A VOICE IN THE NIGHT.
A ROUGH voice aroused Olive. She sprang up in terror and stood pressed
close against the piled up freight in the car. It was an odd-looking
figure she made, as though she had stepped out of a world several
hundred years younger than the present one. The coarse man who watched
her dimly felt it.
The girl's shoes were ragged and hardly covered her slender feet, her
skirt was torn and old. Over her shoulders hung a strange fur garment,
shapeless, save that a hole had been cut in the center for her head. Her
beautiful black hair was braided and one long plait hung over each
shoulder; her head was uncovered and her delicate face, with its pointed
chin, was deathly pale. She was trembling. Dark shadows encircled her
great black eyes and there was a look not of defiance but of pleading in
them.
So picturesque a passenger had never before stolen a ride on a modern
freight train. She belonged to the days of the pioneer settlers in the
new land of America.
"How did you come here?" the man demanded gruffly.
Olive's voice shook. She had thought it would be easy to tell her story,
if she could only get away from the Indians, but this fierce man
frightened her more than any one of them could have done. What must she
say? Where could she begin with the tale of her misfortunes.
"I stole in, when the train stopped a while ago, I don't just know
when," Olive answered vaguely. She could not tell how long she had been
asleep.
"Then you'll git out the next time it stops, young Missie," the trainman
announced harshly. "I'd put you off right now, but we are already behind
time, because of a rascally Indian boy a piece up the road. Better stay
hid and not let our engineer catch sight of you, or he'd make it good
and hot for you. Maybe he would turn you over to the police."
Olive could not realize it, but her appearance had already touched her
discoverer. She crouched in her corner again and bowed her head in her
slim brown hands, as she had the day when the ranch girls brought her
out of Frieda's cave. She did not try to defend herself.
The trainman climbed up on a box and sat whittling a stick and watching
Olive out of a pair of shrewd Irish blue eyes. He was not a fierce man.
He had a wife and five tow-headed children, living in one of the little
frame shacks along the line of the railroad. The man was clever enough
to see that Olive was not an ordinary thief or impostor.
"Are you sick, girl?" the man inquired, surprised by Olive's silence.
The girl shook her head. "Oh, no, I am not sick, thank you," Olive
answered gently, "but I am very tired. I ran away from an Indian
encampment before dawn to-day. Would you mind telling me where this
train is going?"
Little by little Olive told the whole history of her strange life to the
Irishman, who sat on the box in the freight car and never ceased his
whittling for a moment.
"By St. Peter!" he muttered, when Olive finished replying to his last
question. "This girl tells a story that might have come out of a poetry
or a history book. The funny thing is, her story must be true! Oh,
well," he announced to himself, not to Olive, "there is one thing
certain. Nobody can ever make up in their heads such all-fired queer
things as happen every day."
But the man had not answered Olive's question as to where this train was
going. She had not the courage to ask him again.
By and by Olive saw little houses along the road and knew that their
train was nearing a small, western town. She got up and touched the
Irishman timidly on the arm. "May I get off at the station myself,
please?" she begged. "You won't have to put me off."
The man shook his head severely. "No, you are not going to get off
yourself," he returned gruffly, "and I ain't going to put you off
either. If you can keep on making yourself small, and you are a pretty
thin kind of a girl, I am going to take you farther down the road with
us. I have an idea this here freight train will run along somewhere near
Wolfville in the course of the afternoon. You have had such bad luck in
the past, Missie, that maybe your luck has changed. Anyhow, when you
butted blindly into this freight car, you found a coach going in just
about the way you needed to travel. Don't worry your head any more about
what you are to do. I'll put you off at Wolfville, and though it looks a
bit cloudy, as though it might mean to blow up a bit of snow, I expect
you'll manage to get back to the Ralston Ranch, somehow, before night."
Olive, satisfied that this kind-hearted stranger would look out for her,
dozed on, half waking and half sleeping. Neither she nor her new friend
knew how exhausted she was. She had passed through several weeks of
dreadful hardship, exposure and unhappiness, and now she felt too happy
to think or care because her head ached dully, and her legs shook so she
could hardly stand on them. She would be home soon with Frieda and Jean
and Jack!
Several hours went by. The trainman left the car and attended to his
duties. But Olive had entire faith that he would not forget her.
At a little past five o'clock in the afternoon the freight train came to
a stop near the little town of Wolfville, which was only a matter of ten
miles from Rainbow Ranch. The wind was blowing with a queer, ominous
rattling sound and a few flakes of snow were falling.
Olive's new friend gazed at her a little queerly, as he lifted her out
on the platform. There were no people in sight except the station
master, for it was almost dark and the stopping of a freight train was
of little interest.
"Sure you know how to get to your friends from here?" the Irishman asked
Olive. She took time to nod and wave her hand, then ran swiftly away
from the station in the direction of Rainbow Ranch.
If Olive had gone into the town, someone would have driven her to the
Lodge, or else sent word to Jim Colter or the Ralston girls that she was
in safe-keeping for the night. A prairie snowstorm was approaching and
few people would have cared to trust themselves to a ten-mile drive at
this hour of the winter evening.
But Olive did not think of further danger. Ten miles seemed to her to be
so near home that she could not bear a second's delay in trying to reach
there. For the first few miles she ran swiftly along, as she knew the
trail and it was not too dark to follow it. The stinging wind cut her
face and at times the snow blinded her. But the distance was only a
short walk for a girl who had spent all her life out of doors in the
great West. Yet Olive should have known what a snowstorm in Wyoming,
with a heavy pall of gray clouds and a scudding blast, meant.
After a while, her feet in her worn shoes felt like wooden pegs stumping
on the frozen earth. Her hands had lost all feeling, although she
managed to draw the rabbit-skin furs that Carlos had given her, over her
head and to keep her hands under them. The snow no longer fell in flakes
but in white sheets, lashed and driven by the force of the storm.
The trail across the plains to the Ralston Ranch was quickly hidden.
Mountains of snow piled up in front of Olive, deep gullies appeared at
her feet, where the land was usually as level as a table, and she had no
idea in which direction she should try to travel. But she fought her way
on, thinking perhaps that another wanderer might overtake her, or that
she might catch a glimpse of the lights of some ranch house. If she
could find an objective point ahead of her, she felt that she might get
to it. But to move blindly in a circle of snow, brought no hope of any
relief.
Yet Olive knew she must keep moving if she wished to live. She did not
suffer the same agony from the cold, that she had at first. The wind
blew her about, as though she had been a bit of paper. She staggered and
fell in the snowdrifts, got up and pressed on wishing that even a wild
animal would scurry past her on the way to its retreat. But animals are
always wiser than human beings before the approach of a storm. Every
head of cattle, every horse on the plains, every beast in the forest had
found a rude shelter. Olive felt herself entirely alone in a savage,
white world.
But in quiet natures like Olive's, there is a wonderful power of
resistance. She had endured so much, she had learned the fortitude that
comes with misfortune.
She prayed silently through the hours she struggled. There were moments
when she believed she spied the light of Rainbow Lodge gleaming on the
cruel surface of the snow. She would fight her way to this place, only
to discover that her own blind desire had led her astray.
Night came on, but there was little change from the twilight. The few
stars that broke through the clouds only made the way more blinding.
Olive's patience, Carlos' planning seemed to have been in vain.
Again Olive dreamed she saw some lights ahead of her. Her mind was no
longer clear. She could not remember why she was out alone in the snow.
She cried for Jack, when she had the strength, but the tears froze on
her face.
Olive reached out her arms toward her vision of the lights of Rainbow
Lodge. She was either too blind or too utterly spent to see the snowbank
in front of her, as suddenly it shut out her mirage of home. The girl
gave a cry of despair with all the feeble strength that was left in her
and tumbled headlong into the cold embrace of the snow. But the snow was
no longer cold. It was strangely warm and she was shut away from the
cruel winds.