weaving a romance and a mystery about Mrs.
Sandy, and I honestly think the only trouble is her marrying a westerner
against her sister’s wishes.”
“There’s more than that,” Polly declared, over the curly tousled hair of
Columbia. “I’m going to find out.”
“You won’t from Mrs. Sandy,” Jean said. “She’s a Calvert, you must
remember, and they never tell secrets.”
“But I’ll find out from Mr. Sandy himself,” Polly returned buoyantly.
Chicago was reached and passed almost before the girls realized it.
There was the first vivid flash of the blue waters of Lake Michigan, and
its flat, rockless beaches, with bunches of willow and sand-cherry trees
here and there, and patches of the tall, sharp-pointed sword grass. Then
they slipped into the city, and there came the rush and jostle of crowds
at the changing of trains. Isabel helped her invalid girl, and Polly and
Ruth were with Mrs. Timony and the babies, and Sue and Ted helped the
excited old lady who wasn’t sure whether her son Dan lived at Keokuk or
Osceola.
“It must be Osceola,” declared Sue, finally, “because Keokuk’s the other
way.”
“Ain’t any business a-livin’ in any such outlandish place anyhow,”
declared Dan’s mother, stoutly, as she fanned herself, and smelled at a
bottle of lavender salts. “And he should have met me here too. He never
did have any consideration for his mother.”
“Didn’t you say you were going out to live with him?” asked Ted.
“Doesn’t that prove he loves his mother?”
“Well, mebbe it does. Danny’s sort of pindling in small matters, and
rises to the heights in others. You can depend on him. I guess it was
Osceola, after all. He wrote it down for me. It’s in that handbag—no,
’tain’t. It’s in that basket, or—, wait, here it is right in my
pocketbook. Osceola. Kind of a pretty name, ain’t it, now?”
“Girls, you must make haste,” called Miss Murray, and they hurried the
old lady on her journey, while all she did was talk about Danny at
Osceola, and alternately blame and praise him.
“It looks as if all Illinois were turned into corn and wheat fields,”
said Polly, that afternoon, after miles and miles of the tender green,
and beautiful, feathery corn tassels had been passed. “There’s so much
of the same thing on one place out West here, isn’t there, Miss Murray?”
“Now, girls, isn’t that just like Polly!” laughed Jean.
“But I mean it. Down in Virginia the land is in patches. A corn field
here, over there rye, and then a break of woodland. But out here it’s
all the same thing for miles and miles.”
“Polly Page,” exclaimed Ted suddenly, coming back from the water cooler
at the end of the car, “I’ve just been talking to the conductor, and he
says that we took on three coaches of real homeseekers in Chicago. I
didn’t know that. I’d love to see them.”
“There’s nothing to see, Ted, dear,” Jean told her. “If we could look in
the hearts and read the stories there, it would be worth while, but this
way you’d only see a lot of ordinary travelers.”
“Aren’t they immigrants?”
“Immigrants? Ted! How much you girls have to learn. I don’t know how I
can tell it to you in a few words, but if you had lived out in a large,
new, unsettled State, you would know that the hope of its future lies in
its blessed homeseekers. Where do they come from? Where don’t they, you
mean, Polly. They are people who really need a home, who love the open,
and the new land, and the chance of making good, as we say out West
here. It is hard for you who have lived in the old States to get that
point of view, but there lives to-day in the hearts and souls of our
western homeseekers the essence of the old pioneer spirit.”
“Are they farmers?” asked Ruth practically.
“Farmers! Oh, Ruth, listen. Father and Arch and myself were at the great
land-drawing in South Dakota, several years ago, and I wish you could
have seen the ‘nesters’ then. A little girl like my sister Peggie drew
the numbers, and I know a young girl got the best of the lot. Up in our
section even, there is one school-teacher from New York State, who is
making a success out of her homestead. Her mother and two younger
sisters are with her. Right next to her is old Rattlesnake Bill Perkins.
He used to be a scout, and then a trapper, in the old days. Now, he has
settled down, and has a sugar-beet farm, and is raising sheep too.”
“Seems to me as if out West here, you never stop to fret,” Polly
exclaimed. “When one thing changes, you just change too.”
“We have to, or be left behind in the race,” said Jean simply. “But
we’re all of us pretty wide awake, Polly. We have not had time to sleep
as much as you do when in the Old Dominion.”
It was the next day when they began to see hills, and even before the
gray and violet shadows along the western horizon took shape, the train
turned into the rolling prairie land. For miles there was not a single
tree; nothing but the limitless, billowy sea of sunburnt yellow grass,
with now and then a bleaching skull. Sometimes, they would pass a
grazing herd, with a solitary figure on horseback. If it happened to be
a boy, he would rise in the stirrups, and let out a whoop of welcome at
the train as it flashed by.
The towns seemed like villages, so small were the houses, and all of
wood, and brightly painted. “Like Noah’s Ark towns,” Ted said,
laughingly. Even the trees looked new and precise, set out along the
newly paved streets. But finally, the shadows that trailed low like
clouds took form, and here and there a cone separated itself from the
mass, only to be lost again in the blue distances.
Mr. Timony joined his family at Omaha. He was a tall, lean, sunburnt
looking man, with happy eyes, and a habit of rubbing his bare chin. The
baby seemed to know her father by instinct, and Mrs. Timony was like a
busy mother robin, showing off her brood.
The invalid girl got off at Omaha, to change for the Colorado line, and
Isabel made her promise to let them know how she progressed. At Osceola,
Sue and Ted helped their charge off the train with all her bundles and
satchels, and she landed plump into Danny’s arms. Danny turned out to be
about forty, and weighed over two hundred pounds.
“Oh, Miss Murray, aren’t real people splendid?” Ted said, finally. “I
think they’re more account than anything else. They’re books and music
and everything, all at once. I’ve had so much fun on this trip, just
getting acquainted, and being interested.”
“Have you, Ted?” Jean smiled. “That’s because you have found out what my
mother calls the brotherhood of common folks. She says that when life is
all sifted down, we’re only a lot of little children holding hands, and
we must hold tight, or the next one to us falls down.”
“An endless chain of kindness,” Ruth added.
The lamps in the tourist car were being lighted. It was their last night
on the train. Outside, the country looked bare and scorched. Ted stared
out thoughtfully. And Polly began to sing softly under her breath.
“Guide me, oh, thou great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through this barren land,
I am weak, but thou art mighty,
Hold me in thy powerful hand.”
“That should be the homeseekers’ hymn, I think,” said Isabel; “that, and
‘Lead, Kindly Light.’”
“I like ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ better,” said Ted. “It must take a
lot of courage and hope to come out here and start all over again.”
“Faith, most of all, Ted,” Jean put in. “Mother says she used up pecks
of mustard seed before she caught sight of the promise fulfilled. That’s
a parable, so don’t look puzzled, Sue. But to those who really love it
and believe in it, our new West is more than a promised land. It is like
a great, brooding motherland, I think.”
“The twins are crying,” broke in Polly. “Let’s put them to sleep, girls.
It’s our last chance. Come on, Buddy boy.”
Buddy trotted across the aisle sleepily, and Ruth held out her arms to
Columbia.
“That’s real neighborly, thanks,” said Mr. Timony, with his slow,
surprised smile, and he settled back for a quiet chat with the baby’s
mother.
“It’s fun being neighborly, isn’t it, Polly?” Ruth said under her
breath. Polly only looked her answer. She had had more fun being
neighborly on this trip West as a second-class tourist than ever before.
She wondered what Aunty Welcome and the Admiral would say if they could
have seen her now.