Claim Number One Page 2

  CHAPTER II

  GUESTS FOR THE METROPOLE

  To Comanche there came that August afternoon, when it was wearing downto long shadows, a mixed company, drawn from the far places and themiddle distances east of Wyoming. This company had assembled in thecourse of the day's acquaintance on the last long, dusty run into theland of expectations.

  At dawn these people had left their comfortable sleeping-cars atChadron, in the Nebraska desert, to change to the train of archaiccoaches which transported the land-seekers across the last stretch oftheir journey. Before that morning the company had been pursuing its wayas individual parts--all, that is, with the exception of the miller'swife, from near Boston; the sister of the miller's wife, who was a widowand the mother of June; and June, who was pasty and off-color, due tomuch fudge and polishing in a young ladies' school.

  These three traveled together, as three of such close relationshipnaturally should travel. The widow was taking June to Wyoming to see ifshe could put some marketable color in her cheeks, and the miller's wifewas going along for a belated realization, at least partially, ofyouthful yearnings.

  Since seventeen the miller's wife had longed to see the sun set behind amountain with snow upon it, and to see a cowboy with dust on hisshoulders, like the cowboys of the western drama, come riding out of theglow, a speck at first, and on, and on, until he arrived where shewaited and flung himself from his panting horse, neckerchief awry, spurstinkling, and swept off his broad hat in salute. Beyond that point shehad not dared to go since marrying the miller, who had dust enough on_his_ shoulders--unromantic dust, unromantic shoulders, goodness knows!But that was her picture, all framed in the gold of her heart. Shewanted to see the mountain with the sun behind it, and the cowboy, andall, and then she could sigh, and go back to the miller and near Bostonto await the prosaic end.

  For all of her thirty-eight years Mrs. Dorothy Mann was shy inproportion as her miller husband, the widely known J. Milton Mann wasbold. That he was a hard-mailed knight in the lists of business, andthat he was universally known, Mrs. Mann was ready to contend and upholdin any company. She carried with her in the black bag which always hungupon her arm certain poems bearing her husband's confession ofauthorship, which had been printed in the _Millers' Journal_, all ofthem calling public attention to the noble office of his ancient trade.Of course the miller was not of the party, so we really have nothingmore to do with him than we have with the rest of the throng thatarrived on the train with these singled-out adventurers. But hisinfluence traveled far, like a shadow reaching out after the heart ofhis spare, pert, large-eyed wife. She was not yet so far away from himthat she dared move even her eyes as her heart longed.

  In the manner of the miller's wife, there was a restraint upon the mostcommonplace and necessary intercourse with strangers which seemed almostchildish. She even turned in questioning indecision toward June's motherbefore taking a seat offered her by a strange man, feeling at the sametime of the black bag upon her arm, where the poems reposed, as if tobeg indulgence from their author for any liberties which she mightassume.

  June's mother, Mrs. Malvina Reed, widow of that great statesman, theHon. Alonzo Confucius Reed, who will be remembered as the author of thenotable bill to prohibit barbers breathing on the backs of theircustomers' necks, was duenna of the party. She was a dumpy, small woman,gray, with lines in her steamed face, in which all attempts atrejuvenation had failed.

  Mrs. Reed was a severe lady when it came to respecting the conventionsof polite life, and June was her heart's deep worry. She believed thatyoung woman to be in the first stage of a dangerous and mysteriousmalady, which belief and which malady were alike nothing in the worldbut fudge. When she turned her eyes upon June's overfed face a moisturecame into them; a sigh disturbed her breast.

  By one of those strange chances, such as seem to us when we meet themnothing short of preconceived arrangement, enough seats had been leftunoccupied in the rear coach, all in one place, to accommodate a secondparty, which came straggling through with hand-baggage hooked upon allits dependent accessories. It proved very pleasant for all involved.There the June party scraped acquaintance with the others, after thefirst restraint had been dissolved in a discussion of the virtues ofcanned tomatoes applied to the tongue of one famishing in the desert.

  First among the others was the bright-haired young woman from Canton,Ohio, whose gray eyes seemed older than herself, lighting as if with newhope every time they turned to acknowledge a good wish for her luck inthe new land. It seemed at such moments as if she quickened with thebelief that she was coming upon the track of something which she hadlost, and was in a way of getting trace of it again.

  She sat up straight-backed as a saint in a cathedral window, but sheunbent toward June. June was not long in finding out that she, also, wasa product of grand old Molly Bawn, that mighty institution of learningso justly famed throughout the world for its fudge; that her name wasAgnes Horton, and that she was going to register for a piece of land.

  Some five years before June had matriculated, Agnes Horton had steppedout, finished, from the halls of Molly Bawn.

  "She's old," confided June to her mother's ear. "She must be at leasttwenty-five!"

  Old or young, she was handsomer than any other woman on the train, andseemingly unaware of it as she leaned her elbow upon the dustywindow-sill and gazed out in pensive introspection upon the bleak landwhere glaciers had trampled and volcanoes raged, each of them leavingits waste of worn stone and blackened ledge.

  And there was the school-teacher from Iowa; a long, thin string of aman, who combed his hair straight back from his narrow, dished foreheadand said "idear." He was thinking seriously of sheep.

  And there was the commissary sergeant from Fort Sheridan, which iswithin the shadow of Chicago, German-faced, towering, broad. He blushedas if scandalized every time a woman spoke to him, and he took Limburgercheese and onions from his cloth telescope grip for his noonday lunch.

  And there was the well-mannered manufacturer of tools, who came fromBuffalo, and his bald brother with him, who followed the law. There wasthe insurance man from Kansas, who grinned when he wasn't talking andtalked when he didn't grin; and the doctor from Missouri, a large-framedman with a worn face and anxious look, traveling westward in hope; andthe lumberman from Minnesota, who wore a round hat and looked meek, likea secretary of a Y. M. C. A., and spat tobacco-juice out of the window.

  All of these men, save the school-teacher and manufacturer, were more orless failures, one way or another. Take the sergeant--Sergeant Schaefer,and Jake was the name in front of that--for example. He had failed inhis examination for advancement to a commission, and blamed thearistocracy of the army for it. He was disgusted with military life; andto him a claim, especially Claim Number One, in the Indian Reservationof Wyoming, looked like a haven of independence and peace.

  There was the bald lawyer, too; a young man old from his honest cares, afailure in the law because he could not square his conscience with itspractices. He was ready to quit it for an alfalfa-plot and a littlebunch of fat cattle--especially if he drew Number One.

  Horace Bentley sighed when he looked back upon his struggles with theworld and the law. The law had been a saddle that galled his backthrough many a heavy year. And his brother William, in need of a holidayfrom his busy factory, had taken a month to himself to see "the boy," ashe called Horace, established in a new calling in the high-minded,open-faced West.

  As for the insurance solicitor and lumberman, it must be owned that theywere gamblers on the drawing. They meant to register and hang around forthe lottery. Then if they should draw Number One, or even anything up toa hundred, they would sell out for what there was to be gained.

  With Dr. Warren Slavens it was quite different from the case of thesepurely adventurous speculators. Dr. Slavens had been late in getting astart. It was not a difficulty peculiar to him alone that the startalways seemed a considerable distance ahead of him. Up to that time hehad been engaged with merely the prelimi
naries, and they had hobbled himand cumbered him, and heaped up continually such a mass of matter to besmoothed out of the way of his going, that he never had struck a canteron the highway of life.

  Of all the disheartened, blue, and beaten men on that dusty train thatdusty day, Dr. Warren Slavens, late of Missouri, was without questionthe deepest down in the quagmire of failure. He hated himself for thefizzle that he had made of it, and he hated the world that would notopen the gates and give him one straight dash for the goal among men ofhis size.

  He went frequently to the platform of the car and took a long pull at abig, black pipe which he carried in a formidable leather case, like asurgical instrument, in his inner pocket. After each pull at it hereturned with a redder face and a cloudier brow, ready to snap and snarllike an under dog that believes every foot in the world is raised tocome down on his own ribs.

  But there was nobody on that train who cared an empty sardine-can forthe doctor's failures or feelings. Nobody wanted to jab him in the ribs;nobody wanted to hear his complaint. He was wise enough to know it, in away. So he kept to himself, pulling his shoulders up in soldierlyfashion when he passed Agnes Horton's place, or when he felt that shewas looking at him from her station directly behind his seat.

  At any rate, up to the neck as he was in the bog of failure, the doctorwas going to Wyoming with a good many practical advantages ahead ofthousands of his fellows. Before turning doctor he had been a farmer'sboy; and he told himself that, failing in his solid determination to getup to the starting-line in his profession, he believed he could dopretty well at his older trade. But if he drew Claim Number One he meantto sell it for ten thousand dollars--that being the current valuationplaced on first choice--and go back home to establish himself in dignityand build up a practice.

  The school-teacher hadn't much to say, but his cast was serious. Heexpected to draw Number One, not to sell, but to improve, to put sheepon, and alfalfa, and build a long barn with his name on the roof so thatit could be read from the railroad as the trains went by.

  June's mother, being a widow, was eligible for the drawing. She alsomeant to register. If she drew Number One--and she hadn't yet made upher mind about the certainty of that--she intended to sell herrelinquishment and take June to Vienna for examination by an eminentphysician.

  When anybody asked Agnes Horton what she intended to do with herwinnings out of the land lottery, she only smiled with that littlejumping of hope in her eyes. It was a marvel to the whole party what awell set-up girl like her, with her refinement and looks and clothes,wanted to fool her time away in Wyoming for, when the world was full ofmen who would wear their hands raw to smooth a way for her feet to passin pleasanter places. But all of them could see that in her heart thehope of Number One was as big as a can of tomatoes--in cowboyliterature--to the eyes of a man dying of thirst in Death Valley.

  Only the toolmaker, William Bentley--and he was gray at the curling hairwhich turned up at his broad temples--smiled as if he held it to be apleasant fantasy, too nebulous and far-away to be realized upon, whenany asked him of his intentions concerning Number One. He put off hisquestioners with a pleasantry when they pressed him, but there was sucha tenderness in his eyes as he looked at his pale, bald brother, old inhonest ways before his time, that it was the same as spoken words.

  So it will be seen that a great deal depended on Claim Number One, notalone among the pleasant little company of ours, but in the calculationsof every man and woman out of the forty-seven thousand who wouldregister, ultimately, for the chance and the hope of drawing it.

  At Casper a runner for the Hotel Metropole had boarded the train. He wasa voluble young man with a thousand reasons why travelers to the end ofthe world and the railroad should patronize the Hotel Metropole and noother. He sat on the arms of passengers' seats and made his argument,having along with him a great quantity of yellow cards, each cardbearing a number, each good for an apartment or a cot in the open. Bypayment of the rate, a person could secure his bed ahead of any need forit which, said the young man, was the precaution of a wise ginny who wason to his job. The train conductor vouched for the genuineness of theyoung man's credentials, and conditions of things at Comanche as hepictured them.

  It was due to Sergeant Jake Schaefer that the company organized to messtogether. The hotel representative fell in with the idea with greatwarmth. There was a large tent on the corner, just off Main Street,which the company could rent, said he. A partition would be put in itfor the privacy of the ladies, and the hotel would supply the guestswith a stove and utensils. June's mother liked the notion. It relievedher of a great worry, for with a stove of her own she could stillcontrive those dainties so necessary to the continued existence of thedelicate child.

  So the bargain was struck, the sergeant was placed in charge of theconduct and supply of the camp, and everybody breathed easier. They hadanticipated difficulty over the matter of lodging and food in Comanche,for wild tales of extortion and crowding, and undesirable conditionsgenerally, had been traveling through the train all day.

  Comanche was quiet when the train arrived, for that was the part of theday when the lull between the afternoon's activities and the night'sfrantic reaping fell. Everyone who had arrived the day previousaccounted himself an old-timer, and all such, together with all thearrivals of all the days since the registration began, came down to seethe tenderfeet swallow their first impressions of the coming Eden.

  The Hotel Metropole was the only public house in Comanche thatmaintained a conveyance to meet travelers at the station, and that wasfor the transportation of their baggage only. For a man will follow hisbelongings and stick to them in one place as well as another, and theproprietor of the Metropole was philosopher enough to know that. So hismen with the wagon grabbed all the baggage they could wrench from, liftfrom under, or pry out of the grasp of travelers when they stepped offthe train.

  The June party saw their possessions loaded into the wagon, under theloud supervision of Sergeant Schaefer, who had been in that countrybefore and could be neither intimidated, out-sounded, nor bluffed. Then,following their traveling agent-guide, they pushed through the crowds totheir quarters.

  Fortunate, indeed, they considered themselves when they saw how mattersstood in Comanche. There seemed to be two men for every cot in theplace. Of women there were few, and June's mother shuddered when shethought of what they would have been obliged to face if they hadn't beenso lucky as to get a tent to themselves.

  "I never would have got off that train!" she declared. "No, I neverwould have brought my daughter into any such unprotected place asthis!"

  Mrs. Reed looked around her severely, for life was starting to lift itshead again in Comanche after the oppression of the afternoon's heat.

  Mrs. Mann smiled. She was beginning to take a comprehensive account ofthe distance between Wyoming and the town near Boston where the millertoiled in the gloom of his mill.

  "I think it's perfectly lovely and romantic!" said she.

  Mrs. Reed received the outburst with disfavor.

  "Remember your husband, Dorothy Ann!" warned she.

  Dorothy Ann sighed, gently caressing the black bag which dangled uponher slender arm.

  "I do, Malvina," said she.