Читать книгу Virginia of Elk Creek Valley - Mary Ellen Chase - Страница 6

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Virginia Hunter was right. Priscilla Winthrop, her roommate at St. Helen’s, and junior partner in the formation of the Vigilante Order, had not been still for ten minutes since five A. M. At that hour she had risen from bed, dressed hurriedly, and bribed the sleepy porter to allow her a seat on the observation platform. It was contrary to custom and orders at that hour, but he had done it notwithstanding. Apparently this young lady would take no refusal.

Priscilla had moved her chair to the extreme rear of the platform that nothing on either side might escape her eager eyes. She had watched the sun rise from behind the first mountain spurs, and gild their barren summits and sagebrush-covered sides. They looked so gaunt and lonely standing there, she thought, like great gods guarding the entrance 12 to an enchanted land. Between her and them stretched the plains—here white with alkali, there barren with sparse sagebrush. Not infrequently the train rumbled across a little creek or irrigation ditch around which cottonwoods grew and grass was green. In these fertile spots there were always rude houses of logs with outlying shacks and corrals. Priscilla had shuddered at the thought of living in such places. These must be other pioneers, she said to herself, whose ancestors Virginia delighted to honor. Well, they most certainly deserved it!

She had hardly kept her seat at all. There was constantly something on one side or the other which attracted her attention, and she darted right and left much to the amusement of the brakeman who sat within the car and watched her. As they hurried through one of the irrigated spots, she heard a bird sing—a clear, jubilant, rollicking song. Could it be the meadow-lark of which Virginia had always spoken? At six they had passed through a prairie-dog town, whose inhabitants had thus far existed for Priscilla only in books and in Virginia’s stories. 13 Her fascinated eyes spied the little animals, as for one instant they stood upright to survey this rude and noisy intruder, and then darted into their house doorways. She had knocked over two camp chairs in her excited efforts to reach the brakeman, and assure herself that they were really prairie dogs.

But the climax had occurred shortly afterward when while going through a country of sagebrush stretches and grim, almost naked buttes, she had seen—actually seen a cow boy! He was true to every description Virginia had ever given her—sombrero, bandana, chaps and all! She could not see his face, but she knew he must be fine-looking like the “Virginian” or like Dick at the Hunter ranch. He was galloping through the sagebrush on a mottled, ugly-looking broncho, doubtless bent on some secret errand.

Priscilla was seized with half a dozen impulses as she watched him. Should she hurry through four cars and tell the others that they might see him also? Should she send the porter? How any one could sleep at such a time as this was far beyond her 14 comprehension! But she had remained, rooted at last to one spot, and watched him until he was lost to sight. How would it seem, she wondered, to gallop alone through this country? She hoped the cow boy had noticed the sun rise over the buttes; she hoped that even now he was not blind to the great mountains in the distance, which were reaching their blue summits toward the sky.

She drew a long breath of the thin, clear mountain air! So this was Virginia’s country! It was a big land! She understood now what Virginia had meant by talking about the bigness of everything. The plains, stretching on and on, gray-green with sagebrush, the gaunt mountain spurs, the far-away real mountains, blue and snow-furrowed, the great, clear sky over all! It must be wonderful at night with countless stars and a moon looking down upon the loneliness of everything. There was something about it all that, in some strange way, pulled out one’s very soul—that made one want to be big in thought, tolerant, kind!

The brakeman, perhaps alarmed at seeing his interesting passenger actually standing still, had joined 15 her at that moment. Priscilla pointed to a speck in the sagebrush—the vanishing cow boy.

“A real cow boy!” she shouted above the rumble of the wheels.

“Humph!” grunted her companion. “Didn’t you never see one before?”

“Never!” cried Priscilla fervently.

“It ain’t no great sight!” returned the sophisticated brakeman.

“Perhaps not to you,” Priscilla shouted in his ear, “but it would be if you had dreamed of seeing one for ten months and three-quarters the way I have.”

“Humph!” grunted the brakeman again. “You must be a tenderfoot.”

“I am,” cried Priscilla, “and I’m glad of it! You can only see bran-new things once. The second time you see them they aren’t new any longer, and can’t give you thrills like the first time.”

The brakeman grinned.

“There’s some yucca,” he shouted, pointing to a tall, straight plant with white, bell-shaped flowers growing by the track. 16

“What’s that?” screamed the interested Priscilla.

“Sometimes folks call it Indian soap-weed,” explained the brakeman in her ear, “because if you break the leaves they’ll lather in water. And some folks call it Spanish bayonet. It grows in barren places out here.”

“I’ll put that in my Thought Book,” Priscilla told him. “I guess it’s lucky I have a new one with all these new things to write about. Why are all the trees out here those tall cottonwoods?”

“They ain’t all,” answered the obliging brakeman, “but the cottonwoods don’t take so much soil. They grow easy and quick, and make good wind-breaks, so folks plant ’em when they build a house near a creek like that one over there. Quaking-asps—they grow well, too.”

“Quaking-asps!” cried Priscilla. “Where are they? Please show me! I’d give worlds to see one! My roommate lives out here—I’m just on my way to visit her—and it’s her favorite tree.”

“You don’t have to give nothin’,” shouted her companion dryly. “There’s plenty of ’em right along this creek we’re passing. They’re them little trees 17 with light green trunks and trembly leaves. They grow by creeks and in springy places mostly.”

Priscilla leaned over the railing and gazed.

“Oh, aren’t they happy? They’re the jolliest trees I ever saw!”

“I guess that is a good word for ’em,” agreed the brakeman. “They sure do dance around.”

“Doesn’t anything grow on those hills but little trees and sagebrush?” queried Priscilla. “It is sagebrush, isn’t it? I guessed it was from pictures, and from what Virginia said.”

“Yes, it’s sagebrush, ma’am, and nothin’ much grows on them buttes except that and rattlers.”

“Oh!” screamed Priscilla. “That’s one thing I’d hate to see! You don’t think I will, do you?”

“Like’s not,” encouraged the brakeman. “They ain’t so bad. Must come in handy for something, else we wouldn’t have ’em.”

Just then Carver Standish had opened the door for Aunt Nan, who announced breakfast for the party. Priscilla was obdurate.

“Miss Webster,” she remonstrated, “please don’t make me eat! I simply couldn’t do it! I’ve had the 18 most wonderful morning of my whole life. I’ve seen prairie-dogs and yucca and quaking-asps and a cow boy, and I know I heard a meadow-lark. This gentleman has taught me all kinds of things.”

The brakeman touched his hat.

“He’s been very kind, I’m sure,” said Aunt Nan, too used to her own niece’s methods of making new friends to be troubled. “But we’re going to reach Virginia and Donald in another hour, and you must have some breakfast, Priscilla.”

“Carver will bring me some fruit,” persisted Priscilla, “and you can’t see a thing from the window. Oh, please, Miss Webster! I just can’t eat when I have this queer feeling inside of me!”

So Priscilla had been left in peace, much against the better judgment of the chaperone; and now at nine o’clock, the three Vigilantes with Aunt Nan, Jack Williams and Carver Standish III viewed Virginia’s country together and all for the first time. The picture which Virginia was at that very moment painting for Donald was very accurate—even to detail. Aunt Nan, eager that no one should miss a thing, kept pointing out this and that feature of 19 interest—the strange, new flowers by the track, the occasional log houses, the irrigation ditches, so new to them all. Vivian sat quietly in one corner—her eyes big, round, almost frightened. The endless stretches of country, the lonely barren places, and the great mountains somehow scared Vivian. It was the loneliest country she had ever seen, she told Aunt Nan. Mary Williams said nothing, but her dark blue eyes roamed delightedly from prairie to foot-hills, and from the foot-hills to the mountains, where they lingered longest. In all her dreams she had never pictured anything so big and wonderful as this. Jack and Carver stood together by the railing, and let nothing escape their eager eyes; while Priscilla, forgetting to eat Carver Standish’s banana, hurried from one to another with eager explanations gained from her morning’s experience.

In half an hour they would be there. Already the barren stretches had given place to acres and acres of grain, across which were comfortable ranch-houses, set about by cottonwoods. Beyond the grain-fields rose the foot-hills—open ranges where hundreds of cattle were feeding, and far above the 20 foot-hills towered the mountains in all their blue-clad mystery.

“There’s the creek bridge!” cried Priscilla, springing to her feet a few minutes later. “Virginia has written me a dozen times that when we crossed that red bridge we should begin to get ready. I suppose I ought to comb my hair. It’s a sight! But Virginia’ll be so happy she’ll never notice in all this world!”

Virginia was assuredly too happy to notice disheveled heads or smoke-stained faces or wrinkled suits when she saw her own dear Aunt Nan and her very best friends step excitedly from the train onto the little station platform. That queer sinking feeling inside vanished, and only joy was left.

“It’s come true! It’s come true!” she kept crying as she greeted them all. “Just think, Priscilla, it’s really happening this minute! You’re all in my country at last—Donald’s and mine!”

So the world looked very beautiful to them all as they drove homeward. The three boys on the front seat became acquainted and re-acquainted, while the Vigilantes and Aunt Nan behind held one another’s 21 hands and asked question after question of the happy Virginia. No, she told them, the days weren’t all as perfect, but most of them were. Yes, the sunflowers grew wild all in among the grain. No, there were no snakes very near. Yes, it was truly sixty-five miles away to the farthest mountains. No, she had never been so happy in all her life.

They stopped at the Keith ranch to receive a copyrighted Western welcome, and to leave Jack and Carver. Donald would drive the girls home, and then return. Mr. David, Mother Mary, Malcolm and little Kenneth—all the Keith family—came to greet them. It seemed to Jack Williams as though he had never received a welcome so genuine; and to the hungry and tired Carver Standish III the simple brown ranch-house, surrounded by cottonwoods and set about by wide grain-fields, possessed a charm unsurpassed by the most stately mansions of New England.

The Vigilantes and Aunt Nan received as genuine a welcome a half hour later when they drove down the long avenue of cottonwoods to Virginia’s home. It came not only from a tall, bronzed man, who 22 shared his little daughter’s joy, but also from a white-aproned, kind-faced woman in the doorway, and a quiet, stooped man by Aunt Nan’s marigolds.

“I know it’s Hannah,” cried Priscilla, running to the doorway. “She looks just as though she knew all about the German measles!”

“And I’m sure this is William,” said Mary a little shyly, as she shook hands with the quiet man by the garden. “It just couldn’t be—any one else!”

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