The Song of the Lark

The “Ballade” took ten minutes, which was five minutes too long. The
audience grew restive and fell to whispering. Thea could hear Mrs.
Livery Johnson’s bracelets jangling as she fanned herself, and she
could hear her father’s nervous, ministerial cough. Thor behaved better
than any one else. When Thea bowed and returned to her seat at the back
of the stage there was the usual applause, but it was vigorous only
from the back of the house where the Mexicans sat, and from Ray
Kennedy’s _claqueurs_. Any one could see that a good-natured audience
had been bored.

Because Mr. Kronborg’s sister was on the programme, it had also been
necessary to ask the Baptist preacher’s wife’s cousin to sing. She was
a “deep alto” from McCook, and she sang, “Thy Sentinel Am I.” After her
came Lily Fisher. Thea’s rival was also a blonde, but her hair was much
heavier than Thea’s, and fell in long round curls over her shoulders.
She was the angel-child of the Baptists, and looked exactly like the
beautiful children on soap calendars. Her pink-and-white face, her set
smile of innocence, were surely born of a color-press. She had long,
drooping eyelashes, a little pursed-up mouth, and narrow, pointed
teeth, like a squirrel’s.

Lily began:—

“_Rock of Ages, cleft for me_, carelessly the maiden sang.”

Thea drew a long breath. That was the game; it was a recitation and a
song in one. Lily trailed the hymn through half a dozen verses with
great effect. The Baptist preacher had announced at the beginning of
the concert that “owing to the length of the programme, there would be
no encores.” But the applause which followed Lily to her seat was such
an unmistakable expression of enthusiasm that Thea had to admit Lily
was justified in going back. She was attended this time by Mrs. Livery
Johnson herself, crimson with triumph and gleaming-eyed, nervously
rolling and unrolling a sheet of music. She took off her bracelets and
played Lily’s accompaniment. Lily had the effrontery to come out with,
“She sang the song of Home, Sweet Home, the song that touched my
heart.” But this did not surprise Thea; as Ray said later in the
evening, “the cards had been stacked against her from the beginning.”
The next issue of the _Gleam_ correctly stated that “unquestionably the
honors of the evening must be accorded to Miss Lily Fisher.” The
Baptists had everything their own way.

After the concert Ray Kennedy joined the Kronborgs’ party and walked
home with them. Thea was grateful for his silent sympathy, even while
it irritated her. She inwardly vowed that she would never take another
lesson from old Wunsch. She wished that her father would not keep
cheerfully singing, “When Shepherds Watched,” as he marched ahead,
carrying Thor. She felt that silence would become the Kronborgs for a
while. As a family, they somehow seemed a little ridiculous, trooping
along in the starlight. There were so many of them, for one thing. Then
Tillie was so absurd. She was giggling and talking to Anna just as if
she had not made, as even Mrs. Kronborg admitted, an exhibition of
herself.

When they got home, Ray took a box from his overcoat pocket and slipped
it into Thea’s hand as he said goodnight. They all hurried in to the
glowing stove in the parlor. The sleepy children were sent to bed. Mrs.
Kronborg and Anna stayed up to fill the stockings.

“I guess you’re tired, Thea. You needn’t stay up.” Mrs. Kronborg’s
clear and seemingly indifferent eye usually measured Thea pretty
accurately.

Thea hesitated. She glanced at the presents laid out on the dining-room
table, but they looked unattractive. Even the brown plush monkey she
had bought for Thor with such enthusiasm seemed to have lost his wise
and humorous expression. She murmured, “All right,” to her mother, lit
her lantern, and went upstairs.

Ray’s box contained a hand-painted white satin fan, with pond lilies—an
unfortunate reminder. Thea smiled grimly and tossed it into her upper
drawer. She was not to be consoled by toys. She undressed quickly and
stood for some time in the cold, frowning in the broken looking glass
at her flaxen pig-tails, at her white neck and arms. Her own broad,
resolute face set its chin at her, her eyes flashed into her own
defiantly. Lily Fisher was pretty, and she was willing to be just as
big a fool as people wanted her to be. Very well; Thea Kronborg wasn’t.
She would rather be hated than be stupid, any day. She popped into bed
and read stubbornly at a queer paper book the drug-store man had given
her because he couldn’t sell it. She had trained herself to put her
mind on what she was doing, otherwise she would have come to grief with
her complicated daily schedule. She read, as intently as if she had not
been flushed with anger, the strange “Musical Memories” of the Reverend
H. R. Haweis. At last she blew out the lantern and went to sleep. She
had many curious dreams that night. In one of them Mrs. Tellamantez
held her shell to Thea’s ear, and she heard the roaring, as before, and
distant voices calling, “Lily Fisher! Lily Fisher!”

IX

Mr. Kronborg considered Thea a remarkable child; but so were all his
children remarkable. If one of the business men downtown remarked to
him that he “had a mighty bright little girl, there,” he admitted it,
and at once began to explain what a “long head for business” his son
Gus had, or that Charley was “a natural electrician,” and had put in a
telephone from the house to the preacher’s study behind the church.

Mrs. Kronborg watched her daughter thoughtfully. She found her more
interesting than her other children, and she took her more seriously,
without thinking much about why she did so. The other children had to
be guided, directed, kept from conflicting with one another. Charley
and Gus were likely to want the same thing, and to quarrel about it.
Anna often demanded unreasonable service from her older brothers; that
they should sit up until after midnight to bring her home from parties
when she did not like the youth who had offered himself as her escort;
or that they should drive twelve miles into the country, on a winter
night, to take her to a ranch dance, after they had been working hard
all day. Gunner often got bored with his own clothes or stilts or sled,
and wanted Axel’s. But Thea, from the time she was a little thing, had
her own routine. She kept out of every one’s way, and was hard to
manage only when the other children interfered with her. Then there was
trouble indeed: bursts of temper which used to alarm Mrs. Kronborg.
“You ought to know enough to let Thea alone. She lets you alone,” she
often said to the other children.

One may have staunch friends in one’s own family, but one seldom has
admirers. Thea, however, had one in the person of her addle-pated aunt,
Tillie Kronborg. In older countries, where dress and opinions and
manners are not so thoroughly standardized as in our own West, there is
a belief that people who are foolish about the more obvious things of
life are apt to have peculiar insight into what lies beyond the
obvious. The old woman who can never learn not to put the kerosene can
on the stove, may yet be able to tell fortunes, to persuade a backward
child to grow, to cure warts, or to tell people what to do with a young
girl who has gone melancholy. Tillie’s mind was a curious machine; when
she was awake it went round like a wheel when the belt has slipped off,
and when she was asleep she dreamed follies. But she had intuitions.
She knew, for instance, that Thea was different from the other
Kronborgs, worthy though they all were. Her romantic imagination found
possibilities in her niece. When she was sweeping or ironing, or
turning the ice-cream freezer at a furious rate, she often built up
brilliant futures for Thea, adapting freely the latest novel she had
read.

Tillie made enemies for her niece among the church people because, at
sewing societies and church suppers, she sometimes spoke vauntingly,
with a toss of her head, just as if Thea’s “wonderfulness” were an
accepted fact in Moonstone, like Mrs. Archie’s stinginess, or Mrs.
Livery Johnson’s duplicity. People declared that, on this subject,
Tillie made them tired.

Tillie belonged to a dramatic club that once a year performed in the
Moonstone Opera House such plays as “Among the Breakers,” and “The
Veteran of 1812.” Tillie played character parts, the flirtatious old
maid or the spiteful _intrigante_. She used to study her parts up in
the attic at home. While she was committing the lines, she got Gunner
or Anna to hold the book for her, but when she began “to bring out the
expression,” as she said, she used, very timorously, to ask Thea to
hold the book. Thea was usually—not always—agreeable about it. Her
mother had told her that, since she had some influence with Tillie, it
would be a good thing for them all if she could tone her down a shade
and “keep her from taking on any worse than need be.” Thea would sit on
the foot of Tillie’s bed, her feet tucked under her, and stare at the
silly text. “I wouldn’t make so much fuss, there, Tillie,” she would
remark occasionally; “I don’t see the point in it”; or, “What do you
pitch your voice so high for? It don’t carry half as well.”

“I don’t see how it comes Thea is so patient with Tillie,” Mrs.
Kronborg more than once remarked to her husband. “She ain’t patient
with most people, but it seems like she’s got a peculiar patience for
Tillie.”

Tillie always coaxed Thea to go “behind the scenes” with her when the
club presented a play, and help her with her make-up. Thea hated it,
but she always went. She felt as if she had to do it. There was
something in Tillie’s adoration of her that compelled her. There was no
family impropriety that Thea was so much ashamed of as Tillie’s
“acting” and yet she was always being dragged in to assist her. Tillie
simply had her, there. She didn’t know why, but it was so. There was a
string in her somewhere that Tillie could pull; a sense of obligation
to Tillie’s misguided aspirations. The saloon-keepers had some such
feeling of responsibility toward Spanish Johnny.

The dramatic club was the pride of Tillie’s heart, and her enthusiasm
was the principal factor in keeping it together. Sick or well, Tillie
always attended rehearsals, and was always urging the young people, who
took rehearsals lightly, to “stop fooling and begin now.” The young
men—bank clerks, grocery clerks, insurance agents—played tricks,
laughed at Tillie, and “put it up on each other” about seeing her home;
but they often went to tiresome rehearsals just to oblige her. They
were good-natured young fellows. Their trainer and stage-manager was
young Upping, the jeweler who ordered Thea’s music for her.

Though barely thirty, he had followed half a dozen professions, and had
once been a violinist in the orchestra of the Andrews Opera Company,
then well known in little towns throughout Colorado and Nebraska.

By one amazing indiscretion Tillie very nearly lost her hold upon the
Moonstone Drama Club. The club had decided to put on “The Drummer Boy
of Shiloh,” a very ambitious undertaking because of the many supers
needed and the scenic difficulties of the act which took place in
Andersonville Prison. The members of the club consulted together in
Tillie’s absence as to who should play the part of the drummer boy. It
must be taken by a very young person, and village boys of that age are
self-conscious and are not apt at memorizing. The part was a long one,
and clearly it must be given to a girl. Some members of the club
suggested Thea Kronborg, others advocated Lily Fisher. Lily’s partisans
urged that she was much prettier than Thea, and had a much “sweeter
disposition.” Nobody denied these facts. But there was nothing in the
least boyish about Lily, and she sang all songs and played all parts
alike. Lily’s simper was popular, but it seemed not quite the right
thing for the heroic drummer boy.

Upping, the trainer, talked to one and another: “Lily’s all right for
girl parts,” he insisted, “but you’ve got to get a girl with some
ginger in her for this. Thea’s got the voice, too. When she sings,
‘Just Before the Battle, Mother,’ she’ll bring down the house.”

When all the members of the club had been privately consulted, they
announced their decision to Tillie at the first regular meeting that
was called to cast the parts. They expected Tillie to be overcome with
joy, but, on the contrary, she seemed embarrassed. “I’m afraid Thea
hasn’t got time for that,” she said jerkily. “She is always so busy
with her music. Guess you’ll have to get somebody else.”

The club lifted its eyebrows. Several of Lily Fisher’s friends coughed.
Mr. Upping flushed. The stout woman who always played the injured wife
called Tillie’s attention to the fact that this would be a fine
opportunity for her niece to show what she could do. Her tone was
condescending.

Tillie threw up her head and laughed; there was something sharp and
wild about Tillie’s laugh—when it was not a giggle. “Oh, I guess Thea
hasn’t got time to do any showing off. Her time to show off ain’t come
yet. I expect she’ll make us all sit up when it does. No use asking her
to take the part. She’d turn her nose up at it. I guess they’d be glad
to get her in the Denver Dramatics, if they could.”

The company broke up into groups and expressed their amazement. Of
course all Swedes were conceited, but they would never have believed
that all the conceit of all the Swedes put together would reach such a
pitch as this. They confided to each other that Tillie was “just a
little off, on the subject of her niece,” and agreed that it would be
as well not to excite her further. Tillie got a cold reception at
rehearsals for a long while afterward, and Thea had a crop of new
enemies without even knowing it.

X

Wunsch and old Fritz and Spanish Johnny celebrated Christmas together,
so riotously that Wunsch was unable to give Thea her lesson the next
day. In the middle of the vacation week Thea went to the Kohlers’
through a soft, beautiful snowstorm. The air was a tender blue-gray,
like the color on the doves that flew in and out of the white
dove-house on the post in the Kohlers’ garden. The sand hills looked
dim and sleepy. The tamarisk hedge was full of snow, like a foam of
blossoms drifted over it. When Thea opened the gate, old Mrs. Kohler
was just coming in from the chicken yard, with five fresh eggs in her
apron and a pair of old top-boots on her feet. She called Thea to come
and look at a bantam egg, which she held up proudly. Her bantam hens
were remiss in zeal, and she was always delighted when they
accomplished anything. She took Thea into the sitting-room, very warm
and smelling of food, and brought her a plateful of little Christmas
cakes, made according to old and hallowed formulae, and put them before
her while she warmed her feet. Then she went to the door of the kitchen
stairs and called: “Herr Wunsch, Herr Wunsch!”

Wunsch came down wearing an old wadded jacket, with a velvet collar.
The brown silk was so worn that the wadding stuck out almost
everywhere. He avoided Thea’s eyes when he came in, nodded without
speaking, and pointed directly to the piano stool. He was not so
insistent upon the scales as usual, and throughout the little sonata of
Mozart’s she was studying, he remained languid and absent-minded. His
eyes looked very heavy, and he kept wiping them with one of the new
silk handkerchiefs Mrs. Kohler had given him for Christmas. When the
lesson was over he did not seem inclined to talk. Thea, loitering on
the stool, reached for a tattered book she had taken off the music-rest
when she sat down. It was a very old Leipsic edition of the piano score
of Gluck’s “Orpheus.” She turned over the pages curiously.

“Is it nice?” she asked.

“It is the most beautiful opera ever made,” Wunsch declared solemnly.
“You know the story, eh? How, when she die, Orpheus went down below for
his wife?”

“Oh, yes, I know. I didn’t know there was an opera about it, though. Do
people sing this now?”

“_Aber ja!_ What else? You like to try? See.” He drew her from the
stool and sat down at the piano. Turning over the leaves to the third
act, he handed the score to Thea. “Listen, I play it through and you
get the _rhythmus. Eins, zwei, drei, vier_.” He played through Orpheus’
lament, then pushed back his cuffs with awakening interest and nodded
at Thea. “Now, _vom blatt, mit mir_.”

“Ach, ich habe sie verloren,
All’ mein Glück ist nun dahin.”

Wunsch sang the aria with much feeling. It was evidently one that was
very dear to him.

“_Noch einmal_, alone, yourself.” He played the introductory measures,
then nodded at her vehemently, and she began:—

“Ach, ich habe sie verloren.”

When she finished, Wunsch nodded again. “_Schön_,” he muttered as he
finished the accompaniment softly. He dropped his hands on his knees
and looked up at Thea. “That is very fine, eh? There is no such
beautiful melody in the world. You can take the book for one week and
learn something, to pass the time. It is good to know—always.
_Euridice, Eu—ri—di—ce, weh dass ich auf Erden bin!_” he sang softly,
playing the melody with his right hand.

Thea, who was turning over the pages of the third act, stopped and
scowled at a passage. The old German’s blurred eyes watched her
curiously.

“For what do you look so, _immer?_” puckering up his own face. “You see
something a little difficult, may-be, and you make such a face like it
was an enemy.”

Thea laughed, disconcerted. “Well, difficult things are enemies, aren’t
they? When you have to get them?”

Wunsch lowered his head and threw it up as if he were butting
something. “Not at all! By no means.” He took the book from her and
looked at it. “Yes, that is not so easy, there. This is an old book.
They do not print it so now any more, I think. They leave it out,
may-be. Only one woman could sing that good.”

Thea looked at him in perplexity.

Wunsch went on. “It is written for alto, you see. A woman sings the
part, and there was only one to sing that good in there. You
understand? Only one!” He glanced at her quickly and lifted his red
forefinger upright before her eyes.

Thea looked at the finger as if she were hypnotized. “Only one?” she
asked breathlessly; her hands, hanging at her sides, were opening and
shutting rapidly.

Wunsch nodded and still held up that compelling finger. When he dropped
his hands, there was a look of satisfaction in his face.

“Was she very great?”

Wunsch nodded.

“Was she beautiful?”

“_Aber gar nicht!_ Not at all. She was ugly; big mouth, big teeth, no
figure, nothing at all,” indicating a luxuriant bosom by sweeping his
hands over his chest. “A pole, a post! But for the voice—_ach!_ She
have something in there, behind the eyes,” tapping his temples.

Thea followed all his gesticulations intently. “Was she German?”

“No, _Spanisch_.” He looked down and frowned for a moment. “_Ach_, I
tell you, she look like the Frau Tellamantez, some-thing. Long face,
long chin, and ugly al-so.”

“Did she die a long while ago?”

“Die? I think not. I never hear, anyhow. I guess she is alive somewhere
in the world; Paris, may-be. But old, of course. I hear her when I was
a youth. She is too old to sing now any more.”

“Was she the greatest singer you ever heard?”

Wunsch nodded gravely. “Quite so. She was the most—” he hunted for an
English word, lifted his hand over his head and snapped his fingers
noiselessly in the air, enunciating fiercely, “_künst-ler-isch!_” The
word seemed to glitter in his uplifted hand, his voice was so full of
emotion.

Wunsch rose from the stool and began to button his wadded jacket,
preparing to return to his half-heated room in the loft. Thea
regretfully put on her cloak and hood and set out for home.

When Wunsch looked for his score late that afternoon, he found that
Thea had not forgotten to take it with her. He smiled his loose,
sarcastic smile, and thoughtfully rubbed his stubbly chin with his red
fingers. When Fritz came home in the early blue twilight the snow was
flying faster, Mrs. Kohler was cooking _Hasenpfeffer_ in the kitchen,
and the professor was seated at the piano, playing the Gluck, which he
knew by heart. Old Fritz took off his shoes quietly behind the stove
and lay down on the lounge before his masterpiece, where the firelight
was playing over the walls of Moscow. He listened, while the room grew
darker and the windows duller. Wunsch always came back to the same
thing:—

“Ach, ich habe sie verloren,
…
Euridice, Euridice!”

From time to time Fritz sighed softly. He, too, had lost a Euridice.

XI

One Saturday, late in June, Thea arrived early for her lesson. As she
perched herself upon the piano stool,—a wobbly, old-fashioned thing
that worked on a creaky screw,—she gave Wunsch a side glance, smiling.
“You must not be cross to me to-day. This is my birthday.”

“So?” he pointed to the keyboard.

After the lesson they went out to join Mrs. Kohler, who had asked Thea
to come early, so that she could stay and smell the linden bloom. It
was one of those still days of intense light, when every particle of
mica in the soil flashed like a little mirror, and the glare from the
plain below seemed more intense than the rays from above. The sand
ridges ran glittering gold out to where the mirage licked them up,
shining and steaming like a lake in the tropics. The sky looked like
blue lava, forever incapable of clouds,—a turquoise bowl that was the
lid of the desert. And yet within Mrs. Kohler’s green patch the water
dripped, the beds had all been hosed, and the air was fresh with
rapidly evaporating moisture.

The two symmetrical linden trees were the proudest things in the
garden. Their sweetness embalmed all the air. At every turn of the
paths,—whether one went to see the hollyhocks or the bleeding heart, or
to look at the purple morning-glories that ran over the
bean-poles,—wherever one went, the sweetness of the lindens struck one
afresh and one always came back to them. Under the round leaves, where
the waxen yellow blossoms hung, bevies of wild bees were buzzing. The
tamarisks were still pink, and the flower-beds were doing their best in
honor of the linden festival. The white dove-house was shining with a
fresh coat of paint, and the pigeons were crooning contentedly, flying
down often to drink at the drip from the water tank. Mrs. Kohler, who
was transplanting pansies, came up with her trowel and told Thea it was
lucky to have your birthday when the lindens were in bloom, and that
she must go and look at the sweet peas. Wunsch accompanied her, and as
they walked between the flower-beds he took Thea’s hand.

“Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen,”—

he muttered. “You know that von Heine? _Im leuchtenden Sommermorgen?_”
He looked down at Thea and softly pressed her hand.

“No, I don’t know it. What does _flüstern_ mean?”

“_Flüstern?_—to whisper. You must begin now to know such things. That
is necessary. How many birthdays?”

“Thirteen. I’m in my ’teens now. But how can I know words like that? I
only know what you say at my lessons. They don’t teach German at
school. How can I learn?”

“It is always possible to learn when one likes,” said Wunsch. His words
were peremptory, as usual, but his tone was mild, even confidential.
“There is always a way. And if some day you are going to sing, it is
necessary to know well the German language.”

Thea stooped over to pick a leaf of rosemary. How did Wunsch know that,
when the very roses on her wall-paper had never heard it? “But am I
going to?” she asked, still stooping.

“That is for you to say,” returned Wunsch coldly. “You would better
marry some _Jacob_ here and keep the house for him, may-be? That is as
one desires.”

Thea flashed up at him a clear, laughing look. “No, I don’t want to do
that. You know,” she brushed his coat sleeve quickly with her yellow
head. “Only how can I learn anything here? It’s so far from Denver.”

Wunsch’s loose lower lip curled in amusement. Then, as if he suddenly
remembered something, he spoke seriously. “Nothing is far and nothing
is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human
life is little. There is only one big thing—desire. And before it, when
it is big, all is little. It brought Columbus across the sea in a
little boat, _und so weiter_.” Wunsch made a grimace, took his pupil’s
hand and drew her toward the grape arbor. “Hereafter I will more speak
to you in German. Now, sit down and I will teach you for your birthday
that little song. Ask me the words you do not know already. Now: _Im
leuchtenden Sommermorgen_.”

Thea memorized quickly because she had the power of listening intently.
In a few moments she could repeat the eight lines for him. Wunsch
nodded encouragingly and they went out of the arbor into the sunlight
again. As they went up and down the gravel paths between the
flowerbeds, the white and yellow butterflies kept darting before them,
and the pigeons were washing their pink feet at the drip and crooning
in their husky bass. Over and over again Wunsch made her say the lines
to him. “You see it is nothing. If you learn a great many of the
_Lieder_, you will know the German language already. _Weiter, nun_.” He
would incline his head gravely and listen.

“Im leuchtenden Sommermorgen
Geh’ ich im Garten herum;
Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen,
Ich aber, ich wandte stumm.

“Es flüstern und sprechen die Blumen
Und schau’n mitleidig mich an:
‘Sei unserer Schwester nicht böse,
Du trauriger, blasser Mann!’”

(In the soft-shining summer morning
I wandered the garden within.
The flowers they whispered and murmured,
But I, I wandered dumb.

The flowers they whisper and murmur,
And me with compassion they scan:
“Oh, be not harsh to our sister,
Thou sorrowful, death-pale man!”)

Wunsch had noticed before that when his pupil read anything in verse
the character of her voice changed altogether; it was no longer the
voice which spoke the speech of Moonstone. It was a soft, rich
contralto, and she read quietly; the feeling was in the voice itself,
not indicated by emphasis or change of pitch. She repeated the little
verses musically, like a song, and the entreaty of the flowers was even
softer than the rest, as the shy speech of flowers might be, and she
ended with the voice suspended, almost with a rising inflection. It was
a nature-voice, Wunsch told himself, breathed from the creature and
apart from language, like the sound of the wind in the trees, or the
murmur of water.

“What is it the flowers mean when they ask him not to be harsh to their
sister, eh?” he asked, looking down at her curiously and wrinkling his
dull red forehead.

Thea glanced at him in surprise. “I suppose he thinks they are asking
him not to be harsh to his sweetheart—or some girl they remind him of.”

“And why _trauriger, blasser Mann?_”

They had come back to the grape arbor, and Thea picked out a sunny
place on the bench, where a tortoise-shell cat was stretched at full
length. She sat down, bending over the cat and teasing his whiskers.
“Because he had been awake all night, thinking about her, wasn’t it?
Maybe that was why he was up so early.”

Wunsch shrugged his shoulders. “If he think about her all night
already, why do you say the flowers remind him?”

Thea looked up at him in perplexity. A flash of comprehension lit her
face and she smiled eagerly. “Oh, I didn’t mean ‘remind’ in that way! I
didn’t mean they brought her to his mind! I meant it was only when he
came out in the morning, that she seemed to him like that,—like one of
the flowers.”

“And before he came out, how did she seem?”

This time it was Thea who shrugged her shoulders. The warm smile left
her face. She lifted her eyebrows in annoyance and looked off at the
sand hills.

Wunsch persisted. “Why you not answer me?”

“Because it would be silly. You are just trying to make me say things.
It spoils things to ask questions.”

Wunsch bowed mockingly; his smile was disagreeable. Suddenly his face
grew grave, grew fierce, indeed. He pulled himself up from his clumsy
stoop and folded his arms. “But it is necessary to know if you know
some things. Some things cannot be taught. If you not know in the
beginning, you not know in the end. For a singer there must be
something in the inside from the beginning. I shall not be long in this
place, may-be, and I like to know. Yes,”—he ground his heel in the
gravel,—“yes, when you are barely six, you must know that already. That
is the beginning of all things; _der Geist, die Phantasie_. It must be
in the baby, when it makes its first cry, like _der Rhythmus_, or it is
not to be. You have some voice already, and if in the beginning, when
you are with things-to-play, you know that what you will not tell me,
then you can learn to sing, may-be.”

Wunsch began to pace the arbor, rubbing his hands together. The dark
flush of his face had spread up under the iron-gray bristles on his
head. He was talking to himself, not to Thea. Insidious power of the
linden bloom! “Oh, much you can learn! _Aber nicht die Americanischen
Fräulein_. They have nothing inside them,” striking his chest with both
fists. “They are like the ones in the _Märchen_, a grinning face and
hollow in the insides. Something they can learn, oh, yes, may-be! But
the secret—what make the rose to red, the sky to blue, the man to
love—_in der Brust, in der Brust_ it is, _und ohne dieses giebt es
keine Kunst, giebt es keine Kunst!_” He threw up his square hand and
shook it, all the fingers apart and wagging. Purple and breathless he
went out of the arbor and into the house, without saying good-bye.
These outbursts frightened Wunsch. They were always harbingers of ill.

Thea got her music-book and stole quietly out of the garden. She did
not go home, but wandered off into the sand dunes, where the prickly
pear was in blossom and the green lizards were racing each other in the
glittering light. She was shaken by a passionate excitement. She did
not altogether understand what Wunsch was talking about; and yet, in a
way she knew. She knew, of course, that there was something about her
that was different. But it was more like a friendly spirit than like
anything that was a part of herself. She thought everything to it, and
it answered her; happiness consisted of that backward and forward
movement of herself. The something came and went, she never knew how.
Sometimes she hunted for it and could not find it; again, she lifted
her eyes from a book, or stepped out of doors, or wakened in the
morning, and it was there,—under her cheek, it usually seemed to be, or
over her breast,—a kind of warm sureness. And when it was there,
everything was more interesting and beautiful, even people. When this
companion was with her, she could get the most wonderful things out of
Spanish Johnny, or Wunsch, or Dr. Archie.

On her thirteenth birthday she wandered for a long while about the sand
ridges, picking up crystals and looking into the yellow prickly-pear
blossoms with their thousand stamens. She looked at the sand hills
until she wished she _were_ a sand hill. And yet she knew that she was
going to leave them all behind some day. They would be changing all day
long, yellow and purple and lavender, and she would not be there. From
that day on, she felt there was a secret between her and Wunsch.
Together they had lifted a lid, pulled out a drawer, and looked at
something. They hid it away and never spoke of what they had seen; but
neither of them forgot it.

XII

One July night, when the moon was full, Dr. Archie was coming up from
the depot, restless and discontented, wishing there were something to
do. He carried his straw hat in his hand, and kept brushing his hair
back from his forehead with a purposeless, unsatisfied gesture. After
he passed Uncle Billy Beemer’s cottonwood grove, the sidewalk ran out
of the shadow into the white moonlight and crossed the sand gully on
high posts, like a bridge. As the doctor approached this trestle, he
saw a white figure, and recognized Thea Kronborg. He quickened his pace
and she came to meet him.

“What are you doing out so late, my girl?” he asked as he took her
hand.

“Oh, I don’t know. What do people go to bed so early for? I’d like to
run along before the houses and screech at them. Isn’t it glorious out
here?”

The young doctor gave a melancholy laugh and pressed her hand.

“Think of it,” Thea snorted impatiently. “Nobody up but us and the
rabbits! I’ve started up half a dozen of ’em. Look at that little one
down there now,”—she stooped and pointed. In the gully below them there
was, indeed, a little rabbit with a white spot of a tail, crouching
down on the sand, quite motionless. It seemed to be lapping up the
moonlight like cream. On the other side of the walk, down in the ditch,
there was a patch of tall, rank sunflowers, their shaggy leaves white
with dust. The moon stood over the cottonwood grove. There was no wind,
and no sound but the wheezing of an engine down on the tracks.

“Well, we may as well watch the rabbits.” Dr. Archie sat down on the
sidewalk and let his feet hang over the edge. He pulled out a smooth
linen handkerchief that smelled of German cologne water. “Well, how
goes it? Working hard? You must know about all Wunsch can teach you by
this time.”

Thea shook her head. “Oh, no, I don’t, Dr. Archie. He’s hard to get at,
but he’s been a real musician in his time. Mother says she believes
he’s forgotten more than the music-teachers down in Denver ever knew.”

“I’m afraid he won’t be around here much longer,” said Dr. Archie.
“He’s been making a tank of himself lately. He’ll be pulling his
freight one of these days. That’s the way they do, you know. I’ll be
sorry on your account.” He paused and ran his fresh handkerchief over
his face. “What the deuce are we all here for anyway, Thea?” he said
abruptly.

“On earth, you mean?” Thea asked in a low voice.

“Well, primarily, yes. But secondarily, why are we in Moonstone? It
isn’t as if we’d been born here. You were, but Wunsch wasn’t, and I
wasn’t. I suppose I’m here because I married as soon as I got out of
medical school and had to get a practice quick. If you hurry things,
you always get left in the end. I don’t learn anything here, and as for
the people—In my own town in Michigan, now, there were people who liked
me on my father’s account, who had even known my grandfather. That
meant something. But here it’s all like the sand: blows north one day
and south the next. We’re all a lot of gamblers without much nerve,
playing for small stakes. The railroad is the one real fact in this
country. That has to be; the world has to be got back and forth. But
the rest of us are here just because it’s the end of a run and the
engine has to have a drink. Some day I’ll get up and find my hair
turning gray, and I’ll have nothing to show for it.”

Thea slid closer to him and caught his arm. “No, no. I won’t let you
get gray. You’ve got to stay young for me. I’m getting young now, too.”

Archie laughed. “Getting?”

“Yes. People aren’t young when they’re children. Look at Thor, now;
he’s just a little old man. But Gus has a sweetheart, and he’s young!”

“Something in that!” Dr. Archie patted her head, and then felt the
shape of her skull gently, with the tips of his fingers. “When you were
little, Thea, I used always to be curious about the shape of your head.
You seemed to have more inside it than most youngsters. I haven’t
examined it for a long time. Seems to be the usual shape, but
uncommonly hard, some how. What are you going to do with yourself,
anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“Honest, now?” He lifted her chin and looked into her eyes.

Thea laughed and edged away from him.

“You’ve got something up your sleeve, haven’t you? Anything you like;
only don’t marry and settle down here without giving yourself a chance,
will you?”

“Not much. See, there’s another rabbit!”

“That’s all right about the rabbits, but I don’t want you to get tied
up. Remember that.”

Thea nodded. “Be nice to Wunsch, then. I don’t know what I’d do if he
went away.”

“You’ve got older friends than Wunsch here, Thea.”

“I know.” Thea spoke seriously and looked up at the moon, propping her
chin on her hand. “But Wunsch is the only one that can teach me what I
want to know. I’ve got to learn to do something well, and that’s the
thing I can do best.”

“Do you want to be a music-teacher?”

“Maybe, but I want to be a good one. I’d like to go to Germany to
study, some day. Wunsch says that’s the best place,—the only place you
can really learn.” Thea hesitated and then went on nervously, “I’ve got
a book that says so, too. It’s called ‘My Musical Memories.’ It made me
want to go to Germany even before Wunsch said anything. Of course it’s
a secret. You’re the first one I’ve told.”

Dr. Archie smiled indulgently. “That’s a long way off. Is that what
you’ve got in your hard noddle?” He put his hand on her hair, but this
time she shook him off.

“No, I don’t think much about it. But you talk about going, and a body
has to have something to go _to!_”

“That’s so.” Dr. Archie sighed. “You’re lucky if you have. Poor Wunsch,
now, he hasn’t. What do such fellows come out here for? He’s been
asking me about my mining stock, and about mining towns. What would he
do in a mining town? He wouldn’t know a piece of ore if he saw one.
He’s got nothing to sell that a mining town wants to buy. Why don’t
those old fellows stay at home? We won’t need them for another hundred
years. An engine wiper can get a job, but a piano player! Such people
can’t make good.”

“My grandfather Alstrom was a musician, and he made good.”

Dr. Archie chuckled. “Oh, a Swede can make good anywhere, at anything!
You’ve got that in your favor, miss. Come, you must be getting home.”

Thea rose. “Yes, I used to be ashamed of being a Swede, but I’m not any
more. Swedes are kind of common, but I think it’s better to be
_something_.”

“It surely is! How tall you are getting. You come above my shoulder
now.”

“I’ll keep on growing, don’t you think? I particularly want to be tall.
Yes, I guess I must go home. I wish there’d be a fire.”

“A fire?”

“Yes, so the fire-bell would ring and the roundhouse whistle would
blow, and everybody would come running out. Sometime I’m going to ring
the fire-bell myself and stir them all up.”

“You’d be arrested.”

“Well, that would be better than going to bed.”

“I’ll have to lend you some more books.”

Thea shook herself impatiently. “I can’t read every night.”

Dr. Archie gave one of his low, sympathetic chuckles as he opened the
gate for her. “You’re beginning to grow up, that’s what’s the matter
with you. I’ll have to keep an eye on you. Now you’ll have to say
good-night to the moon.”

“No, I won’t. I sleep on the floor now, right in the moonlight. My
window comes down to the floor, and I can look at the sky all night.”

She shot round the house to the kitchen door, and Dr. Archie watched
her disappear with a sigh. He thought of the hard, mean, frizzy little
woman who kept his house for him; once the belle of a Michigan town,
now dry and withered up at thirty. “If I had a daughter like Thea to
watch,” he reflected, “I wouldn’t mind anything. I wonder if all of my
life’s going to be a mistake just because I made a big one then? Hardly
seems fair.”

Howard Archie was “respected” rather than popular in Moonstone.
Everyone recognized that he was a good physician, and a progressive
Western town likes to be able to point to a handsome, well-set-up,
well-dressed man among its citizens. But a great many people thought
Archie “distant,” and they were right. He had the uneasy manner of a
man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the
world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind. He knew
that every one was curious about his wife, that she played a sort of
character part in Moonstone, and that people made fun of her, not very
delicately. Her own friends—most of them women who were distasteful to
Archie—liked to ask her to contribute to church charities, just to see
how mean she could be. The little, lop-sided cake at the church supper,
the cheapest pincushion, the skimpiest apron at the bazaar, were always
Mrs. Archie’s contribution.

All this hurt the doctor’s pride. But if there was one thing he had
learned, it was that there was no changing Belle’s nature. He had
married a mean woman; and he must accept the consequences. Even in
Colorado he would have had no pretext for divorce, and, to do him
justice, he had never thought of such a thing. The tenets of the
Presbyterian Church in which he had grown up, though he had long ceased
to believe in them, still influenced his conduct and his conception of
propriety. To him there was something vulgar about divorce. A divorced
man was a disgraced man; at least, he had exhibited his hurt, and made
it a matter for common gossip. Respectability was so necessary to
Archie that he was willing to pay a high price for it. As long as he
could keep up a decent exterior, he could manage to get on; and if he
could have concealed his wife’s littleness from all his friends, he
would scarcely have complained. He was more afraid of pity than he was
of any unhappiness. Had there been another woman for whom he cared
greatly, he might have had plenty of courage; but he was not likely to
meet such a woman in Moonstone.

There was a puzzling timidity in Archie’s make-up. The thing that held
his shoulders stiff, that made him resort to a mirthless little laugh
when he was talking to dull people, that made him sometimes stumble
over rugs and carpets, had its counterpart in his mind. He had not the
courage to be an honest thinker. He could comfort himself by evasions
and compromises. He consoled himself for his own marriage by telling
himself that other people’s were not much better. In his work he saw
pretty deeply into marital relations in Moonstone, and he could
honestly say that there were not many of his friends whom he envied.
Their wives seemed to suit them well enough, but they would never have
suited him.

Although Dr. Archie could not bring himself to regard marriage merely
as a social contract, but looked upon it as somehow made sacred by a
church in which he did not believe,—as a physician he knew that a young
man whose marriage is merely nominal must yet go on living his life.
When he went to Denver or to Chicago, he drifted about in careless
company where gayety and good-humor can be bought, not because he had
any taste for such society, but because he honestly believed that
anything was better than divorce. He often told himself that “hanging
and wiving go by destiny.” If wiving went badly with a man,—and it did
oftener than not,—then he must do the best he could to keep up
appearances and help the tradition of domestic happiness along. The
Moonstone gossips, assembled in Mrs. Smiley’s millinery and notion
store, often discussed Dr. Archie’s politeness to his wife, and his
pleasant manner of speaking about her. “Nobody has ever got a thing out
of him yet,” they agreed. And it was certainly not because no one had
ever tried.

When he was down in Denver, feeling a little jolly, Archie could forget
how unhappy he was at home, and could even make himself believe that he
missed his wife. He always bought her presents, and would have liked to
send her flowers if she had not repeatedly told him never to send her
anything but bulbs,—which did not appeal to him in his expansive
moments. At the Denver Athletic Club banquets, or at dinner with his
colleagues at the Brown Palace Hotel, he sometimes spoke sentimentally
about “little Mrs. Archie,” and he always drank the toast “to our
wives, God bless them!” with gusto.

The determining factor about Dr. Archie was that he was romantic. He
had married Belle White because he was romantic—too romantic to know
anything about women, except what he wished them to be, or to repulse a
pretty girl who had set her cap for him. At medical school, though he
was a rather wild boy in behavior, he had always disliked coarse jokes
and vulgar stories. In his old Flint’s Physiology there was still a
poem he had pasted there when he was a student; some verses by Dr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes about the ideals of the medical profession. After
so much and such disillusioning experience with it, he still had a
romantic feeling about the human body; a sense that finer things dwelt
in it than could be explained by anatomy. He never jested about birth
or death or marriage, and did not like to hear other doctors do it. He
was a good nurse, and had a reverence for the bodies of women and
children. When he was tending them, one saw him at his best. Then his
constraint and self-consciousness fell away from him. He was easy,
gentle, competent, master of himself and of other people. Then the
idealist in him was not afraid of being discovered and ridiculed.

In his tastes, too, the doctor was romantic. Though he read Balzac all
the year through, he still enjoyed the Waverley Novels as much as when
he had first come upon them, in thick leather-bound volumes, in his
grandfather’s library. He nearly always read Scott on Christmas and
holidays, because it brought back the pleasures of his boyhood so
vividly. He liked Scott’s women. Constance de Beverley and the minstrel
girl in “The Fair Maid of Perth,” not the Duchesse de Langeais, were
his heroines. But better than anything that ever got from the heart of
a man into printer’s ink, he loved the poetry of Robert Burns. “Death
and Dr. Hornbook” and “The Jolly Beggars,” Burns’s “Reply to his
Tailor,” he often read aloud to himself in his office, late at night,
after a glass of hot toddy. He used to read “Tam o’Shanter” to Thea
Kronborg, and he got her some of the songs, set to the old airs for
which they were written. He loved to hear her sing them. Sometimes when
she sang, “Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast,” the doctor and even Mr.
Kronborg joined in. Thea never minded if people could not sing; she
directed them with her head and somehow carried them along. When her
father got off the pitch she let her own voice out and covered him.

XIII

At the beginning of June, when school closed, Thea had told Wunsch that
she didn’t know how much practicing she could get in this summer
because Thor had his worst teeth still to cut.

“My God! all last summer he was doing that!” Wunsch exclaimed
furiously.

“I know, but it takes them two years, and Thor is slow,” Thea answered
reprovingly.

The summer went well beyond her hopes, however. She told herself that
it was the best summer of her life, so far. Nobody was sick at home,
and her lessons were uninterrupted. Now that she had four pupils of her
own and made a dollar a week, her practicing was regarded more
seriously by the household. Her mother had always arranged things so
that she could have the parlor four hours a day in summer. Thor proved
a friendly ally. He behaved handsomely about his molars, and never
objected to being pulled off into remote places in his cart. When Thea
dragged him over the hill and made a camp under the shade of a bush or
a bank, he would waddle about and play with his blocks, or bury his
monkey in the sand and dig him up again. Sometimes he got into the
cactus and set up a howl, but usually he let his sister read
peacefully, while he coated his hands and face, first with an all-day
sucker and then with gravel.

Life was pleasant and uneventful until the first of September, when
Wunsch began to drink so hard that he was unable to appear when Thea
went to take her mid-week lesson, and Mrs. Kohler had to send her home
after a tearful apology. On Saturday morning she set out for the
Kohlers’ again, but on her way, when she was crossing the ravine, she
noticed a woman sitting at the bottom of the gulch, under the railroad
trestle. She turned from her path and saw that it was Mrs. Tellamantez,
and she seemed to be doing drawn-work. Then Thea noticed that there was
something beside her, covered up with a purple and yellow Mexican
blanket. She ran up the gulch and called to Mrs. Tellamantez. The
Mexican woman held up a warning finger. Thea glanced at the blanket and
recognized a square red hand which protruded. The middle finger
twitched slightly.

“Is he hurt?” she gasped.

Mrs. Tellamantez shook her head. “No; very sick. He knows nothing,” she
said quietly, folding her hands over her drawn-work.

Thea learned that Wunsch had been out all night, that this morning Mrs.
Kohler had gone to look for him and found him under the trestle covered
with dirt and cinders. Probably he had been trying to get home and had
lost his way. Mrs. Tellamantez was watching beside the unconscious man
while Mrs. Kohler and Johnny went to get help.

“You better go home now, I think,” said Mrs. Tellamantez, in closing
her narration.

Thea hung her head and looked wistfully toward the blanket.

“Couldn’t I just stay till they come?” she asked. “I’d like to know if
he’s very bad.”

“Bad enough,” sighed Mrs. Tellamantez, taking up her work again.

Thea sat down under the narrow shade of one of the trestle posts and
listened to the locusts rasping in the hot sand while she watched Mrs.
Tellamantez evenly draw her threads. The blanket looked as if it were
over a heap of bricks.

“I don’t see him breathing any,” she said anxiously.

“Yes, he breathes,” said Mrs. Tellamantez, not lifting her eyes.

It seemed to Thea that they waited for hours. At last they heard
voices, and a party of men came down the hill and up the gulch. Dr.
Archie and Fritz Kohler came first; behind were Johnny and Ray, and
several men from the roundhouse. Ray had the canvas litter that was
kept at the depot for accidents on the road. Behind them trailed half a
dozen boys who had been hanging round the depot.

When Ray saw Thea, he dropped his canvas roll and hurried forward.
“Better run along home, Thee. This is ugly business.” Ray was indignant
that anybody who gave Thea music lessons should behave in such a
manner.

Thea resented both his proprietary tone and his superior virtue. “I
won’t. I want to know how bad he is. I’m not a baby!” she exclaimed
indignantly, stamping her foot into the sand.

Dr. Archie, who had been kneeling by the blanket, got up and came
toward Thea, dusting his knees. He smiled and nodded confidentially.
“He’ll be all right when we get him home. But he wouldn’t want you to
see him like this, poor old chap! Understand? Now, skip!”

Thea ran down the gulch and looked back only once, to see them lifting
the canvas litter with Wunsch upon it, still covered with the blanket.

The men carried Wunsch up the hill and down the road to the Kohlers’.
Mrs. Kohler had gone home and made up a bed in the sitting-room, as she
knew the litter could not be got round the turn in the narrow stairway.
Wunsch was like a dead man. He lay unconscious all day. Ray Kennedy
stayed with him till two o’clock in the afternoon, when he had to go
out on his run. It was the first time he had ever been inside the
Kohlers’ house, and he was so much impressed by Napoleon that the
piece-picture formed a new bond between him and Thea.

Dr. Archie went back at six o’clock, and found Mrs. Kohler and Spanish
Johnny with Wunsch, who was in a high fever, muttering and groaning.

“There ought to be some one here to look after him to-night, Mrs.
Kohler,” he said. “I’m on a confinement case, and I can’t be here, but
there ought to be somebody. He may get violent.”

Mrs. Kohler insisted that she could always do anything with Wunsch, but
the doctor shook his head and Spanish Johnny grinned. He said he would
stay. The doctor laughed at him. “Ten fellows like you couldn’t hold
him, Spanish, if he got obstreperous; an Irishman would have his hands
full. Guess I’d better put the soft pedal on him.” He pulled out his
hypodermic.

Spanish Johnny stayed, however, and the Kohlers went to bed. At about
two o’clock in the morning Wunsch rose from his ignominious cot.
Johnny, who was dozing on the lounge, awoke to find the German standing
in the middle of the room in his undershirt and drawers, his arms bare,
his heavy body seeming twice its natural girth. His face was snarling
and savage, and his eyes were crazy. He had risen to avenge himself, to
wipe out his shame, to destroy his enemy. One look was enough for
Johnny. Wunsch raised a chair threateningly, and Johnny, with the
lightness of a _picador_, darted under the missile and out of the open
window. He shot across the gully to get help, meanwhile leaving the
Kohlers to their fate.

Fritz, upstairs, heard the chair crash upon the stove. Then he heard
doors opening and shutting, and some one stumbling about in the
shrubbery of the garden. He and Paulina sat up in bed and held a
consultation. Fritz slipped from under the covers, and going cautiously
over to the window, poked out his head. Then he rushed to the door and
bolted it.

“_Mein Gott_, Paulina,” he gasped, “he has the axe, he will kill us!”

“The dresser,” cried Mrs. Kohler; “push the dresser before the door.
_Ach_, if you had your rabbit gun, now!”

“It is in the barn,” said Fritz sadly. “It would do no good; he would
not be afraid of anything now. Stay you in the bed, Paulina.” The
dresser had lost its casters years ago, but he managed to drag it in
front of the door. “He is in the garden. He makes nothing. He will get
sick again, may-be.”

Fritz went back to bed and his wife pulled the quilt over him and made
him lie down. They heard stumbling in the garden again, then a smash of
glass.

“_Ach, das Mistbeet!_” gasped Paulina, hearing her hotbed shivered.
“The poor soul, Fritz, he will cut himself. _Ach!_ what is that?” They
both sat up in bed. “_Wieder! Ach_, What is he doing?”

The noise came steadily, a sound of chopping. Paulina tore off her
night-cap. “_Die Bäume, die Bäume!_ He is cutting our trees, Fritz!”
Before her husband could prevent her, she had sprung from the bed and
rushed to the window. “_Der Taubenschlag! Gerechter Himmel_, he is
chopping the dove-house down!”

Fritz reached her side before she had got her breath again, and poked
his head out beside hers. There, in the faint starlight, they saw a
bulky man, barefoot, half dressed, chopping away at the white post that
formed the pedestal of the dove-house. The startled pigeons were
croaking and flying about his head, even beating their wings in his
face, so that he struck at them furiously with the axe. In a few
seconds there was a crash, and Wunsch had actually felled the
dove-house.

“Oh, if only it is not the trees next!” prayed Paulina. “The dove-house
you can make new again, but not _die Bäume_.”

They watched breathlessly. In the garden below Wunsch stood in the
attitude of a woodman, contemplating the fallen cote. Suddenly he threw
the axe over his shoulder and went out of the front gate toward the
town.

“The poor soul, he will meet his death!” Mrs. Kohler wailed. She ran
back to her feather bed and hid her face in the pillow.

Fritz kept watch at the window. “No, no, Paulina,” he called presently;
“I see lanterns coming. Johnny must have gone for somebody. Yes, four
lanterns, coming along the gulch. They stop; they must have seen him
already. Now they are under the hill and I cannot see them, but I think
they have him. They will bring him back. I must dress and go down.” He
caught his trousers and began pulling them on by the window. “Yes, here
they come, half a dozen men. And they have tied him with a rope,
Paulina!”

“_Ach_, the poor man! To be led like a cow,” groaned Mrs. Kohler. “Oh,
it is good that he has no wife!” She was reproaching herself for
nagging Fritz when he drank himself into foolish pleasantry or mild
sulks, and felt that she had never before appreciated her blessings.

Wunsch was in bed for ten days, during which time he was gossiped about
and even preached about in Moonstone. The Baptist preacher took a shot
at the fallen man from his pulpit, Mrs. Livery Johnson nodding
approvingly from her pew. The mothers of Wunsch’s pupils sent him notes
informing him that their daughters would discontinue their
music-lessons. The old maid who had rented him her piano sent the town
dray for her contaminated instrument, and ever afterward declared that
Wunsch had ruined its tone and scarred its glossy finish. The Kohlers
were unremitting in their kindness to their friend. Mrs. Kohler made
him soups and broths without stint, and Fritz repaired the dove-house
and mounted it on a new post, lest it might be a sad reminder.

As soon as Wunsch was strong enough to sit about in his slippers and
wadded jacket, he told Fritz to bring him some stout thread from the
shop. When Fritz asked what he was going to sew, he produced the
tattered score of “Orpheus” and said he would like to fix it up for a
little present. Fritz carried it over to the shop and stitched it into
pasteboards, covered with dark suiting-cloth. Over the stitches he
glued a strip of thin red leather which he got from his friend, the
harness-maker. After Paulina had cleaned the pages with fresh bread,
Wunsch was amazed to see what a fine book he had. It opened stiffly,
but that was no matter.

Sitting in the arbor one morning, under the ripe grapes and the brown,
curling leaves, with a pen and ink on the bench beside him and the
Gluck score on his knee, Wunsch pondered for a long while. Several
times he dipped the pen in the ink, and then put it back again in the
cigar box in which Mrs. Kohler kept her writing utensils. His thoughts
wandered over a wide territory; over many countries and many years.
There was no order or logical sequence in his ideas. Pictures came and
went without reason. Faces, mountains, rivers, autumn days in other
vineyards far away. He thought of a _Fuszreise_ he had made through the
Hartz Mountains in his student days; of the innkeeper’s pretty daughter
who had lighted his pipe for him in the garden one summer evening, of
the woods above Wiesbaden, haymakers on an island in the river. The
roundhouse whistle woke him from his reveries. Ah, yes, he was in
Moonstone, Colorado. He frowned for a moment and looked at the book on
his knee. He had thought of a great many appropriate things to write in
it, but suddenly he rejected all of them, opened the book, and at the
top of the much-engraved title-page he wrote rapidly in purple ink:—

Einst, O Wunder!—

A. Wunsch.

Moonstone, Colo.
September 30, 18—

Nobody in Moonstone ever found what Wunsch’s first name was. That “A”
may have stood for Adam, or August, or even Amadeus; he got very angry
if any one asked him.

He remained A. Wunsch to the end of his chapter there. When he
presented this score to Thea, he told her that in ten years she would
either know what the inscription meant, or she would not have the least
idea, in which case it would not matter.

When Wunsch began to pack his trunk, both the Kohlers were very
unhappy. He said he was coming back some day, but that for the present,
since he had lost all his pupils, it would be better for him to try
some “new town.” Mrs. Kohler darned and mended all his clothes, and
gave him two new shirts she had made for Fritz. Fritz made him a new
pair of trousers and would have made him an overcoat but for the fact
that overcoats were so easy to pawn.

Wunsch would not go across the ravine to the town until he went to take
the morning train for Denver. He said that after he got to Denver he
would “look around.” He left Moonstone one bright October morning,
without telling any one good-bye. He bought his ticket and went
directly into the smoking-car. When the train was beginning to pull
out, he heard his name called frantically, and looking out of the
window he saw Thea Kronborg standing on the siding, bareheaded and
panting. Some boys had brought word to school that they saw Wunsch’s
trunk going over to the station, and Thea had run away from school. She
was at the end of the station platform, her hair in two braids, her
blue gingham dress wet to the knees because she had run across lots
through the weeds. It had rained during the night, and the tall
sunflowers behind her were fresh and shining.

“Good-bye, Herr Wunsch, good-bye!” she called waving to him.

He thrust his head out at the car window and called back, “_Leben sie
wohl, leben sie wohl, mein Kind!_” He watched her until the train swept
around the curve beyond the roundhouse, and then sank back into his
seat, muttering, “She had been running. Ah, she will run a long way;
they cannot stop her!”

What was it about the child that one believed in? Was it her dogged
industry, so unusual in this free-and-easy country? Was it her
imagination? More likely it was because she had both imagination and a
stubborn will, curiously balancing and interpenetrating each other.
There was something unconscious and unawakened about her, that tempted
curiosity. She had a kind of seriousness that he had not met with in a
pupil before. She hated difficult things, and yet she could never pass
one by. They seemed to challenge her; she had no peace until she
mastered them. She had the power to make a great effort, to lift a
weight heavier than herself. Wunsch hoped he would always remember her
as she stood by the track, looking up at him; her broad eager face, so
fair in color, with its high cheek-bones, yellow eyebrows and
greenishhazel eyes. It was a face full of light and energy, of the
unquestioning hopefulness of first youth. Yes, she was like a flower
full of sun, but not the soft German flowers of his childhood. He had
it now, the comparison he had absently reached for before: she was like
the yellow prickly pear blossoms that open there in the desert;
thornier and sturdier than the maiden flowers he remembered; not so
sweet, but wonderful.

That night Mrs. Kohler brushed away many a tear as she got supper and
set the table for two. When they sat down, Fritz was more silent than
usual. People who have lived long together need a third at table: they
know each other’s thoughts so well that they have nothing left to say.
Mrs. Kohler stirred and stirred her coffee and clattered the spoon, but
she had no heart for her supper. She felt, for the first time in years,
that she was tired of her own cooking. She looked across the glass lamp
at her husband and asked him if the butcher liked his new overcoat, and
whether he had got the shoulders right in a ready-made suit he was
patching over for Ray Kennedy. After supper Fritz offered to wipe the
dishes for her, but she told him to go about his business, and not to
act as if she were sick or getting helpless.

When her work in the kitchen was all done, she went out to cover the
oleanders against frost, and to take a last look at her chickens. As
she came back from the hen-house she stopped by one of the linden trees
and stood resting her hand on the trunk. He would never come back, the
poor man; she knew that. He would drift on from new town to new town,
from catastrophe to catastrophe. He would hardly find a good home for
himself again. He would die at last in some rough place, and be buried
in the desert or on the wild prairie, far enough from any linden tree!

Fritz, smoking his pipe on the kitchen doorstep, watched his Paulina
and guessed her thoughts. He, too, was sorry to lose his friend. But
Fritz was getting old; he had lived a long while and had learned to
lose without struggle.

XIV

“Mother,” said Peter Kronborg to his wife one morning about two weeks
after Wunsch’s departure, “how would you like to drive out to Copper
Hole with me to-day?”

Mrs. Kronborg said she thought she would enjoy the drive. She put on
her gray cashmere dress and gold watch and chain, as befitted a
minister’s wife, and while her husband was dressing she packed a black
oilcloth satchel with such clothing as she and Thor would need
overnight.

Copper Hole was a settlement fifteen miles northwest of Moonstone where
Mr. Kronborg preached every Friday evening. There was a big spring
there and a creek and a few irrigating ditches. It was a community of
discouraged agriculturists who had disastrously experimented with dry
farming. Mr. Kronborg always drove out one day and back the next,
spending the night with one of his parishioners. Often, when the
weather was fine, his wife accompanied him. To-day they set out from
home after the midday meal, leaving Tillie in charge of the house. Mrs.
Kronborg’s maternal feeling was always garnered up in the baby, whoever
the baby happened to be. If she had the baby with her, the others could
look out for themselves. Thor, of course, was not, accurately speaking,
a baby any longer. In the matter of nourishment he was quite
independent of his mother, though this independence had not been won
without a struggle. Thor was conservative in all things, and the whole
family had anguished with him when he was being weaned. Being the
youngest, he was still the baby for Mrs. Kronborg, though he was nearly
four years old and sat up boldly on her lap this afternoon, holding on
to the ends of the lines and shouting “’mup, ’mup, horsey.” His father
watched him affectionately and hummed hymn tunes in the jovial way that
was sometimes such a trial to Thea.

Mrs. Kronborg was enjoying the sunshine and the brilliant sky and all
the faintly marked features of the dazzling, monotonous landscape. She
had a rather unusual capacity for getting the flavor of places and of
people. Although she was so enmeshed in family cares most of the time,
she could emerge serene when she was away from them. For a mother of
seven, she had a singularly unprejudiced point of view. She was,
moreover, a fatalist, and as she did not attempt to direct things
beyond her control, she found a good deal of time to enjoy the ways of
man and nature.

When they were well upon their road, out where the first lean pasture
lands began and the sand grass made a faint showing between the
sagebrushes, Mr. Kronborg dropped his tune and turned to his wife.
“Mother, I’ve been thinking about something.”

“I guessed you had. What is it?” She shifted Thor to her left knee,
where he would be more out of the way.

“Well, it’s about Thea. Mr. Follansbee came to my study at the church
the other day and said they would like to have their two girls take
lessons of Thea. Then I sounded Miss Meyers” (Miss Meyers was the
organist in Mr. Kronborg’s church) “and she said there was a good deal
of talk about whether Thea wouldn’t take over Wunsch’s pupils. She said
if Thea stopped school she wouldn’t wonder if she could get pretty much
all Wunsch’s class. People think Thea knows about all Wunsch could
teach.”

Mrs. Kronborg looked thoughtful. “Do you think we ought to take her out
of school so young?”

“She is young, but next year would be her last year anyway. She’s far
along for her age. And she can’t learn much under the principal we’ve
got now, can she?”

“No, I’m afraid she can’t,” his wife admitted. “She frets a good deal
and says that man always has to look in the back of the book for the
answers. She hates all that diagramming they have to do, and I think
myself it’s a waste of time.”

Mr. Kronborg settled himself back into the seat and slowed the mare to
a walk. “You see, it occurs to me that we might raise Thea’s prices, so
it would be worth her while. Seventy-five cents for hour lessons, fifty
cents for half-hour lessons. If she got, say two thirds of Wunsch’s
class, that would bring her in upwards of ten dollars a week. Better
pay than teaching a country school, and there would be more work in
vacation than in winter. Steady work twelve months in the year; that’s
an advantage. And she’d be living at home, with no expenses.”

“There’d be talk if you raised her prices,” said Mrs. Kronborg
dubiously.

“At first there would. But Thea is so much the best musician in town
that they’d all come into line after a while. A good many people in
Moonstone have been making money lately, and have bought new pianos.
There were ten new pianos shipped in here from Denver in the last year.
People ain’t going to let them stand idle; too much money invested. I
believe Thea can have as many scholars as she can handle, if we set her
up a little.”

“How set her up, do you mean?” Mrs. Kronborg felt a certain reluctance
about accepting this plan, though she had not yet had time to think out
her reasons.

“Well, I’ve been thinking for some time we could make good use of
another room. We couldn’t give up the parlor to her all the time. If we
built another room on the ell and put the piano in there, she could
give lessons all day long and it wouldn’t bother us. We could build a
clothes-press in it, and put in a bed-lounge and a dresser and let Anna
have it for her sleeping-room. She needs a place of her own, now that
she’s beginning to be dressy.”

“Seems like Thea ought to have the choice of the room, herself,” said
Mrs. Kronborg.

“But, my dear, she don’t want it. Won’t have it. I sounded her coming
home from church on Sunday; asked her if she would like to sleep in a
new room, if we built on. She fired up like a little wild-cat and said
she’d made her own room all herself, and she didn’t think anybody ought
to take it away from her.”

“She don’t mean to be impertinent, father. She’s made decided that way,
like my father.” Mrs. Kronborg spoke warmly. “I never have any trouble
with the child. I remember my father’s ways and go at her carefully.
Thea’s all right.”

Mr. Kronborg laughed indulgently and pinched Thor’s full cheek. “Oh, I
didn’t mean anything against your girl, mother! She’s all right, but
she’s a little wild-cat, just the same. I think Ray Kennedy’s planning
to spoil a born old maid.”

“Huh! She’ll get something a good sight better than Ray Kennedy, you
see! Thea’s an awful smart girl. I’ve seen a good many girls take music
lessons in my time, but I ain’t seen one that took to it so. Wunsch
said so, too. She’s got the making of something in her.”

“I don’t deny that, and the sooner she gets at it in a businesslike
way, the better. She’s the kind that takes responsibility, and it’ll be
good for her.”

Mrs. Kronborg was thoughtful. “In some ways it will, maybe. But there’s
a good deal of strain about teaching youngsters, and she’s always
worked so hard with the scholars she has. I’ve often listened to her
pounding it into ’em. I don’t want to work her too hard. She’s so
serious that she’s never had what you might call any real childhood.
Seems like she ought to have the next few years sort of free and easy.
She’ll be tied down with responsibilities soon enough.”

Mr. Kronborg patted his wife’s arm. “Don’t you believe it, mother. Thea
is not the marrying kind. I’ve watched ’em. Anna will marry before long
and make a good wife, but I don’t see Thea bringing up a family. She’s
got a good deal of her mother in her, but she hasn’t got all. She’s too
peppery and too fond of having her own way. Then she’s always got to be
ahead in everything. That kind make good church-workers and
missionaries and school teachers, but they don’t make good wives. They
fret all their energy away, like colts, and get cut on the wire.”

Mrs. Kronborg laughed. “Give me the graham crackers I put in your
pocket for Thor. He’s hungry. You’re a funny man, Peter. A body
wouldn’t think, to hear you, you was talking about your own daughters.
I guess you see through ’em. Still, even if Thea ain’t apt to have
children of her own, I don’t know as that’s a good reason why she
should wear herself out on other people’s.”

“That’s just the point, mother. A girl with all that energy has got to
do something, same as a boy, to keep her out of mischief. If you don’t
want her to marry Ray, let her do something to make herself
independent.”

“Well, I’m not against it. It might be the best thing for her. I wish I
felt sure she wouldn’t worry. She takes things hard. She nearly cried
herself sick about Wunsch’s going away. She’s the smartest child of ’em
all, Peter, by a long ways.”

Peter Kronborg smiled. “There you go, Anna. That’s you all over again.
Now, I have no favorites; they all have their good points. But you,”
with a twinkle, “always did go in for brains.”

Mrs. Kronborg chuckled as she wiped the cracker crumbs from Thor’s chin
and fists. “Well, you’re mighty conceited, Peter! But I don’t know as I
ever regretted it. I prefer having a family of my own to fussing with
other folks’ children, that’s the truth.”

Before the Kronborgs reached Copper Hole, Thea’s destiny was pretty
well mapped out for her. Mr. Kronborg was always delighted to have an
excuse for enlarging the house.

Mrs. Kronborg was quite right in her conjecture that there would be
unfriendly comment in Moonstone when Thea raised her prices for
music-lessons. People said she was getting too conceited for anything.
Mrs. Livery Johnson put on a new bonnet and paid up all her back calls
to have the pleasure of announcing in each parlor she entered that her
daughters, at least, would “never pay professional prices to Thea
Kronborg.”

Thea raised no objection to quitting school. She was now in the “high
room,” as it was called, in next to the highest class, and was studying
geometry and beginning Caesar. She no longer recited her lessons to the
teacher she liked, but to the Principal, a man who belonged, like Mrs.
Livery Johnson, to the camp of Thea’s natural enemies. He taught school
because he was too lazy to work among grown-up people, and he made an
easy job of it. He got out of real work by inventing useless activities
for his pupils, such as the “tree-diagramming system.” Thea had spent
hours making trees out of “Thanatopsis,” Hamlet’s soliloquy, Cato on
“Immortality.” She agonized under this waste of time, and was only too
glad to accept her father’s offer of liberty.

So Thea left school the first of November. By the first of January she
had eight one-hour pupils and ten half-hour pupils, and there would be
more in the summer. She spent her earnings generously. She bought a new
Brussels carpet for the parlor, and a rifle for Gunner and Axel, and an
imitation tiger-skin coat and cap for Thor. She enjoyed being able to
add to the family possessions, and thought Thor looked quite as
handsome in his spots as the rich children she had seen in Denver. Thor
was most complacent in his conspicuous apparel. He could walk anywhere
by this time—though he always preferred to sit, or to be pulled in his
cart. He was a blissfully lazy child, and had a number of long, dull
plays, such as making nests for his china duck and waiting for her to
lay him an egg. Thea thought him very intelligent, and she was proud
that he was so big and burly. She found him restful, loved to hear him
call her “sitter,” and really liked his companionship, especially when
she was tired. On Saturday, for instance, when she taught from nine in
the morning until five in the afternoon, she liked to get off in a
corner with Thor after supper, away from all the bathing and dressing
and joking and talking that went on in the house, and ask him about his
duck, or hear him tell one of his rambling stories.

XV

By the time Thea’s fifteenth birthday came round, she was established
as a music teacher in Moonstone. The new room had been added to the
house early in the spring, and Thea had been giving her lessons there
since the middle of May. She liked the personal independence which was
accorded her as a wage-earner. The family questioned her comings and
goings very little. She could go buggy-riding with Ray Kennedy, for
instance, without taking Gunner or Axel. She could go to Spanish
Johnny’s and sing part songs with the Mexicans, and nobody objected.

Thea was still under the first excitement of teaching, and was terribly
in earnest about it. If a pupil did not get on well, she fumed and
fretted. She counted until she was hoarse. She listened to scales in
her sleep. Wunsch had taught only one pupil seriously, but Thea taught
twenty. The duller they were, the more furiously she poked and prodded
them. With the little girls she was nearly always patient, but with
pupils older than herself, she sometimes lost her temper. One of her
mistakes was to let herself in for a calling-down from Mrs. Livery
Johnson. That lady appeared at the Kronborgs’ one morning and announced
that she would allow no girl to stamp her foot at her daughter Grace.
She added that Thea’s bad manners with the older girls were being
talked about all over town, and that if her temper did not speedily
improve she would lose all her advanced pupils. Thea was frightened.
She felt she could never bear the disgrace, if such a thing happened.
Besides, what would her father say, after he had gone to the expense of
building an addition to the house? Mrs. Johnson demanded an apology to
Grace. Thea said she was willing to make it. Mrs. Johnson said that
hereafter, since she had taken lessons of the best piano teacher in
Grinnell, Iowa, she herself would decide what pieces Grace should
study. Thea readily consented to that, and Mrs. Johnson rustled away to
tell a neighbor woman that Thea Kronborg could be meek enough when you
went at her right.

Thea was telling Ray about this unpleasant encounter as they were
driving out to the sand hills the next Sunday.

“She was stuffing you, all right, Thee,” Ray reassured her. “There’s no
general dissatisfaction among your scholars. She just wanted to get in
a knock. I talked to the piano tuner the last time he was here, and he
said all the people he tuned for expressed themselves very favorably
about your teaching. I wish you didn’t take so much pains with them,
myself.”

“But I have to, Ray. They’re all so dumb. They’ve got no ambition,”
Thea exclaimed irritably. “Jenny Smiley is the only one who isn’t
stupid. She can read pretty well, and she has such good hands. But she
don’t care a rap about it. She has no pride.”

Ray’s face was full of complacent satisfaction as he glanced sidewise
at Thea, but she was looking off intently into the mirage, at one of
those mammoth cattle that are nearly always reflected there. “Do you
find it easier to teach in your new room?” he asked.

“Yes; I’m not interrupted so much. Of course, if I ever happen to want
to practice at night, that’s always the night Anna chooses to go to bed
early.”

“It’s a darned shame, Thee, you didn’t cop that room for yourself. I’m
sore at the _padre_ about that. He ought to give you that room. You
could fix it up so pretty.”

“I didn’t want it, honest I didn’t. Father would have let me have it. I
like my own room better. Somehow I can think better in a little room.
Besides, up there I am away from everybody, and I can read as late as I
please and nobody nags me.”

“A growing girl needs lots of sleep,” Ray providently remarked.

Thea moved restlessly on the buggy cushions. “They need other things
more,” she muttered. “Oh, I forgot. I brought something to show you.
Look here, it came on my birthday. Wasn’t it nice of him to remember?”
She took from her pocket a postcard, bent in the middle and folded, and
handed it to Ray. On it was a white dove, perched on a wreath of very
blue forget-me-nots, and “Birthday Greetings” in gold letters. Under
this was written, “From A. Wunsch.”

Ray turned the card over, examined the postmark, and then began to
laugh.

“Concord, Kansas. He has my sympathy!”

“Why, is that a poor town?”

“It’s the jumping-off place, no town at all. Some houses dumped down in
the middle of a cornfield. You get lost in the corn. Not even a saloon
to keep things going; sell whiskey without a license at the butcher
shop, beer on ice with the liver and beefsteak. I wouldn’t stay there
over Sunday for a ten-dollar bill.”

“Oh, dear! What do you suppose he’s doing there? Maybe he just stopped
off there a few days to tune pianos,” Thea suggested hopefully.

Ray gave her back the card. “He’s headed in the wrong direction. What
does he want to get back into a grass country for? Now, there are lots
of good live towns down on the Santa Fé, and everybody down there is
musical. He could always get a job playing in saloons if he was dead
broke. I’ve figured out that I’ve got no years of my life to waste in a
Methodist country where they raise pork.”

“We must stop on our way back and show this card to Mrs. Kohler. She
misses him so.”

“By the way, Thee, I hear the old woman goes to church every Sunday to
hear you sing. Fritz tells me he has to wait till two o’clock for his
Sunday dinner these days. The church people ought to give you credit
for that, when they go for you.”

Thea shook her head and spoke in a tone of resignation. “They’ll always
go for me, just as they did for Wunsch. It wasn’t because he drank they
went for him; not really. It was something else.”

“You want to salt your money down, Thee, and go to Chicago and take
some lessons. Then you come back, and wear a long feather and high
heels and put on a few airs, and that’ll fix ’em. That’s what they
like.”

“I’ll never have money enough to go to Chicago. Mother meant to lend me
some, I think, but now they’ve got hard times back in Nebraska, and her
farm don’t bring her in anything. Takes all the tenant can raise to pay
the taxes. Don’t let’s talk about that. You promised to tell me about
the play you went to see in Denver.”

Any one would have liked to hear Ray’s simple and clear account of the
performance he had seen at the Tabor Grand Opera House—Maggie Mitchell
in _Little Barefoot_—and any one would have liked to watch his kind
face. Ray looked his best out of doors, when his thick red hands were
covered by gloves, and the dull red of his sunburned face somehow
seemed right in the light and wind. He looked better, too, with his hat
on; his hair was thin and dry, with no particular color or character,
“regular Willy-boy hair,” as he himself described it. His eyes were
pale beside the reddish bronze of his skin. They had the faded look
often seen in the eyes of men who have lived much in the sun and wind
and who have been accustomed to train their vision upon distant
objects.

Ray realized that Thea’s life was dull and exacting, and that she
missed Wunsch. He knew she worked hard, that she put up with a great
many little annoyances, and that her duties as a teacher separated her
more than ever from the boys and girls of her own age. He did
everything he could to provide recreation for her. He brought her candy
and magazines and pineapples—of which she was very fond—from Denver,
and kept his eyes and ears open for anything that might interest her.
He was, of course, living for Thea. He had thought it all out carefully
and had made up his mind just when he would speak to her. When she was
seventeen, then he would tell her his plan and ask her to marry him. He
would be willing to wait two, or even three years, until she was
twenty, if she thought best. By that time he would surely have got in
on something: copper, oil, gold, silver, sheep,—something.

Meanwhile, it was pleasure enough to feel that she depended on him more
and more, that she leaned upon his steady kindness. He never broke
faith with himself about her; he never hinted to her of his hopes for
the future, never suggested that she might be more intimately
confidential with him, or talked to her of the thing he thought about
so constantly. He had the chivalry which is perhaps the proudest
possession of his race. He had never embarrassed her by so much as a
glance. Sometimes, when they drove out to the sand hills, he let his
left arm lie along the back of the buggy seat, but it never came any
nearer to Thea than that, never touched her. He often turned to her a
face full of pride, and frank admiration, but his glance was never so
intimate or so penetrating as Dr. Archie’s. His blue eyes were clear
and shallow, friendly, uninquiring. He rested Thea because he was so
different; because, though he often told her interesting things, he
never set lively fancies going in her head; because he never
misunderstood her, and because he never, by any chance, for a single
instant, understood her! Yes, with Ray she was safe; by him she would
never be discovered!

XVI

The pleasantest experience Thea had that summer was a trip that she and
her mother made to Denver in Ray Kennedy’s caboose. Mrs. Kronborg had
been looking forward to this excursion for a long while, but as Ray
never knew at what hour his freight would leave Moonstone, it was
difficult to arrange. The call-boy was as likely to summon him to start
on his run at twelve o’clock midnight as at twelve o’clock noon. The
first week in June started out with all the scheduled trains running on
time, and a light freight business. Tuesday evening Ray, after
consulting with the dispatcher, stopped at the Kronborgs’ front gate to
tell Mrs. Kronborg—who was helping Tillie water the flowers—that if she
and Thea could be at the depot at eight o’clock the next morning, he
thought he could promise them a pleasant ride and get them into Denver
before nine o’clock in the evening. Mrs. Kronborg told him cheerfully,
across the fence, that she would “take him up on it,” and Ray hurried
back to the yards to scrub out his car.

The one complaint Ray’s brakemen had to make of him was that he was too
fussy about his caboose. His former brakeman had asked to be
transferred because, he said, “Kennedy was as fussy about his car as an
old maid about her bird-cage.” Joe Giddy, who was braking with Ray now,
called him “the bride,” because he kept the caboose and bunks so clean.

It was properly the brakeman’s business to keep the car clean, but when
Ray got back to the depot, Giddy was nowhere to be found. Muttering
that all his brakemen seemed to consider him “easy,” Ray went down to
his car alone. He built a fire in the stove and put water on to heat
while he got into his overalls and jumper. Then he set to work with a
scrubbing-brush and plenty of soap and “cleaner.” He scrubbed the floor
and seats, blacked the stove, put clean sheets on the bunks, and then
began to demolish Giddy’s picture gallery. Ray found that his brakemen
were likely to have what he termed “a taste for the nude in art,” and
Giddy was no exception. Ray took down half a dozen girls in tights and
ballet skirts,—premiums for cigarette coupons,—and some racy calendars
advertising saloons and sporting clubs, which had cost Giddy both time
and trouble; he even removed Giddy’s particular pet, a naked girl lying
on a couch with her knee carelessly poised in the air. Underneath the
picture was printed the title, “The Odalisque.” Giddy was under the
happy delusion that this title meant something wicked,—there was a
wicked look about the consonants,—but Ray, of course, had looked it up,
and Giddy was indebted to the dictionary for the privilege of keeping
his lady. If “odalisque” had been what Ray called an objectionable
word, he would have thrown the picture out in the first place. Ray even
took down a picture of Mrs. Langtry in evening dress, because it was
entitled the “Jersey Lily,” and because there was a small head of
Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, in one corner. Albert Edward’s
conduct was a popular subject of discussion among railroad men in those
days, and as Ray pulled the tacks out of this lithograph he felt more
indignant with the English than ever. He deposited all these pictures
under the mattress of Giddy’s bunk, and stood admiring his clean car in
the lamplight; the walls now exhibited only a wheatfield, advertising
agricultural implements, a map of Colorado, and some pictures of
race-horses and hunting-dogs. At this moment Giddy, freshly shaved and
shampooed, his shirt shining with the highest polish known to Chinese
laundrymen, his straw hat tipped over his right eye, thrust his head in
at the door.

“What in hell—” he brought out furiously. His good humored, sunburned
face seemed fairly to swell with amazement and anger.

“That’s all right, Giddy,” Ray called in a conciliatory tone. “Nothing
injured. I’ll put ’em all up again as I found ’em. Going to take some
ladies down in the car to-morrow.”

Giddy scowled. He did not dispute the propriety of Ray’s measures, if
there were to be ladies on board, but he felt injured. “I suppose
you’ll expect me to behave like a Y.M.C.A. secretary,” he growled. “I
can’t do my work and serve tea at the same time.”

“No need to have a tea-party,” said Ray with determined cheerfulness.
“Mrs. Kronborg will bring the lunch, and it will be a darned good one.”

Giddy lounged against the car, holding his cigar between two thick
fingers. “Then I guess she’ll get it,” he observed knowingly. “I don’t
think your musical friend is much on the grub-box. Has to keep her
hands white to tickle the ivories.” Giddy had nothing against Thea, but
he felt cantankerous and wanted to get a rise out of Kennedy.

“Every man to his own job,” Ray replied agreeably, pulling his white
shirt on over his head.

Giddy emitted smoke disdainfully. “I suppose so. The man that gets her
will have to wear an apron and bake the pancakes. Well, some men like
to mess about the kitchen.” He paused, but Ray was intent on getting
into his clothes as quickly as possible. Giddy thought he could go a
little further. “Of course, I don’t dispute your right to haul women in
this car if you want to; but personally, so far as I’m concerned, I’d a
good deal rather drink a can of tomatoes and do without the women _and_
their lunch. I was never much enslaved to hard-boiled eggs, anyhow.”

“You’ll eat ’em to-morrow, all the same.” Ray’s tone had a steely
glitter as he jumped out of the car, and Giddy stood aside to let him
pass. He knew that Kennedy’s next reply would be delivered by hand. He
had once seen Ray beat up a nasty fellow for insulting a Mexican woman
who helped about the grub-car in the work train, and his fists had
worked like two steel hammers. Giddy wasn’t looking for trouble.

At eight o’clock the next morning Ray greeted his ladies and helped
them into the car. Giddy had put on a clean shirt and yellow pig-skin
gloves and was whistling his best. He considered Kennedy a fluke as a
ladies’ man, and if there was to be a party, the honors had to be done
by some one who wasn’t a blacksmith at small-talk. Giddy had, as Ray
sarcastically admitted, “a local reputation as a jollier,” and he was
fluent in gallant speeches of a not too-veiled nature. He insisted that
Thea should take his seat in the cupola, opposite Ray’s, where she
could look out over the country. Thea told him, as she clambered up,
that she cared a good deal more about riding in that seat than about
going to Denver. Ray was never so companionable and easy as when he sat
chatting in the lookout of his little house on wheels. Good stories
came to him, and interesting recollections. Thea had a great respect
for the reports he had to write out, and for the telegrams that were
handed to him at stations; for all the knowledge and experience it must
take to run a freight train.

Giddy, down in the car, in the pauses of his work, made himself
agreeable to Mrs. Kronborg.

“It’s a great rest to be where my family can’t get at me, Mr. Giddy,”
she told him. “I thought you and Ray might have some housework here for
me to look after, but I couldn’t improve any on this car.”

“Oh, we like to keep her neat,” returned Giddy glibly, winking up at
Ray’s expressive back. “If you want to see a clean ice-box, look at
this one. Yes, Kennedy always carries fresh cream to eat on his
oatmeal. I’m not particular. The tin cow’s good enough for me.”

“Most of you boys smoke so much that all victuals taste alike to you,”
said Mrs. Kronborg. “I’ve got no religious scruples against smoking,
but I couldn’t take as much interest cooking for a man that used
tobacco. I guess it’s all right for bachelors who have to eat round.”

Mrs. Kronborg took off her hat and veil and made herself comfortable.
She seldom had an opportunity to be idle, and she enjoyed it. She could
sit for hours and watch the sage-hens fly up and the jack-rabbits dart
away from the track, without being bored. She wore a tan bombazine
dress, made very plainly, and carried a roomy, worn,
mother-of-the-family handbag.

Ray Kennedy always insisted that Mrs. Kronborg was “a fine-looking
lady,” but this was not the common opinion in Moonstone. Ray had lived
long enough among the Mexicans to dislike fussiness, to feel that there
was something more attractive in ease of manner than in absentminded
concern about hairpins and dabs of lace. He had learned to think that
the way a woman stood, moved, sat in her chair, looked at you, was more
important than the absence of wrinkles from her skirt. Ray had, indeed,
such unusual perceptions in some directions, that one could not help
wondering what he would have been if he had ever, as he said, had “half
a chance.”

He was right; Mrs. Kronborg was a fine-looking woman. She was short and
square, but her head was a real head, not a mere jerky termination of
the body. It had some individuality apart from hats and hairpins. Her
hair, Moonstone women admitted, would have been very pretty “on anybody
else.” Frizzy bangs were worn then, but Mrs. Kronborg always dressed
her hair in the same way, parted in the middle, brushed smoothly back
from her low, white forehead, pinned loosely on the back of her head in
two thick braids. It was growing gray about the temples, but after the
manner of yellow hair it seemed only to have grown paler there, and had
taken on a color like that of English primroses. Her eyes were clear
and untroubled; her face smooth and calm, and, as Ray said, “strong.”

Thea and Ray, up in the sunny cupola, were laughing and talking. Ray
got great pleasure out of seeing her face there in the little box where
he so often imagined it. They were crossing a plateau where great red
sandstone boulders lay about, most of them much wider at the top than
at the base, so that they looked like great toadstools.

“The sand has been blowing against them for a good many hundred years,”
Ray explained, directing Thea’s eyes with his gloved hand. “You see the
sand blows low, being so heavy, and cuts them out underneath. Wind and
sand are pretty high-class architects. That’s the principle of most of
the Cliff-Dweller remains down at Canyon de Chelly. The sandstorms had
dug out big depressions in the face of a cliff, and the Indians built
their houses back in that depression.”

“You told me that before, Ray, and of course you know. But the
geography says their houses were cut out of the face of the living
rock, and I like that better.”

Ray sniffed. “What nonsense does get printed! It’s enough to give a man
disrespect for learning. How could them Indians cut houses out of the
living rock, when they knew nothing about the art of forging metals?”
Ray leaned back in his chair, swung his foot, and looked thoughtful and
happy. He was in one of his favorite fields of speculation, and nothing
gave him more pleasure than talking these things over with Thea
Kronborg. “I’ll tell you, Thee, if those old fellows had learned to
work metals once, your ancient Egyptians and Assyrians wouldn’t have
beat them very much. Whatever they did do, they did well. Their
masonry’s standing there to-day, the corners as true as the Denver
Capitol. They were clever at most everything but metals; and that one
failure kept them from getting across. It was the quicksand that
swallowed ’em up, as a race. I guess civilization proper began when men
mastered metals.”

Ray was not vain about his bookish phrases. He did not use them to show
off, but because they seemed to him more adequate than colloquial
speech. He felt strongly about these things, and groped for words, as
he said, “to express himself.” He had the lamentable American belief
that “expression” is obligatory. He still carried in his trunk, among
the unrelated possessions of a railroad man, a notebook on the
title-page of which was written “Impressions on First Viewing the Grand
Canyon, Ray H. Kennedy.” The pages of that book were like a
battlefield; the laboring author had fallen back from metaphor after
metaphor, abandoned position after position. He would have admitted
that the art of forging metals was nothing to this treacherous business
of recording impressions, in which the material you were so full of
vanished mysteriously under your striving hand. “Escaping steam!” he
had said to himself, the last time he tried to read that notebook.

Thea didn’t mind Ray’s travel-lecture expressions. She dodged them,
unconsciously, as she did her father’s professional palaver. The light
in Ray’s pale-blue eyes and the feeling in his voice more than made up
for the stiffness of his language.

“Were the Cliff-Dwellers really clever with their hands, Ray, or do you
always have to make allowance and say, ‘That was pretty good for an
Indian’?” she asked.

Ray went down into the car to give some instructions to Giddy. “Well,”
he said when he returned, “about the aborigines: once or twice I’ve
been with some fellows who were cracking burial mounds. Always felt a
little ashamed of it, but we did pull out some remarkable things. We
got some pottery out whole; seemed pretty fine to me. I guess their
women were their artists. We found lots of old shoes and sandals made
out of yucca fiber, neat and strong; and feather blankets, too.”

“Feather blankets? You never told me about them.”

“Didn’t I? The old fellows—or the squaws—wove a close netting of yucca
fiber, and then tied on little bunches of down feathers, overlapping,
just the way feathers grow on a bird. Some of them were feathered on
both sides. You can’t get anything warmer than that, now, can you?—or
prettier. What I like about those old aborigines is, that they got all
their ideas from nature.”

Thea laughed. “That means you’re going to say something about girls’
wearing corsets. But some of your Indians flattened their babies’
heads, and that’s worse than wearing corsets.”

“Give me an Indian girl’s figure for beauty,” Ray insisted. “And a girl
with a voice like yours ought to have plenty of lung-action. But you
know my sentiments on that subject. I was going to tell you about the
handsomest thing we ever looted out of those burial mounds. It was on a
woman, too, I regret to say. She was preserved as perfect as any mummy
that ever came out of the pyramids. She had a big string of turquoises
around her neck, and she was wrapped in a fox-fur cloak, lined with
little yellow feathers that must have come off wild canaries. Can you
beat that, now? The fellow that claimed it sold it to a Boston man for
a hundred and fifty dollars.”

Thea looked at him admiringly. “Oh, Ray, and didn’t you get anything
off her, to remember her by, even? She must have been a princess.”

Ray took a wallet from the pocket of the coat that was hanging beside
him, and drew from it a little lump wrapped in worn tissue paper. In a
moment a stone, soft and blue as a robin’s egg, lay in the hard palm of
his hand. It was a turquoise, rubbed smooth in the Indian finish, which
is so much more beautiful than the incongruous high polish the white
man gives that tender stone. “I got this from her necklace. See the
hole where the string went through? You know how the Indians drill
them? Work the drill with their teeth. You like it, don’t you? They’re
just right for you. Blue and yellow are the Swedish colors.” Ray looked
intently at her head, bent over his hand, and then gave his whole
attention to the track.

“I’ll tell you, Thee,” he began after a pause, “I’m going to form a
camping party one of these days and persuade your _padre_ to take you
and your mother down to that country, and we’ll live in the rock
houses—they’re as comfortable as can be—and start the cook fires up in
’em once again. I’ll go into the burial mounds and get you more
keepsakes than any girl ever had before.” Ray had planned such an
expedition for his wedding journey, and it made his heart thump to see
how Thea’s eyes kindled when he talked about it. “I’ve learned more
down there about what makes history,” he went on, “than in all the
books I’ve ever read. When you sit in the sun and let your heels hang
out of a doorway that drops a thousand feet, ideas come to you. You
begin to feel what the human race has been up against from the
beginning. There’s something mighty elevating about those old
habitations. You feel like it’s up to you to do your best, on account
of those fellows having it so hard. You feel like you owed them
something.”

At Wassiwappa, Ray got instructions to sidetrack until Thirty-six went
by. After reading the message, he turned to his guests. “I’m afraid
this will hold us up about two hours, Mrs. Kronborg, and we won’t get
into Denver till near midnight.”

“That won’t trouble me,” said Mrs. Kronborg contentedly. “They know me
at the Y.W.C.A., and they’ll let me in any time of night. I came to see
the country, not to make time. I’ve always wanted to get out at this
white place and look around, and now I’ll have a chance. What makes it
so white?”

“Some kind of chalky rock.” Ray sprang to the ground and gave Mrs.
Kronborg his hand. “You can get soil of any color in Colorado; match
most any ribbon.”

While Ray was getting his train on to a side track, Mrs. Kronborg
strolled off to examine the post-office and station house; these, with
the water tank, made up the town. The station agent “batched” and
raised chickens. He ran out to meet Mrs. Kronborg, clutched at her
feverishly, and began telling her at once how lonely he was and what
bad luck he was having with his poultry. She went to his chicken yard
with him, and prescribed for gapes.

Wassiwappa seemed a dreary place enough to people who looked for
verdure, a brilliant place to people who liked color. Beside the
station house there was a blue-grass plot, protected by a red plank
fence, and six fly-bitten box-elder trees, not much larger than bushes,
were kept alive by frequent hosings from the water plug. Over the
windows some dusty morning-glory vines were trained on strings. All the
country about was broken up into low chalky hills, which were so
intensely white, and spotted so evenly with sage, that they looked like
white leopards crouching. White dust powdered everything, and the light
was so intense that the station agent usually wore blue glasses. Behind
the station there was a water course, which roared in flood time, and a
basin in the soft white rock where a pool of alkali water flashed in
the sun like a mirror. The agent looked almost as sick as his chickens,
and Mrs. Kronborg at once invited him to lunch with her party. He had,
he confessed, a distaste for his own cooking, and lived mainly on soda
crackers and canned beef. He laughed apologetically when Mrs. Kronborg
said she guessed she’d look about for a shady place to eat lunch.

She walked up the track to the water tank, and there, in the narrow
shadows cast by the uprights on which the tank stood, she found two
tramps. They sat up and stared at her, heavy with sleep. When she asked
them where they were going, they told her “to the coast.” They rested
by day and traveled by night; walked the ties unless they could steal a
ride, they said; adding that “these Western roads were getting strict.”
Their faces were blistered, their eyes blood-shot, and their shoes
looked fit only for the trash pile.

“I suppose you’re hungry?” Mrs. Kronborg asked. “I suppose you both
drink?” she went on thoughtfully, not censoriously.

The huskier of the two hoboes, a bushy, bearded fellow, rolled his eyes
and said, “I wonder?” But the other, who was old and spare, with a
sharp nose and watery eyes, sighed. “Some has one affliction, some
another,” he said.

Mrs. Kronborg reflected. “Well,” she said at last, “you can’t get
liquor here, anyway. I am going to ask you to vacate, because I want to
have a little picnic under this tank for the freight crew that brought
me along. I wish I had lunch enough to provide you, but I ain’t. The
station agent says he gets his provisions over there at the post office
store, and if you are hungry you can get some canned stuff there.” She
opened her handbag and gave each of the tramps a half-dollar.

The old man wiped his eyes with his forefinger. “Thank ’ee, ma’am. A
can of tomatters will taste pretty good to me. I wasn’t always walkin’
ties; I had a good job in Cleveland before—”

The hairy tramp turned on him fiercely. “Aw, shut up on that, grandpaw!
Ain’t you got no gratitude? What do you want to hand the lady that
fur?”

The old man hung his head and turned away. As he went off, his comrade
looked after him and said to Mrs. Kronborg: “It’s true, what he says.
He had a job in the car shops; but he had bad luck.” They both limped
away toward the store, and Mrs. Kronborg sighed. She was not afraid of
tramps. She always talked to them, and never turned one away. She hated
to think how many of them there were, crawling along the tracks over
that vast country.

Her reflections were cut short by Ray and Giddy and Thea, who came
bringing the lunch box and water bottles. Although there was not shadow
enough to accommodate all the party at once, the air under the tank was
distinctly cooler than the surrounding air, and the drip made a
pleasant sound in that breathless noon. The station agent ate as if he
had never been fed before, apologizing every time he took another piece
of fried chicken. Giddy was unabashed before the devilled eggs of which
he had spoken so scornfully last night. After lunch the men lit their
pipes and lay back against the uprights that supported the tank.

“This is the sunny side of railroading, all right,” Giddy drawled
luxuriously.

“You fellows grumble too much,” said Mrs. Kronborg as she corked the
pickle jar. “Your job has its drawbacks, but it don’t tie you down. Of
course there’s the risk; but I believe a man’s watched over, and he
can’t be hurt on the railroad or anywhere else if it’s intended he
shouldn’t be.”

Giddy laughed. “Then the trains must be operated by fellows the Lord
has it in for, Mrs. Kronborg. They figure it out that a railroad man’s
only due to last eleven years; then it’s his turn to be smashed.”

“That’s a dark Providence, I don’t deny,” Mrs. Kronborg admitted. “But
there’s lots of things in life that’s hard to understand.”

“I guess!” murmured Giddy, looking off at the spotted white hills.

Ray smoked in silence, watching Thea and her mother clear away the
lunch. He was thinking that Mrs. Kronborg had in her face the same
serious look that Thea had; only hers was calm and satisfied, and
Thea’s was intense and questioning. But in both it was a large kind of
look, that was not all the time being broken up and convulsed by
trivial things. They both carried their heads like Indian women, with a
kind of noble unconsciousness. He got so tired of women who were always
nodding and jerking; apologizing, deprecating, coaxing, insinuating
with their heads.

When Ray’s party set off again that afternoon the sun beat fiercely
into the cupola, and Thea curled up in one of the seats at the back of
the car and had a nap.

As the short twilight came on, Giddy took a turn in the cupola, and Ray
came down and sat with Thea on the rear platform of the caboose and
watched the darkness come in soft waves over the plain. They were now
about thirty miles from Denver, and the mountains looked very near. The
great toothed wall behind which the sun had gone down now separated
into four distinct ranges, one behind the other. They were a very pale
blue, a color scarcely stronger than wood smoke, and the sunset had
left bright streaks in the snow-filled gorges. In the clear,
yellow-streaked sky the stars were coming out, flickering like newly
lighted lamps, growing steadier and more golden as the sky darkened and
the land beneath them fell into complete shadow. It was a cool, restful
darkness that was not black or forbidding, but somehow open and free;
the night of high plains where there is no moistness or mistiness in
the atmosphere.