THE SONG OF THE LARK (1915 edition) by WILLA CATHER

                      THE SONG OF THE LARK

                             PART I

                      FRIENDS OF CHILDHOOD

                                I


    Dr. Howard Archie had just come up from a
game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two travel-
ing men who happened to be staying overnight in Moon-
stone.  His offices were in the Duke Block, over the drug
store.  Larry, the doctor's man, had lit the overhead light
in the waiting-room and the double student's lamp on the
desk in the study.  The isinglass sides of the hard-coal
burner were aglow, and the air in the study was so hot that
as he came in the doctor opened the door into his little
operating-room, where there was no stove.  The waiting-
room was carpeted and stiffly furnished, something like a
country parlor.  The study had worn, unpainted floors, but
there was a look of winter comfort about it.  The doctor's
flat-top desk was large and well made; the papers were in
orderly piles, under glass weights.  Behind the stove a wide
bookcase, with double glass doors, reached from the floor
to the ceiling.  It was filled with medical books of every
thickness and color.  On the top shelf stood a long row of
thirty or forty volumes, bound all alike in dark mottled
board covers, with imitation leather backs.

    As the doctor in New England villages is proverbially
old, so the doctor in small Colorado towns twenty-five
years ago was generally young.  Dr. Archie was barely
thirty.  He was tall, with massive shoulders which he held
stiffly, and a large, well-shaped head.  He was a distin-
guished-looking man, for that part of the world, at least.

There was something individual in the way in which his
reddish-brown hair, parted cleanly at the side, bushed over
his high forehead.  His nose was straight and thick, and his
eyes were intelligent.  He wore a curly, reddish mustache
and an imperial, cut trimly, which made him look a little
like the pictures of Napoleon III.  His hands were large and
well kept, but ruggedly formed, and the backs were shaded
with crinkly reddish hair.  He wore a blue suit of woolly,
wide-waled serge; the traveling men had known at a glance
that it was made by a Denver tailor.  The doctor was al-
ways well dressed.

    Dr. Archie turned up the student's lamp and sat down in
the swivel chair before his desk.  He sat uneasily, beating
a tattoo on his knees with his fingers, and looked about him
as if he were bored.  He glanced at his watch, then absently
took from his pocket a bunch of small keys, selected one
and looked at it.  A contemptuous smile, barely percepti-
ble, played on his lips, but his eyes remained meditative.
Behind the door that led into the hall, under his buffalo-
skin driving-coat, was a locked cupboard.  This the doctor
opened mechanically, kicking aside a pile of muddy over-
shoes.  Inside, on the shelves, were whiskey glasses and
decanters, lemons, sugar, and bitters.  Hearing a step in
the empty, echoing hall without, the doctor closed the cup-
board again, snapping the Yale lock.  The door of the
waiting-room opened, a man entered and came on into
the consulting-room.

    "Good-evening, Mr. Kronborg," said the doctor care-
lessly.  "Sit down."

    His visitor was a tall, loosely built man, with a thin
brown beard, streaked with gray.  He wore a frock coat, a
broad-brimmed black hat, a white lawn necktie, and steel-
rimmed spectacles.  Altogether there was a pretentious and
important air about him, as he lifted the skirts of his coat
and sat down.

    "Good-evening, doctor.  Can you step around to the

house with me?  I think Mrs. Kronborg will need you this
evening."  This was said with profound gravity and, curi-
ously enough, with a slight embarrassment.

    "Any hurry?" the doctor asked over his shoulder as he
went into his operating-room.

    Mr. Kronborg coughed behind his hand, and contracted
his brows.  His face threatened at every moment to break
into a smile of foolish excitement.  He controlled it only by
calling upon his habitual pulpit manner.  "Well, I think it
would be as well to go immediately.  Mrs. Kronborg will be
more comfortable if you are there.  She has been suffering
for some time."

    The doctor came back and threw a black bag upon his
desk.  He wrote some instructions for his man on a pre-
scription pad and then drew on his overcoat.  "All ready,"
he announced, putting out his lamp.  Mr. Kronborg rose
and they tramped through the empty hall and down the
stairway to the street.  The drug store below was dark, and
the saloon next door was just closing.  Every other light on
Main Street was out.

    On either side of the road and at the outer edge of the
board sidewalk, the snow had been shoveled into breast-
works.  The town looked small and black, flattened down
in the snow, muffled and all but extinguished.  Overhead
the stars shone gloriously.  It was impossible not to notice
them.  The air was so clear that the white sand hills to the
east of Moonstone gleamed softly.  Following the Reverend
Mr. Kronborg along the narrow walk, past the little dark,
sleeping houses, the doctor looked up at the flashing night
and whistled softly.  It did seem that people were stupider
than they need be; as if on a night like this there ought to
be something better to do than to sleep nine hours, or to
assist Mrs. Kronborg in functions which she could have
performed so admirably unaided.  He wished he had gone
down to Denver to hear Fay Templeton sing "See-Saw."
Then he remembered that he had a personal interest in this

family, after all.  They turned into another street and saw
before them lighted windows; a low story-and-a-half house,
with a wing built on at the right and a kitchen addition at
the back, everything a little on the slant--roofs, windows,
and doors.  As they approached the gate, Peter Kron-
borg's pace grew brisker.  His nervous, ministerial cough
annoyed the doctor.  "Exactly as if he were going to give
out a text," he thought.  He drew off his glove and felt
in his vest pocket.  "Have a troche, Kronborg," he said,
producing some.  "Sent me for samples.  Very good for a
rough throat."

    "Ah, thank you, thank you.  I was in something of a
hurry.  I neglected to put on my overshoes.  Here we are,
doctor."  Kronborg opened his front door--seemed de-
lighted to be at home again.

    The front hall was dark and cold; the hatrack was hung
with an astonishing number of children's hats and caps and
cloaks.  They were even piled on the table beneath the
hatrack.  Under the table was a heap of rubbers and over-
shoes.  While the doctor hung up his coat and hat, Peter
Kronborg opened the door into the living-room.  A glare of
light greeted them, and a rush of hot, stale air, smelling of
warming flannels.


    At three o'clock in the morning Dr. Archie was in the
parlor putting on his cuffs and coat--there was no spare
bedroom in that house.  Peter Kronborg's seventh child,
a boy, was being soothed and cosseted by his aunt, Mrs.
Kronborg was asleep, and the doctor was going home.  But
he wanted first to speak to Kronborg, who, coatless and
fluttery, was pouring coal into the kitchen stove.  As the
doctor crossed the dining-room he paused and listened.
From one of the wing rooms, off to the left, he heard rapid,
distressed breathing.  He went to the kitchen door.

    "One of the children sick in there?" he asked, nodding
toward the partition.

    Kronborg hung up the stove-lifter and dusted his fingers.
"It must be Thea.  I meant to ask you to look at her.  She
has a croupy cold.  But in my excitement--Mrs. Kronborg
is doing finely, eh, doctor?  Not many of your patients with
such a constitution, I expect."

    "Oh, yes.  She's a fine mother."  The doctor took up the
lamp from the kitchen table and unceremoniously went
into the wing room.  Two chubby little boys were asleep
in a double bed, with the coverlids over their noses and
their feet drawn up.  In a single bed, next to theirs, lay a
little girl of eleven, wide awake, two yellow braids sticking
up on the pillow behind her.  Her face was scarlet and her
eyes were blazing.

    The doctor shut the door behind him.  "Feel pretty sick,
Thea?" he asked as he took out his thermometer.  "Why
didn't you call somebody?"

    She looked at him with greedy affection.  "I thought you
were here," she spoke between quick breaths.  "There is a
new baby, isn't there?  Which?"

    "Which?" repeated the doctor.

    "Brother or sister?"

    He smiled and sat down on the edge of the bed.  "Bro-
ther," he said, taking her hand.  "Open."

    "Good.  Brothers are better," she murmured as he put
the glass tube under her tongue.

    "Now, be still, I want to count."  Dr. Archie reached
for her hand and took out his watch.  When he put her
hand back under the quilt he went over to one of the win-
dows--they were both tight shut--and lifted it a little
way.  He reached up and ran his hand along the cold, un-
papered wall.  "Keep under the covers; I'll come back to
you in a moment," he said, bending over the glass lamp
with his thermometer.  He winked at her from the door
before he shut it.

    Peter Kronborg was sitting in his wife's room, holding
the bundle which contained his son.  His air of cheerful

importance, his beard and glasses, even his shirt-sleeves,
annoyed the doctor.  He beckoned Kronborg into the liv-
ing-room and said sternly:--

    "You've got a very sick child in there.  Why didn't you
call me before?  It's pneumonia, and she must have been
sick for several days.  Put the baby down somewhere,
please, and help me make up the bed-lounge here in the
parlor.  She's got to be in a warm room, and she's got to
be quiet.  You must keep the other children out.  Here, this
thing opens up, I see," swinging back the top of the car-
pet lounge.  "We can lift her mattress and carry her in
just as she is.  I don't want to disturb her more than is
necessary."

    Kronborg was all concern immediately.  The two men
took up the mattress and carried the sick child into the parlor.
"I'll have to go down to my office to get some medicine,
Kronborg.  The drug store won't be open.  Keep the covers
on her.  I won't be gone long.  Shake down the stove and
put on a little coal, but not too much; so it'll catch quickly,
I mean.  Find an old sheet for me, and put it there to warm."

    The doctor caught his coat and hurried out into the dark
street.  Nobody was stirring yet, and the cold was bitter.
He was tired and hungry and in no mild humor.  "The
idea!" he muttered; "to be such an ass at his age, about the
seventh!  And to feel no responsibility about the little girl.
Silly old goat!  The baby would have got into the world
somehow; they always do.  But a nice little girl like that
--she's worth the whole litter.  Where she ever got it
from--"  He turned into the Duke Block and ran up the
stairs to his office.

    Thea Kronborg, meanwhile, was wondering why she
happened to be in the parlor, where nobody but company
--usually visiting preachers--ever slept.  She had mo-
ments of stupor when she did not see anything, and mo-
ments of excitement when she felt that something unusual
and pleasant was about to happen, when she saw every-

thing clearly in the red light from the isinglass sides of the
hard-coal burner--the nickel trimmings on the stove
itself, the pictures on the wall, which she thought very
beautiful, the flowers on the Brussels carpet, Czerny's
"Daily Studies" which stood open on the upright piano.
She forgot, for the time being, all about the new baby.

    When she heard the front door open, it occurred to her
that the pleasant thing which was going to happen was
Dr. Archie himself.  He came in and warmed his hands at
the stove.  As he turned to her, she threw herself wearily
toward him, half out of her bed.  She would have tumbled
to the floor had he not caught her.  He gave her some medi-
cine and went to the kitchen for something he needed.  She
drowsed and lost the sense of his being there.  When she
opened her eyes again, he was kneeling before the stove,
spreading something dark and sticky on a white cloth, with
a big spoon; batter, perhaps.  Presently she felt him taking
off her nightgown.  He wrapped the hot plaster about her
chest.  There seemed to be straps which he pinned over her
shoulders.  Then he took out a thread and needle and be-
gan to sew her up in it.  That, she felt, was too strange;
she must be dreaming anyhow, so she succumbed to her
drowsiness.

    Thea had been moaning with every breath since the
doctor came back, but she did not know it.  She did not
realize that she was suffering pain.  When she was con-
scious at all, she seemed to be separated from her body; to
be perched on top of the piano, or on the hanging lamp,
watching the doctor sew her up.  It was perplexing and
unsatisfactory, like dreaming.  She wished she could waken
up and see what was going on.

    The doctor thanked God that he had persuaded Peter
Kronborg to keep out of the way.  He could do better by
the child if he had her to himself.  He had no children of his
own.  His marriage was a very unhappy one.  As he lifted
and undressed Thea, he thought to himself what a beauti-

ful thing a little girl's body was,--like a flower.  It was
so neatly and delicately fashioned, so soft, and so milky
white.  Thea must have got her hair and her silky skin from
her mother.  She was a little Swede, through and through.
Dr. Archie could not help thinking how he would cherish
a little creature like this if she were his.  Her hands, so lit-
tle and hot, so clever, too,--he glanced at the open exer-
cise book on the piano.  When he had stitched up the flax-
seed jacket, he wiped it neatly about the edges, where the
paste had worked out on the skin.  He put on her the clean
nightgown he had warmed before the fire, and tucked the
blankets about her.  As he pushed back the hair that had
fuzzed down over her eyebrows, he felt her head thought-
fully with the tips of his fingers.  No, he couldn't say
that it was different from any other child's head, though
he believed that there was something very different about
her.  He looked intently at her wide, flushed face, freckled
nose, fierce little mouth, and her delicate, tender chin--the
one soft touch in her hard little Scandinavian face, as if
some fairy godmother had caressed her there and left a
cryptic promise.  Her brows were usually drawn together
defiantly, but never when she was with Dr. Archie.  Her
affection for him was prettier than most of the things that
went to make up the doctor's life in Moonstone.

    The windows grew gray.  He heard a tramping on the
attic floor, on the back stairs, then cries: "Give me my
shirt!"  "Where's my other stocking?"

    "I'll have to stay till they get off to school," he reflected,
"or they'll be in here tormenting her, the whole lot of
them."

                               II


    For the next four days it seemed to Dr. Archie that
his patient might slip through his hands, do what he
might.  But she did not.  On the contrary, after that she
recovered very rapidly.  As her father remarked, she must
have inherited the "constitution" which he was never tired
of admiring in her mother.

    One afternoon, when her new brother was a week old, the
doctor found Thea very comfortable and happy in her bed
in the parlor.  The sunlight was pouring in over her shoulders,
the baby was asleep on a pillow in a big rocking-chair beside
her.  Whenever he stirred, she put out her hand and rocked
him.  Nothing of him was visible but a flushed, puffy fore-
head and an uncompromisingly big, bald cranium.  The
door into her mother's room stood open, and Mrs. Kronborg
was sitting up in bed darning stockings.  She was a short,
stalwart woman, with a short neck and a determined-looking
head.  Her skin was very fair, her face calm and unwrinkled,
and her yellow hair, braided down her back as she lay in
bed, still looked like a girl's.  She was a woman whom
Dr. Archie respected; active, practical, unruffled; good-
humored, but determined.  Exactly the sort of woman to
take care of a flighty preacher.  She had brought her hus-
band some property, too,--one fourth of her father's broad
acres in Nebraska,--but this she kept in her own name.
She had profound respect for her husband's erudition and
eloquence.  She sat under his preaching with deep humility,
and was as much taken in by his stiff shirt and white neck-
ties as if she had not ironed them herself by lamplight the
night before they appeared correct and spotless in the pul-
pit.  But for all this, she had no confidence in his adminis-
tration of worldly affairs.  She looked to him for morning

prayers and grace at table; she expected him to name the
babies and to supply whatever parental sentiment there
was in the house, to remember birthdays and anniver-
saries, to point the children to moral and patriotic ideals.
It was her work to keep their bodies, their clothes, and
their conduct in some sort of order, and this she accom-
plished with a success that was a source of wonder to her
neighbors.  As she used to remark, and her husband ad-
miringly to echo, she "had never lost one."  With all his
flightiness, Peter Kronborg appreciated the matter-of-fact,
punctual way in which his wife got her children into the
world and along in it.  He believed, and he was right in
believing, that the sovereign State of Colorado was much
indebted to Mrs. Kronborg and women like her.

    Mrs. Kronborg believed that the size of every family was
decided in heaven.  More modern views would not have
startled her; they would simply have seemed foolish--
thin chatter, like the boasts of the men who built the tower
of Babel, or like Axel's plan to breed ostriches in the chicken
yard.  From what evidence Mrs. Kronborg formed her
opinions on this and other matters, it would have been
difficult to say, but once formed, they were unchangeable.
She would no more have questioned her convictions than
she would have questioned revelation.  Calm and even-
tempered, naturally kind, she was capable of strong pre-
judices, and she never forgave.

    When the doctor came in to see Thea, Mrs. Kronborg
was reflecting that the washing was a week behind, and de-
ciding what she had better do about it.  The arrival of a
new baby meant a revision of her entire domestic schedule,
and as she drove her needle along she had been working out
new sleeping arrangements and cleaning days.  The doctor
had entered the house without knocking, after making
noise enough in the hall to prepare his patients.  Thea
was reading, her book propped up before her in the sun-
light.

    "Mustn't do that; bad for your eyes," he said, as Thea
shut the book quickly and slipped it under the covers.

    Mrs. Kronborg called from her bed: "Bring the baby
here, doctor, and have that chair.  She wanted him in there
for company."

    Before the doctor picked up the baby, he put a yellow
paper bag down on Thea's coverlid and winked at her.
They had a code of winks and grimaces.  When he went in
to chat with her mother, Thea opened the bag cautiously,
trying to keep it from crackling.  She drew out a long bunch
of white grapes, with a little of the sawdust in which they
had been packed still clinging to them.  They were called
Malaga grapes in Moonstone, and once or twice during the
winter the leading grocer got a keg of them.  They were
used mainly for table decoration, about Christmas-time.
Thea had never had more than one grape at a time before.
When the doctor came back she was holding the almost
transparent fruit up in the sunlight, feeling the pale-green
skins softly with the tips of her fingers.  She did not thank
him; she only snapped her eyes at him in a special way
which he understood, and, when he gave her his hand,
put it quickly and shyly under her cheek, as if she were
trying to do so without knowing it--and without his
knowing it.

    Dr. Archie sat down in the rocking-chair.  "And how's
Thea feeling to-day?"

    He was quite as shy as his patient, especially when a
third person overheard his conversation.  Big and hand-
some and superior to his fellow townsmen as Dr. Archie
was, he was seldom at his ease, and like Peter Kronborg
he often dodged behind a professional manner.  There
was sometimes a contraction of embarrassment and self-
consciousness all over his big body, which made him awk-
ward--likely to stumble, to kick up rugs, or to knock over
chairs.  If any one was very sick, he forgot himself, but he
had a clumsy touch in convalescent gossip.

    Thea curled up on her side and looked at him with
pleasure.  "All right.  I like to be sick.  I have more fun then
than other times."

    "How's that?"

    "I don't have to go to school, and I don't have to prac-
tice.  I can read all I want to, and have good things,"--
she patted the grapes.  "I had lots of fun that time I
mashed my finger and you wouldn't let Professor Wunsch
make me practice.  Only I had to do left hand, even then.
I think that was mean."

    The doctor took her hand and examined the forefinger,
where the nail had grown back a little crooked.  "You
mustn't trim it down close at the corner there, and then it
will grow straight.  You won't want it crooked when you're
a big girl and wear rings and have sweethearts."

    She made a mocking little face at him and looked at his
new scarf-pin.  "That's the prettiest one you ev-ER had.
I wish you'd stay a long while and let me look at it.  What
is it?"

    Dr. Archie laughed.  "It's an opal.  Spanish Johnny
brought it up for me from Chihuahua in his shoe.  I had it
set in Denver, and I wore it to-day for your benefit."

    Thea had a curious passion for jewelry.  She wanted
every shining stone she saw, and in summer she was always
going off into the sand hills to hunt for crystals and agates
and bits of pink chalcedony.  She had two cigar boxes full
of stones that she had found or traded for, and she imagined
that they were of enormous value.  She was always plan-
ning how she would have them set.

    "What are you reading?"  The doctor reached under the
covers and pulled out a book of Byron's poems.  "Do you
like this?"

    She looked confused, turned over a few pages rapidly,
and pointed to "My native land, good-night."  "That,"
she said sheepishly.

    "How about `Maid of Athens'?"

    She blushed and looked at him suspiciously.  "I like
'There was a sound of revelry,'" she muttered.

    The doctor laughed and closed the book.  It was clumsily
bound in padded leather and had been presented to the
Reverend Peter Kronborg by his Sunday-School class as
an ornament for his parlor table.

    "Come into the office some day, and I'll lend you a nice
book.  You can skip the parts you don't understand.  You
can read it in vacation.  Perhaps you'll be able to under-
stand all of it by then."

    Thea frowned and looked fretfully toward the piano.
"In vacation I have to practice four hours every day, and
then there'll be Thor to take care of."  She pronounced it
"Tor."

    "Thor?  Oh, you've named the baby Thor?" exclaimed
the doctor.

    Thea frowned again, still more fiercely, and said quickly,
"That's a nice name, only maybe it's a little--old-
fashioned."  She was very sensitive about being thought a
foreigner, and was proud of the fact that, in town, her
father always preached in English; very bookish English,
at that, one might add.

    Born in an old Scandinavian colony in Minnesota, Peter
Kronborg had been sent to a small divinity school in
Indiana by the women of a Swedish evangelical mission,
who were convinced of his gifts and who skimped and
begged and gave church suppers to get the long, lazy youth
through the seminary.  He could still speak enough Swed-
ish to exhort and to bury the members of his country
church out at Copper Hole, and he wielded in his Moon-
stone pulpit a somewhat pompous English vocabulary he
had learned out of books at college.  He always spoke
of "the infant Saviour," "our Heavenly Father," etc.  The
poor man had no natural, spontaneous human speech.  If
he had his sincere moments, they were perforce inarticu-
late.  Probably a good deal of his pretentiousness was due

to the fact that he habitually expressed himself in a book-
learned language, wholly remote from anything personal,
native, or homely.  Mrs. Kronborg spoke Swedish to her
own sisters and to her sister-in-law Tillie, and colloquial
English to her neighbors.  Thea, who had a rather sensitive
ear, until she went to school never spoke at all, except in
monosyllables, and her mother was convinced that she was
tongue-tied.  She was still inept in speech for a child so
intelligent.  Her ideas were usually clear, but she seldom
attempted to explain them, even at school, where she
excelled in "written work" and never did more than mutter
a reply.

    "Your music professor stopped me on the street to-day
and asked me how you were," said the doctor, rising.
"He'll be sick himself, trotting around in this slush with
no overcoat or overshoes."

    "He's poor," said Thea simply.

    The doctor sighed.  "I'm afraid he's worse than that.
Is he always all right when you take your lessons?  Never
acts as if he'd been drinking?"

    Thea looked angry and spoke excitedly.  "He knows a
lot.  More than anybody.  I don't care if he does drink;
he's old and poor."  Her voice shook a little.

    Mrs. Kronborg spoke up from the next room.  "He's a
good teacher, doctor.  It's good for us he does drink.  He'd
never be in a little place like this if he didn't have some
weakness.  These women that teach music around here
don't know nothing.  I wouldn't have my child wasting
time with them.  If Professor Wunsch goes away, Thea'll
have nobody to take from.  He's careful with his scholars;
he don't use bad language.  Mrs. Kohler is always present
when Thea takes her lesson.  It's all right."  Mrs. Kronborg
spoke calmly and judicially.  One could see that she had
thought the matter out before.

    "I'm glad to hear that, Mrs. Kronborg.  I wish we could
get the old man off his bottle and keep him tidy.  Do you

suppose if I gave you an old overcoat you could get him to
wear it?"  The doctor went to the bedroom door and Mrs.
Kronborg looked up from her darning.

    "Why, yes, I guess he'd be glad of it.  He'll take most
anything from me.  He won't buy clothes, but I guess he'd
wear 'em if he had 'em.  I've never had any clothes to give
him, having so many to make over for."

    "I'll have Larry bring the coat around to-night.  You
aren't cross with me, Thea?" taking her hand.

    Thea grinned warmly.  "Not if you give Professor
Wunsch a coat--and things," she tapped the grapes sig-
nificantly.  The doctor bent over and kissed her.



                               III


    Being sick was all very well, but Thea knew from
experience that starting back to school again was
attended by depressing difficulties.  One Monday morning
she got up early with Axel and Gunner, who shared her
wing room, and hurried into the back living-room, between
the dining-room and the kitchen.  There, beside a soft-coal
stove, the younger children of the family undressed at night
and dressed in the morning.  The older daughter, Anna,
and the two big boys slept upstairs, where the rooms were
theoretically warmed by stovepipes from below.  The first
(and the worst!) thing that confronted Thea was a suit of
clean, prickly red flannel, fresh from the wash.  Usually
the torment of breaking in a clean suit of flannel came on
Sunday, but yesterday, as she was staying in the house,
she had begged off.  Their winter underwear was a trial to
all the children, but it was bitterest to Thea because she
happened to have the most sensitive skin.  While she was
tugging it on, her Aunt Tillie brought in warm water from
the boiler and filled the tin pitcher.  Thea washed her face,
brushed and braided her hair, and got into her blue cash-
mere dress.  Over this she buttoned a long apron, with
sleeves, which would not be removed until she put on her
cloak to go to school.  Gunner and Axel, on the soap box
behind the stove, had their usual quarrel about which
should wear the tightest stockings, but they exchanged
reproaches in low tones, for they were wholesomely afraid
of Mrs. Kronborg's rawhide whip.  She did not chastise
her children often, but she did it thoroughly.  Only a some-
what stern system of discipline could have kept any degree
of order and quiet in that overcrowded house.

    Mrs. Kronborg's children were all trained to dress them-

selves at the earliest possible age, to make their own beds,
--the boys as well as the girls,--to take care of their
clothes, to eat what was given them, and to keep out of
the way.  Mrs. Kronborg would have made a good chess-
player; she had a head for moves and positions.

    Anna, the elder daughter, was her mother's lieutenant.
All the children knew that they must obey Anna, who was
an obstinate contender for proprieties and not always fair-
minded.  To see the young Kronborgs headed for Sunday-
School was like watching a military drill.  Mrs. Kronborg
let her children's minds alone.  She did not pry into their
thoughts or nag them.  She respected them as individuals,
and outside of the house they had a great deal of liberty.
But their communal life was definitely ordered.

    In the winter the children breakfasted in the kitchen;
Gus and Charley and Anna first, while the younger chil-
dren were dressing.  Gus was nineteen and was a clerk in
a dry-goods store.  Charley, eighteen months younger,
worked in a feed store.  They left the house by the kitchen
door at seven o'clock, and then Anna helped her Aunt
Tillie get the breakfast for the younger ones.  Without the
help of this sister-in-law, Tillie Kronborg, Mrs. Kronborg's
life would have been a hard one.  Mrs. Kronborg often
reminded Anna that "no hired help would ever have taken
the same interest."

    Mr. Kronborg came of a poorer stock than his wife; from
a lowly, ignorant family that had lived in a poor part of
Sweden.  His great-grandfather had gone to Norway to
work as a farm laborer and had married a Norwegian girl.
This strain of Norwegian blood came out somewhere in
each generation of the Kronborgs.  The intemperance of
one of Peter Kronborg's uncles, and the religious mania
of another, had been alike charged to the Norwegian
grandmother.  Both Peter Kronborg and his sister Tillie
were more like the Norwegian root of the family than
like the Swedish, and this same Norwegian strain was

strong in Thea, though in her it took a very different
character.

    Tillie was a queer, addle-pated thing, as flighty as a girl
at thirty-five, and overweeningly fond of gay clothes--
which taste, as Mrs. Kronborg philosophically said, did
nobody any harm.  Tillie was always cheerful, and her
tongue was still for scarcely a minute during the day.  She
had been cruelly overworked on her father's Minnesota
farm when she was a young girl, and she had never been
so happy as she was now; had never before, as she said,
had such social advantages.  She thought her brother the
most important man in Moonstone.  She never missed a
church service, and, much to the embarrassment of the
children, she always "spoke a piece" at the Sunday-School
concerts.  She had a complete set of "Standard Recita-
tions," which she conned on Sundays.  This morning, when
Thea and her two younger brothers sat down to breakfast,
Tillie was remonstrating with Gunner because he had not
learned a recitation assigned to him for George Washington
Day at school.  The unmemorized text lay heavily on
Gunner's conscience as he attacked his buckwheat cakes
and sausage.  He knew that Tillie was in the right, and
that "when the day came he would be ashamed of himself."

    "I don't care," he muttered, stirring his coffee; "they
oughtn't to make boys speak.  It's all right for girls.  They
like to show off."

    "No showing off about it.  Boys ought to like to speak
up for their country.  And what was the use of your father
buying you a new suit, if you're not going to take part in
anything?"

    "That was for Sunday-School.  I'd rather wear my old
one, anyhow.  Why didn't they give the piece to Thea?"
Gunner grumbled.

    Tillie was turning buckwheat cakes at the griddle.
"Thea can play and sing, she don't need to speak.  But
you've got to know how to do something, Gunner, that

you have.  What are you going to do when you git big and
want to git into society, if you can't do nothing?  Every-
body'll say, `Can you sing?  Can you play?  Can you
speak?  Then git right out of society.'  An' that's what
they'll say to you, Mr. Gunner."

    Gunner and Alex grinned at Anna, who was preparing
her mother's breakfast.  They never made fun of Tillie, but
they understood well enough that there were subjects upon
which her ideas were rather foolish.  When Tillie struck
the shallows, Thea was usually prompt in turning the
conversation.

    "Will you and Axel let me have your sled at recess?"
she asked.

    "All the time?" asked Gunner dubiously.

    "I'll work your examples for you to-night, if you do."

    "Oh, all right.  There'll be a lot of 'em."

    "I don't mind, I can work 'em fast.  How about yours,
Axel?"

    Axel was a fat little boy of seven, with pretty, lazy blue
eyes.  "I don't care," he murmured, buttering his last
buckwheat cake without ambition; "too much trouble to
copy 'em down.  Jenny Smiley'll let me have hers."

    The boys were to pull Thea to school on their sled, as
the snow was deep.  The three set off together.  Anna was
now in the high school, and she no longer went with the
family party, but walked to school with some of the older
girls who were her friends, and wore a hat, not a hood like
Thea.

                               IV


    And it was Summer, beautiful Summer!"  Those were
the closing words of Thea's favorite fairy tale, and
she thought of them as she ran out into the world one
Saturday morning in May, her music book under her arm.
She was going to the Kohlers' to take her lesson, but she
was in no hurry.

    It was in the summer that one really lived.  Then all
the little overcrowded houses were opened wide, and the
wind blew through them with sweet, earthy smells of
garden-planting.  The town looked as if it had just been
washed.  People were out painting their fences.  The cotton-
wood trees were a-flicker with sticky, yellow little leaves,
and the feathery tamarisks were in pink bud.  With the
warm weather came freedom for everybody.  People were
dug up, as it were.  The very old people, whom one had not
seen all winter, came out and sunned themselves in the
yard.  The double windows were taken off the houses, the
tormenting flannels in which children had been encased all
winter were put away in boxes, and the youngsters felt a
pleasure in the cool cotton things next their skin.

    Thea had to walk more than a mile to reach the Kohlers'
house, a very pleasant mile out of town toward the glitter-
ing sand hills,--yellow this morning, with lines of deep
violet where the clefts and valleys were.  She followed the
sidewalk to the depot at the south end of the town; then
took the road east to the little group of adobe houses where
the Mexicans lived, then dropped into a deep ravine; a dry
sand creek, across which the railroad track ran on a trestle.
Beyond that gulch, on a little rise of ground that faced the
open sandy plain, was the Kohlers' house, where Professor
Wunsch lived.  Fritz Kohler was the town tailor, one of the

first settlers.  He had moved there, built a little house and
made a garden, when Moonstone was first marked down on
the map.  He had three sons, but they now worked on the
railroad and were stationed in distant cities.  One of them
had gone to work for the Santa Fe, and lived in New
Mexico.

    Mrs. Kohler seldom crossed the ravine and went into the
town except at Christmas-time, when she had to buy pres-
ents and Christmas cards to send to her old friends in
Freeport, Illinois.  As she did not go to church, she did not
possess such a thing as a hat.  Year after year she wore the
same red hood in winter and a black sunbonnet in summer.
She made her own dresses; the skirts came barely to her
shoe-tops, and were gathered as full as they could possibly
be to the waistband.  She preferred men's shoes, and usu-
ally wore the cast-offs of one of her sons.  She had never
learned much English, and her plants and shrubs were her
companions.  She lived for her men and her garden.  Beside
that sand gulch, she had tried to reproduce a bit of her own
village in the Rhine Valley.  She hid herself behind the
growth she had fostered, lived under the shade of what she
had planted and watered and pruned.  In the blaze of the
open plain she was stupid and blind like an owl.  Shade,
shade; that was what she was always planning and making.
Behind the high tamarisk hedge, her garden was a jungle
of verdure in summer.  Above the cherry trees and peach
trees and golden plums stood the windmill, with its tank
on stilts, which kept all this verdure alive.  Outside, the
sage-brush grew up to the very edge of the garden, and the
sand was always drifting up to the tamarisks.

    Every one in Moonstone was astonished when the
Kohlers took the wandering music-teacher to live with
them.  In seventeen years old Fritz had never had a crony,
except the harness-maker and Spanish Johnny.  This
Wunsch came from God knew where,--followed Spanish
Johnny into town when that wanderer came back from one

of his tramps.  Wunsch played in the dance orchestra,
tuned pianos, and gave lessons.  When Mrs. Kohler rescued
him, he was sleeping in a dirty, unfurnished room over one
of the saloons, and he had only two shirts in the world.
Once he was under her roof, the old woman went at him as
she did at her garden.  She sewed and washed and mended
for him, and made him so clean and respectable that he was
able to get a large class of pupils and to rent a piano.  As
soon as he had money ahead, he sent to the Narrow Gauge
lodging-house, in Denver, for a trunkful of music which
had been held there for unpaid board.  With tears in his
eyes the old man--he was not over fifty, but sadly bat-
tered--told Mrs. Kohler that he asked nothing better of
God than to end his days with her, and to be buried in the
garden, under her linden trees.  They were not American
basswood, but the European linden, which has honey-
colored blooms in summer, with a fragrance that sur-
passes all trees and flowers and drives young people wild
with joy.

    Thea was reflecting as she walked along that had it not
been for Professor Wunsch she might have lived on for
years in Moonstone without ever knowing the Kohlers,
without ever seeing their garden or the inside of their
house.  Besides the cuckoo clock,--which was wonderful
enough, and which Mrs. Kohler said she kept for "company
when she was lonesome,"--the Kohlers had in their house
the most wonderful thing Thea had ever seen--but of that
later.

    Professor Wunsch went to the houses of his other pupils
to give them their lessons, but one morning he told Mrs.
Kronborg that Thea had talent, and that if she came to
him he could teach her in his slippers, and that would
be better.  Mrs. Kronborg was a strange woman.  That
word "talent," which no one else in Moonstone, not even
Dr. Archie, would have understood, she comprehended
perfectly.  To any other woman there, it would have meant

that a child must have her hair curled every day and must
play in public.  Mrs. Kronborg knew it meant that Thea
must practice four hours a day.  A child with talent must
be kept at the piano, just as a child with measles must be
kept under the blankets.  Mrs. Kronborg and her three
sisters had all studied piano, and all sang well, but none of
them had talent.  Their father had played the oboe in an
orchestra in Sweden, before he came to America to better
his fortunes.  He had even known Jenny Lind.  A child with
talent had to be kept at the piano; so twice a week in sum-
mer and once a week in winter Thea went over the gulch to
the Kohlers', though the Ladies' Aid Society thought it
was not proper for their preacher's daughter to go "where
there was so much drinking."  Not that the Kohler sons
ever so much as looked at a glass of beer.  They were
ashamed of their old folks and got out into the world as
fast as possible; had their clothes made by a Denver tailor
and their necks shaved up under their hair and forgot
the past.  Old Fritz and Wunsch, however, indulged in a
friendly bottle pretty often.  The two men were like com-
rades; perhaps the bond between them was the glass wherein
lost hopes are found; perhaps it was common memories of
another country; perhaps it was the grapevine in the gar-
den--knotty, fibrous shrub, full of homesickness and senti-
ment, which the Germans have carried around the world
with them.

    As Thea approached the house she peeped between the
pink sprays of the tamarisk hedge and saw the Professor
and Mrs. Kohler in the garden, spading and raking.  The
garden looked like a relief-map now, and gave no indication
of what it would be in August; such a jungle!  Pole beans
and potatoes and corn and leeks and kale and red cabbage
--there would even be vegetables for which there is no
American name.  Mrs. Kohler was always getting by mail
packages of seeds from Freeport and from the old country.
Then the flowers!  There were big sunflowers for the canary

bird, tiger lilies and phlox and zinnias and lady's-slippers
and portulaca and hollyhocks,--giant hollyhocks.  Beside
the fruit trees there was a great umbrella-shaped catalpa,
and a balm-of-Gilead, two lindens, and even a ginka,--a
rigid, pointed tree with leaves shaped like butterflies, which
shivered, but never bent to the wind.

    This morning Thea saw to her delight that the two ole-
ander trees, one white and one red, had been brought up
from their winter quarters in the cellar.  There is hardly a
German family in the most arid parts of Utah, New Mex-
ico, Arizona, but has its oleander trees.  However loutish
the American-born sons of the family may be, there was
never one who refused to give his muscle to the back-break-
ing task of getting those tubbed trees down into the cellar in
the fall and up into the sunlight in the spring.  They may
strive to avert the day, but they grapple with the tub at
last.

    When Thea entered the gate, her professor leaned his
spade against the white post that supported the turreted
dove-house, and wiped his face with his shirt-sleeve; some-
way he never managed to have a handkerchief about him.
Wunsch was short and stocky, with something rough and
bear-like about his shoulders.  His face was a dark, bricky
red, deeply creased rather than wrinkled, and the skin was
like loose leather over his neck band--he wore a brass
collar button but no collar.  His hair was cropped close;
iron-gray bristles on a bullet-like head.  His eyes were
always suffused and bloodshot.  He had a coarse, scornful
mouth, and irregular, yellow teeth, much worn at the edges.
His hands were square and red, seldom clean, but always
alive, impatient, even sympathetic.

    "MORGEN," he greeted his pupil in a businesslike way,
put on a black alpaca coat, and conducted her at once to
the piano in Mrs. Kohler's sitting-room.  He twirled the
stool to the proper height, pointed to it, and sat down in a
wooden chair beside Thea.

    "The scale of B flat major," he directed, and then fell
into an attitude of deep attention.  Without a word his
pupil set to work.

    To Mrs. Kohler, in the garden, came the cheerful sound
of effort, of vigorous striving.  Unconsciously she wielded
her rake more lightly.  Occasionally she heard the teacher's
voice.  "Scale of E minor. . . .  WEITER, WEITER! . . . IMMER
I hear the thumb, like a lame foot.  WEITER . . . WEITER, once;
. . . SCHON!  The chords, quick!"

    The pupil did not open her mouth until they began the
second movement of the Clementi sonata, when she remon-
strated in low tones about the way he had marked the
fingering of a passage.

    "It makes no matter what you think," replied her
teacher coldly.  "There is only one right way.  The thumb
there.  EIN, ZWEI, DREI, VIER," etc.  Then for an hour there
was no further interruption.

    At the end of the lesson Thea turned on her stool and
leaned her arm on the keyboard.  They usually had a little
talk after the lesson.

    Herr Wunsch grinned.  "How soon is it you are free from
school?  Then we make ahead faster, eh?"

    "First week in June.  Then will you give me the `Invi-
tation to the Dance'?"

    He shrugged his shoulders.  "It makes no matter.  If
you want him, you play him out of lesson hours."

    "All right."  Thea fumbled in her pocket and brought
out a crumpled slip of paper.  "What does this mean, please?
I guess it's Latin."

    Wunsch blinked at the line penciled on the paper.
"Wherefrom you get this?" he asked gruffly.

    "Out of a book Dr. Archie gave me to read.  It's all Eng-
lish but that.  Did you ever see it before?" she asked,
watching his face.

    "Yes.  A long time ago," he muttered, scowling.
"Ovidius!"  He took a stub of lead pencil from his vest

pocket, steadied his hand by a visible effort, and under
the words

    "LENTE CURRITE, LENTE CURRITE, NOCTIS EQUI,"
he wrote in a clear, elegant Gothic hand,--

    "GO SLOWLY, GO SLOWLY, YE STEEDS OF THE NIGHT."
He put the pencil back in his pocket and continued to stare
at the Latin.  It recalled the poem, which he had read as a
student, and thought very fine.  There were treasures of
memory which no lodging-house keeper could attach.  One
carried things about in one's head, long after one's linen
could be smuggled out in a tuning-bag.  He handed the
paper back to Thea.  "There is the English, quite elegant,"
he said, rising.

    Mrs. Kohler stuck her head in at the door, and Thea slid
off the stool.  "Come in, Mrs. Kohler," she called, "and
show me the piece-picture."

    The old woman laughed, pulled off her big gardening-
gloves, and pushed Thea to the lounge before the object of
her delight.  The "piece-picture," which hung on the wall
and nearly covered one whole end of the room, was the
handiwork of Fritz Kohler.  He had learned his trade under
an old-fashioned tailor in Magdeburg who required from
each of his apprentices a thesis: that is, before they left his
shop, each apprentice had to copy in cloth some well-
known German painting, stitching bits of colored stuff
together on a linen background; a kind of mosaic.  The
pupil was allowed to select his subject, and Fritz Kohler
had chosen a popular painting of Napoleon's retreat from
Moscow.  The gloomy Emperor and his staff were repre-
sented as crossing a stone bridge, and behind them was the
blazing city, the walls and fortresses done in gray cloth
with orange tongues of flame darting about the domes and
minarets.  Napoleon rode his white horse; Murat, in Ori-
ental dress, a bay charger.  Thea was never tired of exam-
ining this work, of hearing how long it had taken Fritz to

make it, how much it had been admired, and what narrow
escapes it had had from moths and fire.  Silk, Mrs. Kohler
explained, would have been much easier to manage than
woolen cloth, in which it was often hard to get the right
shades.  The reins of the horses, the wheels of the spurs,
the brooding eyebrows of the Emperor, Murat's fierce
mustaches, the great shakos of the Guard, were all worked
out with the minutest fidelity.  Thea's admiration for this
picture had endeared her to Mrs. Kohler.  It was now many
years since she used to point out its wonders to her own
little boys.  As Mrs. Kohler did not go to church, she never
heard any singing, except the songs that floated over from
Mexican Town, and Thea often sang for her after the lesson
was over.  This morning Wunsch pointed to the piano.

    "On Sunday, when I go by the church, I hear you sing
something."

    Thea obediently sat down on the stool again and began,
"COME, YE DISCONSOLATE."  Wunsch listened thoughtfully,
his hands on his knees.  Such a beautiful child's voice!
Old Mrs. Kohler's face relaxed in a smile of happiness;
she half closed her eyes.  A big fly was darting in and out
of the window; the sunlight made a golden pool on the
rag carpet and bathed the faded cretonne pillows on the
lounge, under the piece-picture.  "EARTH HAS NO SORROW
THAT HEAVEN CANNOT HEAL," the song died away.

    "That is a good thing to remember," Wunsch shook him-
self.  "You believe that?" looking quizzically at Thea.

    She became confused and pecked nervously at a black
key with her middle finger.  "I don't know.  I guess so,"
she murmured.

    Her teacher rose abruptly.  "Remember, for next time,
thirds.  You ought to get up earlier."

    That night the air was so warm that Fritz and Herr
Wunsch had their after-supper pipe in the grape arbor,
smoking in silence while the sound of fiddles and guitars
came across the ravine from Mexican Town.  Long after

Fritz and his old Paulina had gone to bed, Wunsch sat
motionless in the arbor, looking up through the woolly
vine leaves at the glittering machinery of heaven.


         "LENTE CURRITE, NOCTIS EQUI."

That line awoke many memories.  He was thinking of
youth; of his own, so long gone by, and of his pupil's, just
beginning.  He would even have cherished hopes for her,
except that he had become superstitious.  He believed that
whatever he hoped for was destined not to be; that his
affection brought ill-fortune, especially to the young; that
if he held anything in his thoughts, he harmed it.  He had
taught in music schools in St. Louis and Kansas City, where
the shallowness and complacency of the young misses had
maddened him.  He had encountered bad manners and bad
faith, had been the victim of sharpers of all kinds, was
dogged by bad luck.  He had played in orchestras that were
never paid and wandering opera troupes which disbanded
penniless.  And there was always the old enemy, more
relentless than the others.  It was long since he had wished
anything or desired anything beyond the necessities of the
body.  Now that he was tempted to hope for another, he
felt alarmed and shook his head.

    It was his pupil's power of application, her rugged will,
that interested him.  He had lived for so long among people
whose sole ambition was to get something for nothing that
he had learned not to look for seriousness in anything.  Now
that he by chance encountered it, it recalled standards, am-
bitions, a society long forgot.  What was it she reminded
him of?  A yellow flower, full of sunlight, perhaps.  No; a
thin glass full of sweet-smelling, sparkling Moselle wine.  He
seemed to see such a glass before him in the arbor, to watch
the bubbles rising and breaking, like the silent discharge
of energy in the nerves and brain, the rapid florescence in
young blood--Wunsch felt ashamed and dragged his slip-
pers along the path to the kitchen, his eyes on the ground.

                                V


    The children in the primary grades were sometimes
required to make relief maps of Moonstone in sand.
Had they used colored sands, as the Navajo medicine men
do in their sand mosaics, they could easily have indicated
the social classifications of Moonstone, since these con-
formed to certain topographical boundaries, and every
child understood them perfectly.

    The main business street ran, of course, through the
center of the town.  To the west of this street lived all the
people who were, as Tillie Kronborg said, "in society."
Sylvester Street, the third parallel with Main Street on the
west, was the longest in town, and the best dwellings were
built along it.  Far out at the north end, nearly a mile from
the court-house and its cottonwood grove, was Dr. Archie's
house, its big yard and garden surrounded by a white paling
fence.  The Methodist Church was in the center of the
town, facing the court-house square.  The Kronborgs lived
half a mile south of the church, on the long street that
stretched out like an arm to the depot settlement.  This
was the first street west of Main, and was built up only on
one side.  The preacher's house faced the backs of the brick
and frame store buildings and a draw full of sunflowers
and scraps of old iron.  The sidewalk which ran in front
of the Kronborgs' house was the one continuous sidewalk
to the depot, and all the train men and roundhouse em-
ployees passed the front gate every time they came up-
town.  Thea and Mrs. Kronborg had many friends among
the railroad men, who often paused to chat across the fence,
and of one of these we shall have more to say.

    In the part of Moonstone that lay east of Main Street,
toward the deep ravine which, farther south, wound by

Mexican Town, lived all the humbler citizens, the people
who voted but did not run for office.  The houses were little
story-and-a-half cottages, with none of the fussy archi-
tectural efforts that marked those on Sylvester Street.
They nestled modestly behind their cottonwoods and Vir-
ginia creeper; their occupants had no social pretensions to
keep up.  There were no half-glass front doors with door-
bells, or formidable parlors behind closed shutters.  Here
the old women washed in the back yard, and the men sat
in the front doorway and smoked their pipes.  The people
on Sylvester Street scarcely knew that this part of the
town existed.  Thea liked to take Thor and her express
wagon and explore these quiet, shady streets, where the
people never tried to have lawns or to grow elms and pine
trees, but let the native timber have its way and spread in
luxuriance.  She had many friends there, old women who
gave her a yellow rose or a spray of trumpet vine and
appeased Thor with a cooky or a doughnut.  They called
Thea "that preacher's girl," but the demonstrative was
misplaced, for when they spoke of Mr. Kronborg they
called him "the Methodist preacher."

    Dr. Archie was very proud of his yard and garden, which
he worked himself.  He was the only man in Moonstone
who was successful at growing rambler roses, and his
strawberries were famous.  One morning when Thea was
downtown on an errand, the doctor stopped her, took her
hand and went over her with a quizzical eye, as he nearly
always did when they met.

    "You haven't been up to my place to get any straw-
berries yet, Thea.  They're at their best just now.  Mrs.
Archie doesn't know what to do with them all.  Come up
this afternoon.  Just tell Mrs. Archie I sent you.  Bring a
big basket and pick till you are tired."

    When she got home Thea told her mother that she didn't
want to go, because she didn't like Mrs. Archie.

    "She is certainly one queer woman," Mrs. Kronborg

assented, "but he's asked you so often, I guess you'll have
to go this time.  She won't bite you."

    After dinner Thea took a basket, put Thor in his baby-
buggy, and set out for Dr. Archie's house at the other end
of town.  As soon as she came within sight of the house,
she slackened her pace.  She approached it very slowly,
stopping often to pick dandelions and sand-peas for Thor
to crush up in his fist.

    It was his wife's custom, as soon as Dr. Archie left the
house in the morning, to shut all the doors and windows
to keep the dust out, and to pull down the shades to keep
the sun from fading the carpets.  She thought, too, that
neighbors were less likely to drop in if the house was closed
up.  She was one of those people who are stingy without
motive or reason, even when they can gain nothing by it.
She must have known that skimping the doctor in heat
and food made him more extravagant than he would have
been had she made him comfortable.  He never came home
for lunch, because she gave him such miserable scraps and
shreds of food.  No matter how much milk he bought, he
could never get thick cream for his strawberries.  Even
when he watched his wife lift it from the milk in smooth,
ivory-colored blankets, she managed, by some sleight-of-
hand, to dilute it before it got to the breakfast table.  The
butcher's favorite joke was about the kind of meat he sold
Mrs. Archie.  She felt no interest in food herself, and she
hated to prepare it.  She liked nothing better than to have
Dr. Archie go to Denver for a few days--he often went
chiefly because he was hungry--and to be left alone to
eat canned salmon and to keep the house shut up from
morning until night.

    Mrs. Archie would not have a servant because, she said,
"they ate too much and broke too much"; she even said
they knew too much.  She used what mind she had in
devising shifts to minimize her housework.  She used to
tell her neighbors that if there were no men, there would

be no housework.  When Mrs. Archie was first married,
she had been always in a panic for fear she would have
children.  Now that her apprehensions on that score had
grown paler, she was almost as much afraid of having dust
in the house as she had once been of having children in it.
If dust did not get in, it did not have to be got out, she said.
She would take any amount of trouble to avoid trouble.
Why, nobody knew.  Certainly her husband had never
been able to make her out.  Such little, mean natures are
among the darkest and most baffling of created things.
There is no law by which they can be explained.  The or-
dinary incentives of pain and pleasure do not account for
their behavior.  They live like insects, absorbed in petty
activities that seem to have nothing to do with any genial
aspect of human life.

    Mrs. Archie, as Mrs. Kronborg said, "liked to gad."
She liked to have her house clean, empty, dark, locked, and
to be out of it--anywhere.  A church social, a prayer
meeting, a ten-cent show; she seemed to have no prefer-
ence.  When there was nowhere else to go, she used to sit
for hours in Mrs. Smiley's millinery and notion store, lis-
tening to the talk of the women who came in, watching
them while they tried on hats, blinking at them from her
corner with her sharp, restless little eyes.  She never talked
much herself, but she knew all the gossip of the town and
she had a sharp ear for racy anecdotes--"traveling men's
stories," they used to be called in Moonstone.  Her clicking
laugh sounded like a typewriting machine in action, and,
for very pointed stories, she had a little screech.

    Mrs. Archie had been Mrs. Archie for only six years,
and when she was Belle White she was one of the "pretty"
girls in Lansing, Michigan.  She had then a train of suitors.
She could truly remind Archie that "the boys hung around
her."  They did.  They thought her very spirited and were
always saying, "Oh, that Belle White, she's a case!"  She
used to play heavy practical jokes which the young men

thought very clever.  Archie was considered the most
promising young man in "the young crowd," so Belle
selected him.  She let him see, made him fully aware, that
she had selected him, and Archie was the sort of boy who
could not withstand such enlightenment.  Belle's family
were sorry for him.  On his wedding day her sisters looked
at the big, handsome boy--he was twenty-four--as he
walked down the aisle with his bride, and then they looked
at each other.  His besotted confidence, his sober, radiant
face, his gentle, protecting arm, made them uncomfort-
able.  Well, they were glad that he was going West at once,
to fulfill his doom where they would not be onlookers.  Any-
how, they consoled themselves, they had got Belle off their
hands.

    More than that, Belle seemed to have got herself off her
hands.  Her reputed prettiness must have been entirely
the result of determination, of a fierce little ambition.  Once
she had married, fastened herself on some one, come to
port,--it vanished like the ornamental plumage which
drops away from some birds after the mating season.  The
one aggressive action of her life was over.  She began to
shrink in face and stature.  Of her harum-scarum spirit
there was nothing left but the little screech.  Within a few
years she looked as small and mean as she was.

    Thor's chariot crept along.  Thea approached the house
unwillingly.  She didn't care about the strawberries, any-
how.  She had come only because she did not want to hurt
Dr. Archie's feelings.  She not only disliked Mrs. Archie,
she was a little afraid of her.  While Thea was getting the
heavy baby-buggy through the iron gate she heard some
one call, "Wait a minute!" and Mrs. Archie came running
around the house from the back door, her apron over her
head.  She came to help with the buggy, because she was
afraid the wheels might scratch the paint off the gate-
posts.  She was a skinny little woman with a great pile of
frizzy light hair on a small head.

    "Dr. Archie told me to come up and pick some straw-
berries," Thea muttered, wishing she had stayed at home.

    Mrs. Archie led the way to the back door, squinting and
shading her eyes with her hand.  "Wait a minute," she said
again, when Thea explained why she had come.

    She went into her kitchen and Thea sat down on the
porch step.  When Mrs. Archie reappeared she carried in
her hand a little wooden butter-basket trimmed with
fringed tissue paper, which she must have brought home
from some church supper.  "You'll have to have something
to put them in," she said, ignoring the yawning willow
basket which stood empty on Thor's feet.  "You can have
this, and you needn't mind about returning it.  You know
about not trampling the vines, don't you?"

    Mrs. Archie went back into the house and Thea leaned
over in the sand and picked a few strawberries.  As soon as
she was sure that she was not going to cry, she tossed the
little basket into the big one and ran Thor's buggy along
the gravel walk and out of the gate as fast as she could push
it.  She was angry, and she was ashamed for Dr. Archie.  She
could not help thinking how uncomfortable he would be if
he ever found out about it.  Little things like that were the
ones that cut him most.  She slunk home by the back way,
and again almost cried when she told her mother about it.

    Mrs. Kronborg was frying doughnuts for her husband's
supper.  She laughed as she dropped a new lot into the hot
grease.  "It's wonderful, the way some people are made,"
she declared.  "But I wouldn't let that upset me if I was
you.  Think what it would be to live with it all the time.
You look in the black pocketbook inside my handbag and
take a dime and go downtown and get an ice-cream soda.
That'll make you feel better.  Thor can have a little of the
ice-cream if you feed it to him with a spoon.  He likes it,
don't you, son?"  She stooped to wipe his chin.  Thor was
only six months old and inarticulate, but it was quite true
that he liked ice-cream.

                               VI


    Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked
like a Noah's ark town set out in the sand and lightly
shaded by gray-green tamarisks and cottonwoods.  A few
people were trying to make soft maples grow in their
turfed lawns, but the fashion of planting incongruous
trees from the North Atlantic States had not become gen-
eral then, and the frail, brightly painted desert town was
shaded by the light-reflecting, wind-loving trees of the
desert, whose roots are always seeking water and whose
leaves are always talking about it, making the sound of
rain.  The long porous roots of the cottonwood are irre-
pressible.  They break into the wells as rats do into grana-
ries, and thieve the water.

    The long street which connected Moonstone with the
depot settlement traversed in its course a considerable
stretch of rough open country, staked out in lots but not
built up at all, a weedy hiatus between the town and the
railroad.  When you set out along this street to go to the
station, you noticed that the houses became smaller and
farther apart, until they ceased altogether, and the board
sidewalk continued its uneven course through sunflower
patches, until you reached the solitary, new brick Catholic
Church.  The church stood there because the land was
given to the parish by the man who owned the adjoining
waste lots, in the hope of making them more salable--
"Farrier's Addition," this patch of prairie was called in the
clerk's office.  An eighth of a mile beyond the church was
a washout, a deep sand-gully, where the board sidewalk
became a bridge for perhaps fifty feet.  Just beyond the
gully was old Uncle Billy Beemer's grove,--twelve town
lots set out in fine, well-grown cottonwood trees, delightful

to look upon, or to listen to, as they swayed and rippled in
the wind.  Uncle Billy had been one of the most worthless
old drunkards who ever sat on a store box and told filthy
stories.  One night he played hide-and-seek with a switch
engine and got his sodden brains knocked out.  But his
grove, the one creditable thing he had ever done in his life,
rustled on.  Beyond this grove the houses of the depot
settlement began, and the naked board walk, that had run
in out of the sunflowers, again became a link between
human dwellings.

    One afternoon, late in the summer, Dr. Howard Archie
was fighting his way back to town along this walk through
a blinding sandstorm, a silk handkerchief tied over his
mouth.  He had been to see a sick woman down in the depot
settlement, and he was walking because his ponies had
been out for a hard drive that morning.

    As he passed the Catholic Church he came upon Thea
and Thor.  Thea was sitting in a child's express wagon, her
feet out behind, kicking the wagon along and steering by
the tongue.  Thor was on her lap and she held him with one
arm.  He had grown to be a big cub of a baby, with a con-
stitutional grievance, and he had to be continually amused.
Thea took him philosophically, and tugged and pulled
him about, getting as much fun as she could under her
encumbrance.  Her hair was blowing about her face, and
her eyes were squinting so intently at the uneven board
sidewalk in front of her that she did not see the doctor
until he spoke to her.

    "Look out, Thea.  You'll steer that youngster into the
ditch."

    The wagon stopped.  Thea released the tongue, wiped
her hot, sandy face, and pushed back her hair.  "Oh, no,
I won't!  I never ran off but once, and then he didn't get
anything but a bump.  He likes this better than a baby-
buggy, and so do I."

    "Are you going to kick that cart all the way home?"

    "Of course.  We take long trips; wherever there is a side-
walk.  It's no good on the road."

    "Looks to me like working pretty hard for your fun.
Are you going to be busy to-night?  Want to make a call
with me?  Spanish Johnny's come home again, all used up.
His wife sent me word this morning, and I said I'd go over
to see him to-night.  He's an old chum of yours, isn't
he?"

    "Oh, I'm glad.  She's been crying her eyes out.  When
did he come?"

    "Last night, on Number Six.  Paid his fare, they tell me.
Too sick to beat it.  There'll come a time when that boy
won't get back, I'm afraid.  Come around to my office about
eight o'clock,--and you needn't bring that!"

    Thor seemed to understand that he had been insulted,
for he scowled and began to kick the side of the wagon,
shouting, "Go-go, go-go!"  Thea leaned forward and
grabbed the wagon tongue.  Dr. Archie stepped in front of
her and blocked the way.  "Why don't you make him wait?
What do you let him boss you like that for?"

    "If he gets mad he throws himself, and then I can't do
anything with him.  When he's mad he's lots stronger than
me, aren't you, Thor?"  Thea spoke with pride, and the
idol was appeased.  He grunted approvingly as his sister
began to kick rapidly behind her, and the wagon rattled off
and soon disappeared in the flying currents of sand.

    That evening Dr. Archie was seated in his office, his desk
chair tilted back, reading by the light of a hot coal-oil lamp.
All the windows were open, but the night was breathless
after the sandstorm, and his hair was moist where it hung
over his forehead.  He was deeply engrossed in his book
and sometimes smiled thoughtfully as he read.  When
Thea Kronborg entered quietly and slipped into a seat, he
nodded, finished his paragraph, inserted a bookmark, and
rose to put the book back into the case.  It was one out of
the long row of uniform volumes on the top shelf.

    "Nearly every time I come in, when you're alone, you're
reading one of those books," Thea remarked thoughtfully.
"They must be very nice."

    The doctor dropped back into his swivel chair, the mot-
tled volume still in his hand.  "They aren't exactly books,
Thea," he said seriously.  "They're a city."

    "A history, you mean?"

    "Yes, and no.  They're a history of a live city, not a
dead one.  A Frenchman undertook to write about a whole
cityful of people, all the kinds he knew.  And he got them
nearly all in, I guess.  Yes, it's very interesting.  You'll
like to read it some day, when you're grown up."

    Thea leaned forward and made out the title on the back,
"A Distinguished Provincial in Paris."

    "It doesn't sound very interesting."

    "Perhaps not, but it is."  The doctor scrutinized her
broad face, low enough to be in the direct light from under
the green lamp shade.  "Yes," he went on with some sat-
isfaction, "I think you'll like them some day.  You're
always curious about people, and I expect this man knew
more about people than anybody that ever lived."

    "City people or country people?"

    "Both.  People are pretty much the same everywhere."

    "Oh, no, they're not.  The people who go through in the
dining-car aren't like us."

    "What makes you think they aren't, my girl?  Their
clothes?"

    Thea shook her head.  "No, it's something else.  I don't
know."  Her eyes shifted under the doctor's searching gaze
and she glanced up at the row of books.  "How soon will
I be old enough to read them?"

    "Soon enough, soon enough, little girl."  The doctor
patted her hand and looked at her index finger.  "The
nail's coming all right, isn't it?  But I think that man
makes you practice too much.  You have it on your mind
all the time."  He had noticed that when she talked to him

she was always opening and shutting her hands.  "It makes
you nervous."

    "No, he don't," Thea replied stubbornly, watching Dr.
Archie return the book to its niche.

    He took up a black leather case, put on his hat, and they
went down the dark stairs into the street.  The summer
moon hung full in the sky.  For the time being, it was the
great fact in the world.  Beyond the edge of the town the
plain was so white that every clump of sage stood out dis-
tinct from the sand, and the dunes looked like a shining
lake.  The doctor took off his straw hat and carried it in his
hand as they walked toward Mexican Town, across the
sand.

    North of Pueblo, Mexican settlements were rare in
Colorado then.  This one had come about accidentally.
Spanish Johnny was the first Mexican who came to Moon-
stone.  He was a painter and decorator, and had been
working in Trinidad, when Ray Kennedy told him there
was a "boom" on in Moonstone, and a good many new
buildings were going up.  A year after Johnny settled in
Moonstone, his cousin, Famos Serrenos, came to work in
the brickyard; then Serrenos' cousins came to help him.
During the strike, the master mechanic put a gang of
Mexicans to work in the roundhouse.  The Mexicans had
arrived so quietly, with their blankets and musical instru-
ments, that before Moonstone was awake to the fact, there
was a Mexican quarter; a dozen families or more.

    As Thea and the doctor approached the 'dobe houses,
they heard a guitar, and a rich barytone voice--that of
Famos Serrenos--singing "La Golandrina."  All the
Mexican houses had neat little yards, with tamarisk hedges
and flowers, and walks bordered with shells or white-
washed stones.  Johnny's house was dark.  His wife, Mrs.
Tellamantez, was sitting on the doorstep, combing her
long, blue-black hair.  (Mexican women are like the Spar-
tans; when they are in trouble, in love, under stress of any

kind, they comb and comb their hair.)  She rose without
embarrassment or apology, comb in hand, and greeted the
doctor.

    "Good-evening; will you go in?" she asked in a low,
musical voice.  "He is in the back room.  I will make a
light."  She followed them indoors, lit a candle and handed
it to the doctor, pointing toward the bedroom.  Then she
went back and sat down on her doorstep.

    Dr. Archie and Thea went into the bedroom, which was
dark and quiet.  There was a bed in the corner, and a man
was lying on the clean sheets.  On the table beside him was
a glass pitcher, half-full of water.  Spanish Johnny looked
younger than his wife, and when he was in health he was
very handsome: slender, gold-colored, with wavy black
hair, a round, smooth throat, white teeth, and burning
black eyes.  His profile was strong and severe, like an
Indian's.  What was termed his "wildness" showed itself
only in his feverish eyes and in the color that burned on his
tawny cheeks.  That night he was a coppery green, and his
eyes were like black holes.  He opened them when the doc-
tor held the candle before his face.

    "MI TESTA!" he muttered, "MI TESTA, doctor.  "LA
FIEBRE!"  Seeing the doctor's companion at the foot of the bed, he
attempted a smile.  "MUCHACHA!" he exclaimed deprecat-
ingly.

    Dr. Archie stuck a thermometer into his mouth.  "Now,
Thea, you can run outside and wait for me."

    Thea slipped noiselessly through the dark house and
joined Mrs. Tellamantez.  The somber Mexican woman
did not seem inclined to talk, but her nod was friendly.
Thea sat down on the warm sand, her back to the moon,
facing Mrs. Tellamantez on her doorstep, and began to
count the moonflowers on the vine that ran over the house.
Mrs. Tellamantez was always considered a very homely
woman.  Her face was of a strongly marked type not sym-
pathetic to Americans.  Such long, oval faces, with a full

chin, a large, mobile mouth, a high nose, are not uncom-
mon in Spain.  Mrs. Tellamantez could not write her name,
and could read but little.  Her strong nature lived upon
itself.  She was chiefly known in Moonstone for her forbear-
ance with her incorrigible husband.

    Nobody knew exactly what was the matter with Johnny,
and everybody liked him.  His popularity would have been
unusual for a white man, for a Mexican it was unprece-
dented.  His talents were his undoing.  He had a high,
uncertain tenor voice, and he played the mandolin with
exceptional skill.  Periodically he went crazy.  There was
no other way to explain his behavior.  He was a clever
workman, and, when he worked, as regular and faithful
as a burro.  Then some night he would fall in with a crowd
at the saloon and begin to sing.  He would go on until
he had no voice left, until he wheezed and rasped.  Then
he would play his mandolin furiously, and drink until his
eyes sank back into his head.  At last, when he was put
out of the saloon at closing time, and could get nobody
to listen to him, he would run away--along the railroad
track, straight across the desert.  He always managed to
get aboard a freight somewhere.  Once beyond Denver,
he played his way southward from saloon to saloon until
he got across the border.  He never wrote to his wife; but
she would soon begin to get newspapers from La Junta,
Albuquerque, Chihuahua, with marked paragraphs an-
nouncing that Juan Tellamantez and his wonderful man-
dolin could be heard at the Jack Rabbit Grill, or the Pearl
of Cadiz Saloon.  Mrs. Tellamantez waited and wept and
combed her hair.  When he was completely wrung out and
burned up,--all but destroyed,--her Juan always came
back to her to be taken care of,--once with an ugly knife
wound in the neck, once with a finger missing from his
right hand,--but he played just as well with three fingers
as he had with four.

    Public sentiment was lenient toward Johnny, but every-

body was disgusted with Mrs. Tellamantez for putting up
with him.  She ought to discipline him, people said; she
ought to leave him; she had no self-respect.  In short, Mrs.
Tellamantez got all the blame.  Even Thea thought she
was much too humble.  To-night, as she sat with her back
to the moon, looking at the moonflowers and Mrs. Tella-
mantez's somber face, she was thinking that there is noth-
ing so sad in the world as that kind of patience and resigna-
tion.  It was much worse than Johnny's craziness.  She even
wondered whether it did not help to make Johnny crazy.
People had no right to be so passive and resigned.  She
would like to roll over and over in the sand and screech at
Mrs. Tellamantez.  She was glad when the doctor came out.

    The Mexican woman rose and stood respectful and ex-
pectant.  The doctor held his hat in his hand and looked
kindly at her.

    "Same old thing, Mrs. Tellamantez.  He's no worse than
he's been before.  I've left some medicine.  Don't give him
anything but toast water until I see him again.  You're a
good nurse; you'll get him out."  Dr. Archie smiled en-
couragingly.  He glanced about the little garden and
wrinkled his brows.  "I can't see what makes him behave
so.  He's killing himself, and he's not a rowdy sort of fel-
low.  Can't you tie him up someway?  Can't you tell when
these fits are coming on?"

    Mrs. Tellamantez put her hand to her forehead.  "The
saloon, doctor, the excitement; that is what makes him.
People listen to him, and it excites him."

    The doctor shook his head.  "Maybe.  He's too much for
my calculations.  I don't see what he gets out of it."

    "He is always fooled,"--the Mexican woman spoke
rapidly and tremulously, her long under lip quivering.

    "He is good at heart, but he has no head.  He fools himself.
You do not understand in this country, you are progressive.
But he has no judgment, and he is fooled."  She stooped
quickly, took up one of the white conch-shells that bordered

the walk, and, with an apologetic inclination of her head,
held it to Dr. Archie's ear.  "Listen, doctor.  You hear
something in there?  You hear the sea; and yet the sea is
very far from here.  You have judgment, and you know
that.  But he is fooled.  To him, it is the sea itself.  A
little thing is big to him."  She bent and placed the shell
in the white row, with its fellows.  Thea took it up softly
and pressed it to her own ear.  The sound in it startled
her; it was like something calling one.  So that was why
Johnny ran away.  There was something awe-inspiring
about Mrs. Tellamantez and her shell.

    Thea caught Dr. Archie's hand and squeezed it hard
as she skipped along beside him back toward Moonstone.
She went home, and the doctor went back to his lamp
and his book.  He never left his office until after midnight.
If he did not play whist or pool in the evening, he read.
It had become a habit with him to lose himself.

                               VII


    Thea's twelfth birthday had passed a few weeks
before her memorable call upon Mrs. Tellamantez.
There was a worthy man in Moonstone who was already
planning to marry Thea as soon as she should be old enough.
His name was Ray Kennedy, his age was thirty, and he was
conductor on a freight train, his run being from Moonstone
to Denver.  Ray was a big fellow, with a square, open
American face, a rock chin, and features that one would
never happen to remember.  He was an aggressive idealist,
a freethinker, and, like most railroad men, deeply senti-
mental.  Thea liked him for reasons that had to do with
the adventurous life he had led in Mexico and the South-
west, rather than for anything very personal.  She liked
him, too, because he was the only one of her friends who
ever took her to the sand hills.  The sand hills were a con-
stant tantalization; she loved them better than anything
near Moonstone, and yet she could so seldom get to them.
The first dunes were accessible enough; they were only a
few miles beyond the Kohlers', and she could run out there
any day when she could do her practicing in the morning
and get Thor off her hands for an afternoon.  But the real
hills--the Turquoise Hills, the Mexicans called them--
were ten good miles away, and one reached them by a
heavy, sandy road.  Dr. Archie sometimes took Thea on
his long drives, but as nobody lived in the sand hills, he
never had calls to make in that direction.  Ray Kennedy
was her only hope of getting there.

    This summer Thea had not been to the hills once, though
Ray had planned several Sunday expeditions.  Once Thor
was sick, and once the organist in her father's church was
away and Thea had to play the organ for the three Sunday

services.  But on the first Sunday in September, Ray drove
up to the Kronborgs' front gate at nine o'clock in the morn-
ing and the party actually set off.  Gunner and Axel went
with Thea, and Ray had asked Spanish Johnny to come
and to bring Mrs. Tellamantez and his mandolin.  Ray was
artlessly fond of music, especially of Mexican music.  He
and Mrs. Tellamantez had got up the lunch between them,
and they were to make coffee in the desert.

    When they left Mexican Town, Thea was on the front
seat with Ray and Johnny, and Gunner and Axel sat be-
hind with Mrs. Tellamantez.  They objected to this, of
course, but there were some things about which Thea would
have her own way.  "As stubborn as a Finn," Mrs. Kron-
borg sometimes said of her, quoting an old Swedish saying.
When they passed the Kohlers', old Fritz and Wunsch
were cutting grapes at the arbor.  Thea gave them a busi-
nesslike nod.  Wunsch came to the gate and looked after
them.  He divined Ray Kennedy's hopes, and he dis-
trusted every expedition that led away from the piano.
Unconsciously he made Thea pay for frivolousness of this
sort.

    As Ray Kennedy's party followed the faint road across
the sagebrush, they heard behind them the sound of church
bells, which gave them a sense of escape and boundless
freedom.  Every rabbit that shot across the path, every
sage hen that flew up by the trail, was like a runaway
thought, a message that one sent into the desert.  As they
went farther, the illusion of the mirage became more in-
stead of less convincing; a shallow silver lake that spread
for many miles, a little misty in the sunlight.  Here and
there one saw reflected the image of a heifer, turned loose
to live upon the sparse sand-grass.  They were magnified
to a preposterous height and looked like mammoths, pre-
historic beasts standing solitary in the waters that for
many thousands of years actually washed over that desert;
--the mirage itself may be the ghost of that long-vanished

sea.  Beyond the phantom lake lay the line of many-colored
hills; rich, sun-baked yellow, glowing turquoise, lavender,
purple; all the open, pastel colors of the desert.

    After the first five miles the road grew heavier.  The
horses had to slow down to a walk and the wheels sank
deep into the sand, which now lay in long ridges, like waves,
where the last high wind had drifted it.  Two hours brought
the party to Pedro's Cup, named for a Mexican desperado
who had once held the sheriff at bay there.  The Cup was a
great amphitheater, cut out in the hills, its floor smooth
and packed hard, dotted with sagebrush and greasewood.

    On either side of the Cup the yellow hills ran north and
south, with winding ravines between them, full of soft sand
which drained down from the crumbling banks.  On the
surface of this fluid sand, one could find bits of brilliant
stone, crystals and agates and onyx, and petrified wood as
red as blood.  Dried toads and lizards were to be found
there, too.  Birds, decomposing more rapidly, left only
feathered skeletons.

    After a little reconnoitering, Mrs. Tellamantez declared
that it was time for lunch, and Ray took his hatchet and
began to cut greasewood, which burns fiercely in its green
state.  The little boys dragged the bushes to the spot that
Mrs. Tellamantez had chosen for her fire.  Mexican women
like to cook out of doors.

    After lunch Thea sent Gunner and Axel to hunt for
agates.  "If you see a rattlesnake, run.  Don't try to kill
it," she enjoined.

    Gunner hesitated.  "If Ray would let me take the
hatchet, I could kill one all right."

    Mrs. Tellamantez smiled and said something to Johnny
in Spanish.

    "Yes," her husband replied, translating, "they say in
Mexico, kill a snake but never hurt his feelings.  Down in
the hot country, MUCHACHA," turning to Thea, "people
keep a pet snake in the house to kill rats and mice.  They

call him the house snake.  They keep a little mat for him
by the fire, and at night he curl up there and sit with the
family, just as friendly!"

    Gunner sniffed with disgust.  "Well, I think that's a
dirty Mexican way to keep house; so there!"

    Johnny shrugged his shoulders.  "Perhaps," he muttered.
A Mexican learns to dive below insults or soar above them,
after he crosses the border.

    By this time the south wall of the amphitheater cast a
narrow shelf of shadow, and the party withdrew to this
refuge.  Ray and Johnny began to talk about the Grand
Canyon and Death Valley, two places much shrouded in
mystery in those days, and Thea listened intently.  Mrs.
Tellamantez took out her drawn-work and pinned it to her
knee.  Ray could talk well about the large part of the conti-
nent over which he had been knocked about, and Johnny
was appreciative.

    "You been all over, pretty near.  Like a Spanish boy,"
he commented respectfully.

    Ray, who had taken off his coat, whetted his pocket-
knife thoughtfully on the sole of his shoe.  "I began to
browse around early.  I had a mind to see something of this
world, and I ran away from home before I was twelve.
Rustled for myself ever since."

    "Ran away?"  Johnny looked hopeful.  "What for?"

    "Couldn't make it go with my old man, and didn't take
to farming.  There were plenty of boys at home.  I wasn't
missed."

    Thea wriggled down in the hot sand and rested her chin
on her arm.  "Tell Johnny about the melons, Ray, please
do!"

    Ray's solid, sunburned cheeks grew a shade redder, and
he looked reproachfully at Thea.  "You're stuck on that
story, kid.  You like to get the laugh on me, don't you?
That was the finishing split I had with my old man, John.
He had a claim along the creek, not far from Denver, and

raised a little garden stuff for market.  One day he had a
load of melons and he decided to take 'em to town and sell
'em along the street, and he made me go along and drive
for him.  Denver wasn't the queen city it is now, by any
means, but it seemed a terrible big place to me; and when
we got there, if he didn't make me drive right up Capitol
Hill!  Pap got out and stopped at folkses houses to ask if
they didn't want to buy any melons, and I was to drive
along slow.  The farther I went the madder I got, but I was
trying to look unconscious, when the end-gate came loose
and one of the melons fell out and squashed.  Just then a
swell girl, all dressed up, comes out of one of the big houses
and calls out, `Hello, boy, you're losing your melons!'
Some dudes on the other side of the street took their hats
off to her and began to laugh.  I couldn't stand it any
longer.  I grabbed the whip and lit into that team, and they
tore up the hill like jack-rabbits, them damned melons
bouncing out the back every jump, the old man cussin' an'
yellin' behind and everybody laughin'.  I never looked be-
hind, but the whole of Capitol Hill must have been a mess
with them squashed melons.  I didn't stop the team till I
got out of sight of town.  Then I pulled up an' left 'em with
a rancher I was acquainted with, and I never went home to
get the lickin' that was waitin' for me.  I expect it's waitin'
for me yet."

    Thea rolled over in the sand.  "Oh, I wish I could have
seen those melons fly, Ray!  I'll never see anything as
funny as that.  Now, tell Johnny about your first job."

    Ray had a collection of good stories.  He was observant,
truthful, and kindly--perhaps the chief requisites in a
good story-teller. Occasionally he used newspaper phrases,
conscientiously learned in his efforts at self-instruction, but
when he talked naturally he was always worth listening to.
Never having had any schooling to speak of, he had, almost
from the time he first ran away, tried to make good his loss.
As a sheep-herder he had worried an old grammar to tatters,

and read instructive books with the help of a pocket dic-
tionary.  By the light of many camp-fires he had pondered
upon Prescott's histories, and the works of Washington
Irving, which he bought at a high price from a book-agent.
Mathematics and physics were easy for him, but general
culture came hard, and he was determined to get it.  Ray
was a freethinker, and inconsistently believed himself
damned for being one.  When he was braking, down on the
Santa Fe, at the end of his run he used to climb into the
upper bunk of the caboose, while a noisy gang played poker
about the stove below him, and by the roof-lamp read
Robert Ingersoll's speeches and "The Age of Reason."

    Ray was a loyal-hearted fellow, and it had cost him a
great deal to give up his God.  He was one of the step-
children of Fortune, and he had very little to show for all
his hard work; the other fellow always got the best of it.
He had come in too late, or too early, on several schemes
that had made money.  He brought with him from all his
wanderings a good deal of information (more or less correct
in itself, but unrelated, and therefore misleading), a high
standard of personal honor, a sentimental veneration for
all women, bad as well as good, and a bitter hatred of
Englishmen.  Thea often thought that the nicest thing
about Ray was his love for Mexico and the Mexicans, who
had been kind to him when he drifted, a homeless boy, over
the border.  In Mexico, Ray was Senor Ken-ay-dy, and
when he answered to that name he was somehow a different
fellow.  He spoke Spanish fluently, and the sunny warmth
of that tongue kept him from being quite as hard as his
chin, or as narrow as his popular science.

    While Ray was smoking his cigar, he and Johnny fell to
talking about the great fortunes that had been made in
the Southwest, and about fellows they knew who had
"struck it rich."

    "I guess you been in on some big deals down there?"
Johnny asked trustfully.

    Ray smiled and shook his head.  "I've been out on some,
John.  I've never been exactly in on any.  So far, I've either
held on too long or let go too soon.  But mine's coming to
me, all right."  Ray looked reflective.  He leaned back in
the shadow and dug out a rest for his elbow in the sand.
"The narrowest escape I ever had, was in the Bridal Cham-
ber.  If I hadn't let go there, it would have made me rich.
That was a close call."

    Johnny looked delighted.  "You don' say!  She was silver
mine, I guess?"

    "I guess she was!  Down at Lake Valley.  I put up a few
hundred for the prospector, and he gave me a bunch of
stock.  Before we'd got anything out of it, my brother-in-
law died of the fever in Cuba.  My sister was beside herself
to get his body back to Colorado to bury him.  Seemed
foolish to me, but she's the only sister I got.  It's expensive
for dead folks to travel, and I had to sell my stock in the
mine to raise the money to get Elmer on the move.  Two
months afterward, the boys struck that big pocket in the
rock, full of virgin silver.  They named her the Bridal
Chamber.  It wasn't ore, you remember.  It was pure, soft
metal you could have melted right down into dollars.  The
boys cut it out with chisels.  If old Elmer hadn't played
that trick on me, I'd have been in for about fifty thousand.
That was a close call, Spanish."

    "I recollec'.  When the pocket gone, the town go bust."

    "You bet.  Higher'n a kite.  There was no vein, just a
pocket in the rock that had sometime or another got filled
up with molten silver.  You'd think there would be more
somewhere about, but NADA.  There's fools digging holes in
that mountain yet."

    When Ray had finished his cigar, Johnny took his man-
dolin and began Kennedy's favorite, "Ultimo Amor."  It
was now three o'clock in the afternoon, the hottest hour
in the day.  The narrow shelf of shadow had widened until
the floor of the amphitheater was marked off in two halves,

one glittering yellow, and one purple.  The little boys had
come back and were making a robbers' cave to enact the
bold deeds of Pedro the bandit.  Johnny, stretched grace-
fully on the sand, passed from "Ultimo Amor" to "Fluvia
de Oro," and then to "Noches de Algeria," playing lan-
guidly.

    Every one was busy with his own thoughts.  Mrs.
Tellamantez was thinking of the square in the little town
in which she was born; of the white churchsteps, with
people genuflecting as they passed, and the round-topped
acacia trees, and the band playing in the plaza.  Ray Ken-
nedy was thinking of the future, dreaming the large Western
dream of easy money, of a fortune kicked up somewhere in
the hills,--an oil well, a gold mine, a ledge of copper.  He
always told himself, when he accepted a cigar from a newly
married railroad man, that he knew enough not to marry
until he had found his ideal, and could keep her like a queen.
He believed that in the yellow head over there in the sand
he had found his ideal, and that by the time she was old
enough to marry, he would be able to keep her like a queen.
He would kick it up from somewhere, when he got loose
from the railroad.

    Thea, stirred by tales of adventure, of the Grand Canyon
and Death Valley, was recalling a great adventure of her
own.  Early in the summer her father had been invited to
conduct a reunion of old frontiersmen, up in Wyoming,
near Laramie, and he took Thea along with him to play
the organ and sing patriotic songs.  There they stayed
at the house of an old ranchman who told them about
a ridge up in the hills called Laramie Plain, where the
wagon-trails of the Forty-niners and the Mormons were
still visible.  The old man even volunteered to take Mr.
Kronborg up into the hills to see this place, though it was
a very long drive to make in one day.  Thea had begged
frantically to go along, and the old rancher, flattered by
her rapt attention to his stories, had interceded for her.

    They set out from Laramie before daylight, behind a strong
team of mules.  All the way there was much talk of the
Forty-niners.  The old rancher had been a teamster in a
freight train that used to crawl back and forth across the
plains between Omaha and Cherry Creek, as Denver was
then called, and he had met many a wagon train bound for
California.  He told of Indians and buffalo, thirst and
slaughter, wanderings in snowstorms, and lonely graves
in the desert.

    The road they followed was a wild and beautiful one.  It
led up and up, by granite rocks and stunted pines, around
deep ravines and echoing gorges.  The top of the ridge, when
they reached it, was a great flat plain, strewn with white
boulders, with the wind howling over it.  There was not one
trail, as Thea had expected; there were a score; deep fur-
rows, cut in the earth by heavy wagon wheels, and now
grown over with dry, whitish grass.  The furrows ran side
by side; when one trail had been worn too deep, the next
party had abandoned it and made a new trail to the right
or left.  They were, indeed, only old wagon ruts, running
east and west, and grown over with grass.  But as Thea ran
about among the white stones, her skirts blowing this way
and that, the wind brought to her eyes tears that might
have come anyway.  The old rancher picked up an iron
ox-shoe from one of the furrows and gave it to her for a
keepsake.  To the west one could see range after range of
blue mountains, and at last the snowy range, with its white,
windy peaks, the clouds caught here and there on their
spurs.  Again and again Thea had to hide her face from the
cold for a moment.  The wind never slept on this plain, the
old man said.  Every little while eagles flew over.

    Coming up from Laramie, the old man had told them
that he was in Brownsville, Nebraska, when the first tele-
graph wires were put across the Missouri River, and that
the first message that ever crossed the river was "West-
ward the course of Empire takes its way."  He had been

in the room when the instrument began to click, and all
the men there had, without thinking what they were doing,
taken off their hats, waiting bareheaded to hear the mes-
sage translated.  Thea remembered that message when she
sighted down the wagon tracks toward the blue moun-
tains.  She told herself she would never, never forget it.
The spirit of human courage seemed to live up there with
the eagles.  For long after, when she was moved by a
Fourth-of-July oration, or a band, or a circus parade, she
was apt to remember that windy ridge.

    To-day she went to sleep while she was thinking about
it.  When Ray wakened her, the horses were hitched to the
wagon and Gunner and Axel were begging for a place on
the front seat.  The air had cooled, the sun was setting, and
the desert was on fire.  Thea contentedly took the back seat
with Mrs. Tellamantez.  As they drove homeward the stars
began to come out, pale yellow in a yellow sky, and Ray
and Johnny began to sing one of those railroad ditties that
are usually born on the Southern Pacific and run the length
of the Santa Fe and the "Q" system before they die to give
place to a new one.  This was a song about a Greaser dance,
the refrain being something like this:--


    "Pedro, Pedro, swing high, swing low,

    And it's allamand left again;

    For there's boys that's bold and there's some that's cold,

    But the gold boys come from Spain,

    Oh, the gold boys come from Spain!"

                              VIII


    Winter was long in coming that year.  Throughout
October the days were bathed in sunlight and the
air was clear as crystal.  The town kept its cheerful sum-
mer aspect, the desert glistened with light, the sand hills
every day went through magical changes of color.  The
scarlet sage bloomed late in the front yards, the cottonwood
leaves were bright gold long before they fell, and it was not
until November that the green on the tamarisks began to
cloud and fade.  There was a flurry of snow about Thanks-
giving, and then December came on warm and clear.

    Thea had three music pupils now, little girls whose
mothers declared that Professor Wunsch was "much too
severe."  They took their lessons on Saturday, and this, of
course, cut down her time for play.  She did not really mind
this because she was allowed to use the money--her pupils
paid her twenty-five cents a lesson--to fit up a little room
for herself upstairs in the half-story.  It was the end room
of the wing, and was not plastered, but was snugly lined
with soft pine.  The ceiling was so low that a grown person
could reach it with the palm of the hand, and it sloped down
on either side.  There was only one window, but it was a
double one and went to the floor.  In October, while the
days were still warm, Thea and Tillie papered the room,
walls and ceiling in the same paper, small red and brown
roses on a yellowish ground.  Thea bought a brown cotton
carpet, and her big brother, Gus, put it down for her one
Sunday.  She made white cheesecloth curtains and hung
them on a tape.  Her mother gave her an old walnut dresser
with a broken mirror, and she had her own dumpy walnut
single bed, and a blue washbowl and pitcher which she had
drawn at a church fair lottery.  At the head of her bed she

had a tall round wooden hat-crate, from the clothing store.
This, standing on end and draped with cretonne, made a
fairly steady table for her lantern.  She was not allowed to
take a lamp upstairs, so Ray Kennedy gave her a railroad
lantern by which she could read at night.

    In winter this loft room of Thea's was bitterly cold, but
against her mother's advice--and Tillie's--she always
left her window open a little way.  Mrs. Kronborg declared
that she "had no patience with American physiology,"
though the lessons about the injurious effects of alcohol
and tobacco were well enough for the boys.  Thea asked
Dr. Archie about the window, and he told her that a girl
who sang must always have plenty of fresh air, or her voice
would get husky, and that the cold would harden her
throat.  The important thing, he said, was to keep your
feet warm.  On very cold nights Thea always put a brick
in the oven after supper, and when she went upstairs she
wrapped it in an old flannel petticoat and put it in her
bed.  The boys, who would never heat bricks for them-
selves, sometimes carried off Thea's, and thought it a good
joke to get ahead of her.

    When Thea first plunged in between her red blankets,
the cold sometimes kept her awake for a good while, and
she comforted herself by remembering all she could of
"Polar Explorations," a fat, calf-bound volume her father
had bought from a book-agent, and by thinking about the
members of Greely's party: how they lay in their frozen
sleeping-bags, each man hoarding the warmth of his own
body and trying to make it last as long as possible against
the on-coming cold that would be everlasting.  After half
an hour or so, a warm wave crept over her body and round,
sturdy legs; she glowed like a little stove with the warmth
of her own blood, and the heavy quilts and red blankets
grew warm wherever they touched her, though her breath
sometimes froze on the coverlid.  Before daylight, her inter-
nal fires went down a little, and she often wakened to find

herself drawn up into a tight ball, somewhat stiff in the legs.
But that made it all the easier to get up.

    The acquisition of this room was the beginning of a new
era in Thea's life.  It was one of the most important things
that ever happened to her.  Hitherto, except in summer,
when she could be out of doors, she had lived in constant
turmoil; the family, the day school, the Sunday-School.
The clamor about her drowned the voice within herself.  In
the end of the wing, separated from the other upstairs
sleeping-rooms by a long, cold, unfinished lumber room,
her mind worked better.  She thought things out more
clearly.  Pleasant plans and ideas occurred to her which had
never come before.  She had certain thoughts which were
like companions, ideas which were like older and wiser
friends.  She left them there in the morning, when she fin-
ished dressing in the cold, and at night, when she came up
with her lantern and shut the door after a busy day, she
found them awaiting her.  There was no possible way of
heating the room, but that was fortunate, for otherwise it
would have been occupied by one of her older brothers.

    From the time when she moved up into the wing, Thea
began to live a double life.  During the day, when the hours
were full of tasks, she was one of the Kronborg children, but
at night she was a different person.  On Friday and Satur-
day nights she always read for a long while after she was in
bed.  She had no clock, and there was no one to nag her.

    Ray Kennedy, on his way from the depot to his boarding-
house, often looked up and saw Thea's light burning when
the rest of the house was dark, and felt cheered as by a
friendly greeting.  He was a faithful soul, and many dis-
appointments had not changed his nature.  He was still,
at heart, the same boy who, when he was sixteen, had set-
tled down to freeze with his sheep in a Wyoming blizzard,
and had been rescued only to play the losing game of fidel-
ity to other charges.

    Ray had no very clear idea of what might be going on

in Thea's head, but he knew that something was.  He used
to remark to Spanish Johnny, "That girl is developing
something fine."  Thea was patient with Ray, even in
regard to the liberties he took with her name.  Outside the
family, every one in Moonstone, except Wunsch and Dr.
Archie, called her "Thee-a," but this seemed cold and dis-
tant to Ray, so he called her "Thee."  Once, in a moment
of exasperation, Thea asked him why he did this, and he
explained that he once had a chum, Theodore, whose
name was always abbreviated thus, and that since he was
killed down on the Santa Fe, it seemed natural to call
somebody "Thee."  Thea sighed and submitted.  She was
always helpless before homely sentiment and usually
changed the subject.

    It was the custom for each of the different Sunday-
Schools in Moonstone to give a concert on Christmas Eve.
But this year all the churches were to unite and give, as
was announced from the pulpits, "a semi-sacred concert
of picked talent" at the opera house.  The Moonstone
Orchestra, under the direction of Professor Wunsch, was
to play, and the most talented members of each Sunday-
School were to take part in the programme.  Thea was put
down by the committee "for instrumental."  This made
her indignant, for the vocal numbers were always more
popular.  Thea went to the president of the committee and
demanded hotly if her rival, Lily Fisher, were going to sing.
The president was a big, florid, powdered woman, a fierce
W.C.T.U. worker, one of Thea's natural enemies.  Her
name was Johnson; her husband kept the livery stable, and
she was called Mrs. Livery Johnson, to distinguish her
from other families of the same surname.  Mrs. Johnson
was a prominent Baptist, and Lily Fisher was the Baptist
prodigy.  There was a not very Christian rivalry between
the Baptist Church and Mr. Kronborg's church.

    When Thea asked Mrs. Johnson whether her rival was
to be allowed to sing, Mrs. Johnson, with an eagerness

which told how she had waited for this moment, replied
that "Lily was going to recite to be obliging, and to give
other children a chance to sing."  As she delivered this
thrust, her eyes glittered more than the Ancient Mariner's,
Thea thought.  Mrs. Johnson disapproved of the way in
which Thea was being brought up, of a child whose chosen
associates were Mexicans and sinners, and who was, as she
pointedly put it, "bold with men."  She so enjoyed an op-
portunity to rebuke Thea, that, tightly corseted as she was,
she could scarcely control her breathing, and her lace and
her gold watch chain rose and fell "with short, uneasy
motion."  Frowning, Thea turned away and walked slowly
homeward.  She suspected guile.  Lily Fisher was the most
stuck-up doll in the world, and it was certainly not like her
to recite to be obliging.  Nobody who could sing ever recited,
because the warmest applause always went to the singers.

    However, when the programme was printed in the Moon-
stone GLEAM, there it was: "Instrumental solo, Thea
Kronborg.  Recitation, Lily Fisher."

    Because his orchestra was to play for the concert, Mr.
Wunsch imagined that he had been put in charge of the
music, and he became arrogant.  He insisted that Thea
should play a "Ballade" by Reinecke.  When Thea con-
sulted her mother, Mrs. Kronborg agreed with her that the
"Ballade" would "never take" with a Moonstone audi-
ence.  She advised Thea to play "something with varia-
tions," or, at least, "The Invitation to the Dance."

    "It makes no matter what they like," Wunsch replied
to Thea's entreaties.  "It is time already that they learn
something."

    Thea's fighting powers had been impaired by an ulcer-
ated tooth and consequent loss of sleep, so she gave in.  She
finally had the molar pulled, though it was a second tooth
and should have been saved.  The dentist was a clumsy,
ignorant country boy, and Mr. Kronborg would not hear
of Dr. Archie's taking Thea to a dentist in Denver, though

Ray Kennedy said he could get a pass for her.  What with
the pain of the tooth, and family discussions about it, with
trying to make Christmas presents and to keep up her
school work and practicing, and giving lessons on Satur-
days, Thea was fairly worn out.

    On Christmas Eve she was nervous and excited.  It
was the first time she had ever played in the opera house,
and she had never before had to face so many people.
Wunsch would not let her play with her notes, and she was
afraid of forgetting.  Before the concert began, all the par-
ticipants had to assemble on the stage and sit there to be
looked at.  Thea wore her white summer dress and a blue
sash, but Lily Fisher had a new pink silk, trimmed with
white swansdown.

    The hall was packed.  It seemed as if every one in Moon-
stone was there, even Mrs. Kohler, in her hood, and old
Fritz.  The seats were wooden kitchen chairs, numbered,
and nailed to long planks which held them together in
rows.  As the floor was not raised, the chairs were all on the
same level.  The more interested persons in the audience
peered over the heads of the people in front of them to get
a good view of the stage.  From the platform Thea picked
out many friendly faces.  There was Dr. Archie, who never
went to church entertainments; there was the friendly
jeweler who ordered her music for her,--he sold accor-
dions and guitars as well as watches,--and the druggist
who often lent her books, and her favorite teacher from the
school.  There was Ray Kennedy, with a party of freshly
barbered railroad men he had brought along with him.
There was Mrs. Kronborg with all the children, even Thor,
who had been brought out in a new white plush coat.  At
the back of the hall sat a little group of Mexicans, and
among them Thea caught the gleam of Spanish Johnny's
white teeth, and of Mrs. Tellamantez's lustrous, smoothly
coiled black hair.

    After the orchestra played "Selections from Erminie,"

and the Baptist preacher made a long prayer, Tillie Kron-
borg came on with a highly colored recitation, "The Polish
Boy."  When it was over every one breathed more freely.
No committee had the courage to leave Tillie off a pro-
gramme.  She was accepted as a trying feature of every
entertainment.  The Progressive Euchre Club was the only
social organization in the town that entirely escaped Tillie.
After Tillie sat down, the Ladies' Quartette sang, "Beloved,
it is Night," and then it was Thea's turn.

    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 nerv-
ous, 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 Mexi-
cans 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 calen-
dars.  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 enthusi-
asm 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, nerv-
ously 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 begin-
ning."  The next issue of the GLEAM correctly stated that
"unquestionably the honors of the evening must be ac-
corded 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 in-
wardly 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 good-
night.  They all hurried in to the glowing stove in the
parlor.  The sleepy children were sent to bed.  Mrs. Kron-
borg 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 usu-
ally 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 lan-
tern 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 dis-
tant 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 electri-
cian," 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, di-
rected, 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 mid-
night 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 Kron-
borgs, worthy though they all were.  Her romantic im-
agination 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 per-
formed 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 Til-
lie," Mrs. Kronborg more than once remarked to her hus-
band.  "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 pro-
fessions, 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 de-
cided 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."  No-
body 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 conde-
scending.

    Tillie threw up her head and laughed; there was some-
thing 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 cele-
brated 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 Kohl-
ers' 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 Kohl-
ers' 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 accom-
plished 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 hal-
lowed 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 wad-
ding 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 de-
clared 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 GLUCK 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 intro-
ductory measures, then nodded at her vehemently, and she
began:--

         "ACH, ICH HABE SIE VERLOREN."

    When she finished, Wunsch nodded again.  "SCHON," 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 satisfac-
tion 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 Tella-
mantez, 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, "KUNST-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 pur-
ple morning-glories that ran over the bean-poles,--wher-
ever 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 FLUSTERN 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 FLUSTERN mean?"

    "FLUSTERN?--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.  "Here-
after 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 LEUCH-
TENDEN 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 flower-
beds, 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 FLUSTERN UND SPRECHEN DIE BLUMEN,
            ICH ABER, ICH WANDTE STUMM.

            "ES FLUSTERN UND SPRECHEN DIE BLUMEN
            UND SCHAU'N MITLEIDIG MICH AN:
            `SEI UNSERER SCHWESTER NICHT BOSE,
            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 alto-
gether; 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 him-
self, 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 compre-
hension 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 annoy-
ance 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 somethings.  Some-
things cannot be taught.  If you not know in the beginning,
you not know in the end.  For a singer there must be some-
thing 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 to-
gether.  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 FRAU-
LEIN.  They have nothing inside them," striking his chest
with both fists.  "They are like the ones in the MAR-
CHEN, a grinning face and hollow in the insides.  Some-
thing 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 an-
swered her; happiness consisted of that backward and for-
ward 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 sta-
mens.  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 discon-
tented, 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 moon-
light 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 uncom-
monly 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 hesi-
tated 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 any-
where, 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 moon-
light.  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 won-
der 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 con-
tribute 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 jus-
tice, 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 cour-
age; but he was not likely to meet such a woman in Moon-
stone.

    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 eva-
sions 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 be-
lieve,--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, as-
sembled in Mrs. Smiley's millinery and notion store, often
discussed Dr. Archie's politeness to his wife, and his pleas-
ant 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 ban-
quets, 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 dis-
liked 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 boy-
hood 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 Beg-
gars," 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.  Some-
times 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 prac-
ticing 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 uninter-
rupted.  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 sum-
mer.  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 Sep-
tember, 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 tear-
ful 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 uncon-
scious man while Mrs. Kohler and Johnny went to get help.

    "You better go home now, I think," said Mrs. Tella-
mantez, 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 Ken-
nedy 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 win-
dow.  He shot across the gully to get help, meanwhile leav-
ing 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 hot-
bed 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 BAUME, DIE BAUME!  He is cut-
ting our trees, Fritz!"  Before her husband could prevent
her, she had sprung from the bed and rushed to the win-
dow.  "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
BAUME."

    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 unre-
mitting 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 Wiesba-
den, haymakers on an island in the river.  The round-
house 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 dur-
ing 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 be-
yond 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 be-
cause she had both imagination and a stubborn will, curi-
ously 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 greenish-
hazel 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 ab-
sently 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 cook-
ing.  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 sup-
per 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 morn-
ing 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 discour-
aged 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 gar-
nered 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 conserva-
tive 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 bril-
liant 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 sagebushes, Mr. Kronborg dropped
his tune and turned to his wife.  "Mother, I've been think-
ing 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 any-
way.  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 advan-
tage.  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 re-
sponsibilities 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 des-
tiny 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 John-
son 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 sum-
mer.  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 posses-
sions, 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 mak-
ing 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 Sat-
urday, 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 ques-
tioned her comings and goings very little.  She could go
buggy-riding with Ray Kennedy, for instance, without tak-
ing 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 daugh-
ter 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 schol-
ars.  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 whis-
key 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 Fe, 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 any-
thing 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: cop-
per, oil, gold, silver, sheep,--something.

    Meanwhile, it was pleasure enough to feel that she de-
pended 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 con-
fidential with him, or talked to her of the thing he thought
about so constantly.  He had the chivalry which is per-
haps 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 look-
ing forward to this excursion for a long while, but as Ray
never knew at what hour his freight would leave Moon-
stone, it was difficult to arrange.  The call-boy was as likely
to summon him to start on his run at twelve o'clock mid-
night 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,--pre-
miums 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 "oda-
lisque" 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 be-
cause 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 de-
posited 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 agri-
cultural 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 deter-
mined 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 toma-
toes 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 repu-
tation 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 particu-
lar.  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 her-
self 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 opin-
ion in Moonstone.  Ray had lived long enough among the
Mexicans to dislike fussiness, to feel that there was some-
thing more attractive in ease of manner than in absent-
minded 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 thought-
ful and happy.  He was in one of his favorite fields of specu-
lation, 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 every-
thing 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 note-
book 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 admit-
ted that the art of forging metals was nothing to this treach-
erous 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 him-
self, 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 pro-
fessional palaver.  The light in Ray's pale-blue eyes and
the feeling in his voice more than made up for the stiff-
ness 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 some-
thing about girls' wearing corsets.  But some of your In-
dians flattened their babies' heads, and that's worse than
wearing corsets."

    "Give me an Indian girl's figure for beauty," Ray in-
sisted.  "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 coun-
try, and we'll live in the rock houses--they're as comfort-
able 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 content-
edly.  "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 sta-
tion 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 apologetic-
ally 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 Cleve-
land 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 coun-
try.

    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 pleas-
ant 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 una-
bashed 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. Kron-
borg 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. Kron-
borg 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 com-
plete 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 misti-
ness in the atmosphere.

    Ray lit his pipe.  "I never get tired of them old stars,
Thee.  I miss 'em up in Washington and Oregon where it's
misty.  Like 'em best down in Mother Mexico, where they
have everything their own way.  I'm not for any country
where the stars are dim."  Ray paused and drew on his
pipe.  "I don't know as I ever really noticed 'em much till
that first year I herded sheep up in Wyoming.  That was
the year the blizzard caught me."

    "And you lost all your sheep, didn't you, Ray?"  Thea
spoke sympathetically.  "Was the man who owned them
nice about it?"

    "Yes, he was a good loser.  But I didn't get over it for
a long while.  Sheep are so damned resigned.  Sometimes,
to this day, when I'm dog-tired, I try to save them sheep

all night long.  It comes kind of hard on a boy when he first
finds out how little he is, and how big everything else is."

    Thea moved restlessly toward him and dropped her chin
on her hand, looking at a low star that seemed to rest just
on the rim of the earth.  "I don't see how you stood it.  I
don't believe I could.  I don't see how people can stand it
to get knocked out, anyhow!"  She spoke with such fierce-
ness that Ray glanced at her in surprise.  She was sitting
on the floor of the car, crouching like a little animal about
to spring.

    "No occasion for you to see," he said warmly.  "There'll
always be plenty of other people to take the knocks for
you."

    "That's nonsense, Ray."  Thea spoke impatiently and
leaned lower still, frowning at the red star.  "Everybody's
up against it for himself, succeeds or fails--himself."

    "In one way, yes," Ray admitted, knocking the sparks
from his pipe out into the soft darkness that seemed to
flow like a river beside the car.  "But when you look at
it another way, there are a lot of halfway people in this
world who help the winners win, and the failers fail.  If a
man stumbles, there's plenty of people to push him down.
But if he's like `the youth who bore,' those same people
are foreordained to help him along.  They may hate to,
worse than blazes, and they may do a lot of cussin' about
it, but they have to help the winners and they can't dodge
it.  It's a natural law, like what keeps the big clock up
there going, little wheels and big, and no mix-up."  Ray's
hand and his pipe were suddenly outlined against the sky.
"Ever occur to you, Thee, that they have to be on time
close enough to MAKE TIME?  The Dispatcher up there must
have a long head."  Pleased with his similitude, Ray went
back to the lookout.  Going into Denver, he had to keep a
sharp watch.

    Giddy came down, cheerful at the prospect of getting
into port, and singing a new topical ditty that had come up

from the Santa Fe by way of La Junta.  Nobody knows
who makes these songs; they seem to follow events auto-
matically.  Mrs. Kronborg made Giddy sing the whole
twelve verses of this one, and laughed until she wiped her
eyes.  The story was that of Katie Casey, head dining-
room girl at Winslow, Arizona, who was unjustly dis-
charged by the Harvey House manager.  Her suitor, the
yardmaster, took the switchmen out on a strike until she
was reinstated.  Freight trains from the east and the west
piled up at Winslow until the yards looked like a log-jam.
The division superintendent, who was in California, had to
wire instructions for Katie Casey's restoration before he
could get his trains running.  Giddy's song told all this with
much detail, both tender and technical, and after each of
the dozen verses came the refrain:--


         "Oh, who would think that Katie Casey owned the Santa Fe?

         But it really looks that way,

         The dispatcher's turnin' gray,

         All the crews is off their pay;

         She can hold the freight from Albuquerq' to Needles any
day;

         The division superintendent, he come home from Monterey,

         Just to see if things was pleasin' Katie Ca--a--a--sey."


    Thea laughed with her mother and applauded Giddy.
Everything was so kindly and comfortable; Giddy and
Ray, and their hospitable little house, and the easy-going
country, and the stars.  She curled up on the seat again
with that warm, sleepy feeling of the friendliness of the
world--which nobody keeps very long, and which she
was to lose early and irrevocably.

                              XVII


    The summer flew by.  Thea was glad when Ray
Kennedy had a Sunday in town and could take her
driving.  Out among the sand hills she could forget the
"new room" which was the scene of wearing and fruitless
labor.  Dr. Archie was away from home a good deal that
year.  He had put all his money into mines above Colo-
rado Springs, and he hoped for great returns from them.

    In the fall of that year, Mr. Kronborg decided that Thea
ought to show more interest in church work.  He put it to
her frankly, one night at supper, before the whole family.
"How can I insist on the other girls in the congregation
being active in the work, when one of my own daughters
manifests so little interest?"

    "But I sing every Sunday morning, and I have to give
up one night a week to choir practice," Thea declared
rebelliously, pushing back her plate with an angry deter-
mination to eat nothing more.

    "One night a week is not enough for the pastor's daugh-
ter," her father replied.  "You won't do anything in the
sewing society, and you won't take part in the Christian
Endeavor or the Band of Hope.  Very well, you must make
it up in other ways.  I want some one to play the organ
and lead the singing at prayer-meeting this winter.  Deacon
Potter told me some time ago that he thought there would
be more interest in our prayer-meetings if we had the organ.
Miss Meyers don't feel that she can play on Wednesday
nights.  And there ought to be somebody to start the hymns.
Mrs. Potter is getting old, and she always starts them too
high.  It won't take much of your time, and it will keep
people from talking."

    This argument conquered Thea, though she left the

table sullenly.  The fear of the tongue, that terror of little
towns, is usually felt more keenly by the minister's family
than by other households.  Whenever the Kronborgs
wanted to do anything, even to buy a new carpet, they had
to take counsel together as to whether people would talk.
Mrs. Kronborg had her own conviction that people talked
when they felt like it, and said what they chose, no matter
how the minister's family conducted themselves.  But she
did not impart these dangerous ideas to her children.  Thea
was still under the belief that public opinion could be
placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would
mistake you for one of themselves.

    Mrs. Kronborg did not have any particular zest for
prayer-meetings, and she stayed at home whenever she had
a valid excuse.  Thor was too old to furnish such an excuse
now, so every Wednesday night, unless one of the children
was sick, she trudged off with Thea, behind Mr. Kronborg.
At first Thea was terribly bored.  But she got used to prayer-
meeting, got even to feel a mournful interest in it.

    The exercises were always pretty much the same.  After
the first hymn her father read a passage from the Bible,
usually a Psalm.  Then there was another hymn, and then
her father commented upon the passage he had read and,
as he said, "applied the Word to our necessities."  After
a third hymn, the meeting was declared open, and the old
men and women took turns at praying and talking.  Mrs.
Kronborg never spoke in meeting.  She told people firmly
that she had been brought up to keep silent and let the
men talk, but she gave respectful attention to the others,
sitting with her hands folded in her lap.

    The prayer-meeting audience was always small.  The
young and energetic members of the congregation came
only once or twice a year, "to keep people from talking."
The usual Wednesday night gathering was made up of old
women, with perhaps six or eight old men, and a few sickly
girls who had not much interest in life; two of them, in-

deed, were already preparing to die.  Thea accepted the
mournfulness of the prayer-meetings as a kind of spiritual
discipline, like funerals.  She always read late after she
went home and felt a stronger wish than usual to live and
to be happy.

    The meetings were conducted in the Sunday-School
room, where there were wooden chairs instead of pews;
an old map of Palestine hung on the wall, and the bracket
lamps gave out only a dim light.  The old women sat
motionless as Indians in their shawls and bonnets; some of
them wore long black mourning veils.  The old men drooped
in their chairs.  Every back, every face, every head said
"resignation."  Often there were long silences, when you
could hear nothing but the crackling of the soft coal in the
stove and the muffled cough of one of the sick girls.

    There was one nice old lady,--tall, erect, self-respect-
ing, with a delicate white face and a soft voice.  She never
whined, and what she said was always cheerful, though she
spoke so nervously that Thea knew she dreaded getting
up, and that she made a real sacrifice to, as she said, "tes-
tify to the goodness of her Saviour."  She was the mother of
the girl who coughed, and Thea used to wonder how she
explained things to herself.  There was, indeed, only one
woman who talked because she was, as Mr. Kronborg said,
"tonguey."  The others were somehow impressive.  They
told about the sweet thoughts that came to them while
they were at their work; how, amid their household tasks,
they were suddenly lifted by the sense of a divine Presence.
Sometimes they told of their first conversion, of how in
their youth that higher Power had made itself known to
them.  Old Mr. Carsen, the carpenter, who gave his ser-
vices as janitor to the church, used often to tell how, when
he was a young man and a scoffer, bent on the destruction
of both body and soul, his Saviour had come to him in the
Michigan woods and had stood, it seemed to him, beside
the tree he was felling; and how he dropped his axe and

knelt in prayer "to Him who died for us upon the tree."
Thea always wanted to ask him more about it; about his
mysterious wickedness, and about the vision.

    Sometimes the old people would ask for prayers for their
absent children.  Sometimes they asked their brothers and
sisters in Christ to pray that they might be stronger
against temptations.  One of the sick girls used to ask
them to pray that she might have more faith in the times
of depression that came to her, "when all the way before
seemed dark."  She repeated that husky phrase so often,
that Thea always remembered it.

    One old woman, who never missed a Wednesday night,
and who nearly always took part in the meeting, came all
the way up from the depot settlement.  She always wore a
black crocheted "fascinator" over her thin white hair, and
she made long, tremulous prayers, full of railroad termin-
ology.  She had six sons in the service of different railroads,
and she always prayed "for the boys on the road, who know
not at what moment they may be cut off.  When, in Thy
divine wisdom, their hour is upon them, may they, O our
Heavenly Father, see only white lights along the road to
Eternity."  She used to speak, too, of "the engines that
race with death"; and though she looked so old and little
when she was on her knees, and her voice was so shaky, her
prayers had a thrill of speed and danger in them; they made
one think of the deep black canyons, the slender trestles,
the pounding trains.  Thea liked to look at her sunken eyes
that seemed full of wisdom, at her black thread gloves,
much too long in the fingers and so meekly folded one over
the other.  Her face was brown, and worn away as rocks
are worn by water.  There are many ways of describing
that color of age, but in reality it is not like parchment, or
like any of the things it is said to be like.  That brownness
and that texture of skin are found only in the faces of old
human creatures, who have worked hard and who have
always been poor.

    One bitterly cold night in December the prayer-meeting
seemed to Thea longer than usual.  The prayers and the
talks went on and on.  It was as if the old people were
afraid to go out into the cold, or were stupefied by the hot
air of the room.  She had left a book at home that she was
impatient to get back to.  At last the Doxology was sung,
but the old people lingered about the stove to greet each
other, and Thea took her mother's arm and hurried out to
the frozen sidewalk, before her father could get away.  The
wind was whistling up the street and whipping the naked
cottonwood trees against the telegraph poles and the sides
of the houses.  Thin snow clouds were flying overhead, so
that the sky looked gray, with a dull phosphorescence.
The icy streets and the shingle roofs of the houses were
gray, too.  All along the street, shutters banged or windows
rattled, or gates wobbled, held by their latch but shaking
on loose hinges.  There was not a cat or a dog in Moonstone
that night that was not given a warm shelter; the cats
under the kitchen stove, the dogs in barns or coal-sheds.
When Thea and her mother reached home, their mufflers
were covered with ice, where their breath had frozen.  They
hurried into the house and made a dash for the parlor and
the hard-coal burner, behind which Gunner was sitting on
a stool, reading his Jules Verne book.  The door stood open
into the dining-room, which was heated from the parlor.
Mr. Kronborg always had a lunch when he came home
from prayer-meeting, and his pumpkin pie and milk were
set out on the dining-table.  Mrs. Kronborg said she
thought she felt hungry, too, and asked Thea if she didn't
want something to eat.

    "No, I'm not hungry, mother.  I guess I'll go upstairs."

    "I expect you've got some book up there," said Mrs.
Kronborg, bringing out another pie.  "You'd better bring
it down here and read.  Nobody'll disturb you, and it's
terrible cold up in that loft."

    Thea was always assured that no one would disturb her

if she read downstairs, but the boys talked when they came
in, and her father fairly delivered discourses after he had
been renewed by half a pie and a pitcher of milk.

    "I don't mind the cold.  I'll take a hot brick up for my
feet.  I put one in the stove before I left, if one of the boys
hasn't stolen it.  Good-night, mother."  Thea got her brick
and lantern, and dashed upstairs through the windy loft.
She undressed at top speed and got into bed with her brick.
She put a pair of white knitted gloves on her hands, and
pinned over her head a piece of soft flannel that had been
one of Thor's long petticoats when he was a baby.  Thus
equipped, she was ready for business.  She took from her
table a thick paper-backed volume, one of the "line" of
paper novels the druggist kept to sell to traveling men.
She had bought it, only yesterday, because the first sen-
tence interested her very much, and because she saw, as
she glanced over the pages, the magical names of two
Russian cities.  The book was a poor translation of "Anna
Karenina."  Thea opened it at a mark, and fixed her eyes
intently upon the small print.  The hymns, the sick girl,
the resigned black figures were forgotten.  It was the night
of the ball in Moscow.

    Thea would have been astonished if she could have
known how, years afterward, when she had need of them,
those old faces were to come back to her, long after they
were hidden away under the earth; that they would seem
to her then as full of meaning, as mysteriously marked by
Destiny, as the people who danced the mazurka under the
elegant Korsunsky.

                              XVIII


    Mr. Kronborg was too fond of his ease and too
sensible to worry his children much about religion.
He was more sincere than many preachers, but when he
spoke to his family about matters of conduct it was usually
with a regard for keeping up appearances.  The church and
church work were discussed in the family like the routine
of any other business.  Sunday was the hard day of the
week with them, just as Saturday was the busy day with
the merchants on Main Street.  Revivals were seasons of
extra work and pressure, just as threshing-time was on the
farms.  Visiting elders had to be lodged and cooked for,
the folding-bed in the parlor was let down, and Mrs.
Kronborg had to work in the kitchen all day long and
attend the night meetings.

    During one of these revivals Thea's sister Anna professed
religion with, as Mrs. Kronborg said, "a good deal of
fluster."  While Anna was going up to the mourners' bench
nightly and asking for the prayers of the congregation, she
disseminated general gloom throughout the household, and
after she joined the church she took on an air of "set-apart-
ness" that was extremely trying to her brothers and her
sister, though they realized that Anna's sanctimoniousness
was perhaps a good thing for their father.  A preacher ought
to have one child who did more than merely acquiesce in
religious observances, and Thea and the boys were glad
enough that it was Anna and not one of themselves who
assumed this obligation.

    "Anna, she's American," Mrs. Kronborg used to say.
The Scandinavian mould of countenance, more or less
marked in each of the other children, was scarcely dis-
cernible in her, and she looked enough like other Moon-

stone girls to be thought pretty.  Anna's nature was con-
ventional, like her face.  Her position as the minister's
eldest daughter was important to her, and she tried to
live up to it.  She read sentimental religious story-books
and emulated the spiritual struggles and magnanimous
behavior of their persecuted heroines.  Everything had to
be interpreted for Anna.  Her opinions about the small-
est and most commonplace things were gleaned from the
Denver papers, the church weeklies, from sermons and
Sunday-School addresses.  Scarcely anything was attrac-
tive to her in its natural state--indeed, scarcely anything
was decent until it was clothed by the opinion of some
authority.  Her ideas about habit, character, duty, love,
marriage, were grouped under heads, like a book of popular
quotations, and were totally unrelated to the emergencies
of human living.  She discussed all these subjects with other
Methodist girls of her age.  They would spend hours, for
instance, in deciding what they would or would not toler-
ate in a suitor or a husband, and the frailties of masculine
nature were too often a subject of discussion among them.
In her behavior Anna was a harmless girl, mild except
where her prejudices were concerned, neat and industrious,
with no graver fault than priggishness; but her mind had
really shocking habits of classification.  The wickedness of
Denver and of Chicago, and even of Moonstone, occupied
her thoughts too much.  She had none of the delicacy that
goes with a nature of warm impulses, but the kind of fishy
curiosity which justifies itself by an expression of horror.

    Thea, and all Thea's ways and friends, seemed indecor-
ous to Anna.  She not only felt a grave social discrimination
against the Mexicans; she could not forget that Spanish
Johnny was a drunkard and that "nobody knew what he
did when he ran away from home."  Thea pretended, of
course, that she liked the Mexicans because they were
fond of music; but every one knew that music was no-
thing very real, and that it did not matter in a girl's re-

lations with people.  What was real, then, and what did
matter?  Poor Anna!

    Anna approved of Ray Kennedy as a young man of
steady habits and blameless life, but she regretted that he
was an atheist, and that he was not a passenger conductor
with brass buttons on his coat.  On the whole, she won-
dered what such an exemplary young man found to like in
Thea.  Dr. Archie she treated respectfully because of his
position in Moonstone, but she KNEW he had kissed the
Mexican barytone's pretty daughter, and she had a whole
DOSSIER of evidence about his behavior in his hours of relax-
ation in Denver.  He was "fast," and it was because he was
"fast" that Thea liked him.  Thea always liked that kind
of people.  Dr. Archie's whole manner with Thea, Anna
often told her mother, was too free.  He was always putting
his hand on Thea's head, or holding her hand while he
laughed and looked down at her.  The kindlier manifesta-
tion of human nature (about which Anna sang and talked,
in the interests of which she went to conventions and wore
white ribbons) were never realities to her after all.  She did
not believe in them.  It was only in attitudes of protest or
reproof, clinging to the cross, that human beings could be
even temporarily decent.

    Preacher Kronborg's secret convictions were very much
like Anna's.  He believed that his wife was absolutely good,
but there was not a man or woman in his congregation
whom he trusted all the way.

    Mrs. Kronborg, on the other hand, was likely to find
something to admire in almost any human conduct that
was positive and energetic.  She could always be taken
in by the stories of tramps and runaway boys.  She went
to the circus and admired the bareback riders, who were
"likely good enough women in their way."  She admired
Dr. Archie's fine physique and well-cut clothes as much
as Thea did, and said she "felt it was a privilege to be
handled by such a gentleman when she was sick."

    Soon after Anna became a church member she began to
remonstrate with Thea about practicing--playing "secu-
lar music"--on Sunday.  One Sunday the dispute in the
parlor grew warm and was carried to Mrs. Kronborg in
the kitchen.  She listened judicially and told Anna to read
the chapter about how Naaman the leper was permitted
to bow down in the house of Rimmon.  Thea went back to
the piano, and Anna lingered to say that, since she was in
the right, her mother should have supported her.

    "No," said Mrs. Kronborg, rather indifferently, "I can't
see it that way, Anna.  I never forced you to practice, and
I don't see as I should keep Thea from it.  I like to hear her,
and I guess your father does.  You and Thea will likely fol-
low different lines, and I don't see as I'm called upon to
bring you up alike."

    Anna looked meek and abused.  "Of course all the church
people must hear her.  Ours is the only noisy house on this
street.  You hear what she's playing now, don't you?"

    Mrs. Kronborg rose from browning her coffee.  "Yes;
it's the Blue Danube waltzes.  I'm familiar with 'em.  If
any of the church people come at you, you just send 'em
to me.  I ain't afraid to speak out on occasion, and I
wouldn't mind one bit telling the Ladies' Aid a few things
about standard composers."  Mrs. Kronborg smiled, and
added thoughtfully, "No, I wouldn't mind that one bit."

    Anna went about with a reserved and distant air for a
week, and Mrs. Kronborg suspected that she held a larger
place than usual in her daughter's prayers; but that was
another thing she didn't mind.


    Although revivals were merely a part of the year's work,
like examination week at school, and although Anna's
piety impressed her very little, a time came when Thea was
perplexed about religion.  A scourge of typhoid broke out
in Moonstone and several of Thea's schoolmates died of
it.  She went to their funerals, saw them put into the

ground, and wondered a good deal about them.  But a
certain grim incident, which caused the epidemic, troubled
her even more than the death of her friends.

    Early in July, soon after Thea's fifteenth birthday, a
particularly disgusting sort of tramp came into Moonstone
in an empty box car.  Thea was sitting in the hammock in
the front yard when he first crawled up to the town from
the depot, carrying a bundle wrapped in dirty ticking
under one arm, and under the other a wooden box with
rusty screening nailed over one end.  He had a thin, hungry
face covered with black hair.  It was just before supper-
time when he came along, and the street smelled of fried
potatoes and fried onions and coffee.  Thea saw him sniffing
the air greedily and walking slower and slower.  He looked
over the fence.  She hoped he would not stop at their gate,
for her mother never turned any one away, and this was
the dirtiest and most utterly wretched-looking tramp she
had ever seen.  There was a terrible odor about him, too.
She caught it even at that distance, and put her handker-
chief to her nose.  A moment later she was sorry, for she
knew that he had noticed it.  He looked away and shuffled
a little faster.

    A few days later Thea heard that the tramp had camped
in an empty shack over on the east edge of town, beside
the ravine, and was trying to give a miserable sort of show
there.  He told the boys who went to see what he was doing,
that he had traveled with a circus.  His bundle contained
a filthy clown's suit, and his box held half a dozen rattle-
snakes.

    Saturday night, when Thea went to the butcher shop to
get the chickens for Sunday, she heard the whine of an
accordion and saw a crowd before one of the saloons.  There
she found the tramp, his bony body grotesquely attired in
the clown's suit, his face shaved and painted white,--the
sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away,--
and his eyes wild and feverish.  Pulling the accordion in

and out seemed to be almost too great an effort for him,
and he panted to the tune of "Marching through Georgia."
After a considerable crowd had gathered, the tramp ex-
hibited his box of snakes, announced that he would now
pass the hat, and that when the onlookers had contributed
the sum of one dollar, he would eat "one of these living
reptiles."  The crowd began to cough and murmur, and the
saloon keeper rushed off for the marshal, who arrested the
wretch for giving a show without a license and hurried
him away to the calaboose.

    The calaboose stood in a sunflower patch,--an old hut
with a barred window and a padlock on the door.  The
tramp was utterly filthy and there was no way to give him
a bath.  The law made no provision to grub-stake vagrants,
so after the constable had detained the tramp for twenty-
four hours, he released him and told him to "get out of
town, and get quick."  The fellow's rattlesnakes had been
killed by the saloon keeper.  He hid in a box car in the
freight yard, probably hoping to get a ride to the next
station, but he was found and put out.  After that he was
seen no more.  He had disappeared and left no trace except
an ugly, stupid word, chalked on the black paint of the
seventy-five-foot standpipe which was the reservoir for the
Moonstone water-supply; the same word, in another
tongue, that the French soldier shouted at Waterloo to
the English officer who bade the Old Guard surrender; a
comment on life which the defeated, along the hard roads
of the world, sometimes bawl at the victorious.

    A week after the tramp excitement had passed over,
the city water began to smell and to taste.  The Kron-
borgs had a well in their back yard and did not use city
water, but they heard the complaints of their neighbors.
At first people said that the town well was full of rot-
ting cottonwood roots, but the engineer at the pumping-
station convinced the mayor that the water left the well
untainted.  Mayors reason slowly, but, the well being

eliminated, the official mind had to travel toward the
standpipe--there was no other track for it to go in.
The standpipe amply rewarded investigation.  The tramp
had got even with Moonstone.  He had climbed the
standpipe by the handholds and let himself down into
seventy-five feet of cold water, with his shoes and hat and
roll of ticking.  The city council had a mild panic and
passed a new ordinance about tramps.  But the fever had
already broken out, and several adults and half a dozen
children died of it.

    Thea had always found everything that happened in
Moonstone exciting, disasters particularly so.  It was grat-
ifying to read sensational Moonstone items in the Denver
paper.  But she wished she had not chanced to see the
tramp as he came into town that evening, sniffing the
supper-laden air.  His face remained unpleasantly clear in
her memory, and her mind struggled with the problem of
his behavior as if it were a hard page in arithmetic.  Even
when she was practicing, the drama of the tramp kept
going on in the back of her head, and she was constantly
trying to make herself realize what pitch of hatred or
despair could drive a man to do such a hideous thing.  She
kept seeing him in his bedraggled clown suit, the white
paint on his roughly shaven face, playing his accordion
before the saloon.  She had noticed his lean body, his
high, bald forehead that sloped back like a curved metal
lid.  How could people fall so far out of fortune?  She tried
to talk to Ray Kennedy about her perplexity, but Ray
would not discuss things of that sort with her.  It was in
his sentimental conception of women that they should be
deeply religious, though men were at liberty to doubt and
finally to deny.  A picture called "The Soul Awakened,"
popular in Moonstone parlors, pretty well interpreted
Ray's idea of woman's spiritual nature.

    One evening when she was haunted by the figure of the
tramp, Thea went up to Dr. Archie's office.  She found him

sewing up two bad gashes in the face of a little boy who
had been kicked by a mule.  After the boy had been ban-
daged and sent away with his father, Thea helped the doc-
tor wash and put away the surgical instruments.  Then
she dropped into her accustomed seat beside his desk
and began to talk about the tramp.  Her eyes were hard
and green with excitement, the doctor noticed.

    "It seems to me, Dr. Archie, that the whole town's to
blame.  I'm to blame, myself.  I know he saw me hold my
nose when he went by.  Father's to blame.  If he believes
the Bible, he ought to have gone to the calaboose and
cleaned that man up and taken care of him.  That's what
I can't understand; do people believe the Bible, or don't
they?  If the next life is all that matters, and we're put
here to get ready for it, then why do we try to make money,
or learn things, or have a good time?  There's not one
person in Moonstone that really lives the way the New
Testament says.  Does it matter, or don't it?"

    Dr. Archie swung round in his chair and looked at her,
honestly and leniently.  "Well, Thea, it seems to me like
this.  Every people has had its religion.  All religions are
good, and all are pretty much alike.  But I don't see how we
could live up to them in the sense you mean.  I've thought
about it a good deal, and I can't help feeling that while we
are in this world we have to live for the best things of this
world, and those things are material and positive.  Now,
most religions are passive, and they tell us chiefly what we
should not do."  The doctor moved restlessly, and his eyes
hunted for something along the opposite wall: "See here,
my girl, take out the years of early childhood and the time
we spend in sleep and dull old age, and we only have about
twenty able, waking years.  That's not long enough to get
acquainted with half the fine things that have been done
in the world, much less to do anything ourselves.  I think
we ought to keep the Commandments and help other
people all we can; but the main thing is to live those

twenty splendid years; to do all we can and enjoy all we
can."

    Dr. Archie met his little friend's searching gaze, the look
of acute inquiry which always touched him.

    "But poor fellows like that tramp--" she hesitated and
wrinkled her forehead.

    The doctor leaned forward and put his hand protect-
ingly over hers, which lay clenched on the green felt desk-
top.  "Ugly accidents happen, Thea; always have and
always will.  But the failures are swept back into the pile
and forgotten.  They don't leave any lasting scar in the
world, and they don't affect the future.  The things that
last are the good things.  The people who forge ahead and
do something, they really count."  He saw tears on her
cheeks, and he remembered that he had never seen her cry
before, not even when she crushed her finger when she was
little.  He rose and walked to the window, came back and
sat down on the edge of his chair.

    "Forget the tramp, Thea.  This is a great big world, and
I want you to get about and see it all.  You're going to
Chicago some day, and do something with that fine voice
of yours.  You're going to be a number one musician and
make us proud of you.  Take Mary Anderson, now; even the
tramps are proud of her.  There isn't a tramp along the `Q'
system who hasn't heard of her.  We all like people who
do things, even if we only see their faces on a cigar-box lid."

    They had a long talk.  Thea felt that Dr. Archie had
never let himself out to her so much before.  It was the
most grown-up conversation she had ever had with him.
She left his office happy, flattered and stimulated.  She ran
for a long while about the white, moonlit streets, looking
up at the stars and the bluish night, at the quiet houses
sunk in black shade, the glittering sand hills.  She loved
the familiar trees, and the people in those little houses, and
she loved the unknown world beyond Denver.  She felt as
if she were being pulled in two, between the desire to go

away forever and the desire to stay forever.  She had only
twenty years--no time to lose.

    Many a night that summer she left Dr. Archie's office
with a desire to run and run about those quiet streets until
she wore out her shoes, or wore out the streets themselves;
when her chest ached and it seemed as if her heart were
spreading all over the desert.  When she went home, it was
not to go to sleep.  She used to drag her mattress beside
her low window and lie awake for a long while, vibrating
with excitement, as a machine vibrates from speed.  Life
rushed in upon her through that window--or so it seemed.
In reality, of course, life rushes from within, not from with-
out.  There is no work of art so big or so beautiful that it was
not once all contained in some youthful body, like this one
which lay on the floor in the moonlight, pulsing with ardor
and anticipation.  It was on such nights that Thea Kronborg
learned the thing that old Dumas meant when he told the
Romanticists that to make a drama he needed but one
passion and four walls.

                               XIX


    It is well for its peace of mind that the traveling public
takes railroads so much for granted.  The only men who
are incurably nervous about railway travel are the railroad
operatives.  A railroad man never forgets that the next run
may be his turn.

    On a single-track road, like that upon which Ray Ken-
nedy worked, the freight trains make their way as best they
can between passenger trains.  Even when there is such a
thing as a freight time-schedule, it is merely a form.  Along
the one track dozens of fast and slow trains dash in both
directions, kept from collision only by the brains in the
dispatcher's office.  If one passenger train is late, the whole
schedule must be revised in an instant; the trains following
must be warned, and those moving toward the belated train
must be assigned new meeting-places.

    Between the shifts and modifications of the passenger
schedule, the freight trains play a game of their own.  They
have no right to the track at any given time, but are sup-
posed to be on it when it is free, and to make the best time
they can between passenger trains.  A freight train, on a
single-track road, gets anywhere at all only by stealing
bases.

    Ray Kennedy had stuck to the freight service, although
he had had opportunities to go into the passenger service
at higher pay.  He always regarded railroading as a tempo-
rary makeshift, until he "got into something," and he dis-
liked the passenger service.  No brass buttons for him, he
said; too much like a livery.  While he was railroading he
would wear a jumper, thank you!

    The wreck that "caught" Ray was a very commonplace
one; nothing thrilling about it, and it got only six lines in

the Denver papers.  It happened about daybreak one
morning, only thirty-two miles from home.

    At four o'clock in the morning Ray's train had stopped
to take water at Saxony, having just rounded the long
curve which lies south of that station.  It was Joe Giddy's
business to walk back along the curve about three hundred
yards and put out torpedoes to warn any train which might
be coming up from behind--a freight crew is not notified
of trains following, and the brakeman is supposed to protect
his train.  Ray was so fussy about the punctilious observ-
ance of orders that almost any brakeman would take a
chance once in a while, from natural perversity.

    When the train stopped for water that morning, Ray
was at the desk in his caboose, making out his report.
Giddy took his torpedoes, swung off the rear platform, and
glanced back at the curve.  He decided that he would not
go back to flag this time.  If anything was coming up be-
hind, he could hear it in plenty of time.  So he ran forward
to look after a hot journal that had been bothering him.
In a general way, Giddy's reasoning was sound.  If a freight
train, or even a passenger train, had been coming up behind
them, he could have heard it in time.  But as it happened, a
light engine, which made no noise at all, was coming,--
ordered out to help with the freight that was piling up at
the other end of the division.  This engine got no warning,
came round the curve, struck the caboose, went straight
through it, and crashed into the heavy lumber car ahead.


    The Kronborgs were just sitting down to breakfast, when
the night telegraph operator dashed into the yard at a run
and hammered on the front door.  Gunner answered the
knock, and the telegraph operator told him he wanted to
see his father a minute, quick.  Mr. Kronborg appeared at
the door, napkin in hand.  The operator was pale and
panting.

    "Fourteen was wrecked down at Saxony this morning,"

he shouted, "and Kennedy's all broke up.  We're sending
an engine down with the doctor, and the operator at Saxony
says Kennedy wants you to come along with us and bring
your girl."  He stopped for breath.

    Mr. Kronborg took off his glasses and began rubbing
them with his napkin.

    "Bring--I don't understand," he muttered.  "How did
this happen?"

    "No time for that, sir.  Getting the engine out now.
Your girl, Thea.  You'll surely do that for the poor chap.
Everybody knows he thinks the world of her."  Seeing that
Mr. Kronborg showed no indication of having made up his
mind, the operator turned to Gunner.  "Call your sister,
kid.  I'm going to ask the girl herself," he blurted out.

    "Yes, yes, certainly.  Daughter," Mr. Kronborg called.
He had somewhat recovered himself and reached to the
hall hatrack for his hat.

    Just as Thea came out on the front porch, before the
operator had had time to explain to her, Dr. Archie's ponies
came up to the gate at a brisk trot.  Archie jumped out
the moment his driver stopped the team and came up to
the bewildered girl without so much as saying good-morn-
ing to any one.  He took her hand with the sympathetic,
reassuring graveness which had helped her at more than
one hard time in her life.  "Get your hat, my girl.  Ken-
nedy's hurt down the road, and he wants you to run down
with me.  They'll have a car for us.  Get into my buggy,
Mr. Kronborg.  I'll drive you down, and Larry can come
for the team."

    The driver jumped out of the buggy and Mr. Kronborg
and the doctor got in.  Thea, still bewildered, sat on her fa-
ther's knee.  Dr. Archie gave his ponies a smart cut with the
whip.

    When they reached the depot, the engine, with one car
attached, was standing on the main track.  The engineer
had got his steam up, and was leaning out of the cab im-

patiently.  In a moment they were off.  The run to Saxony
took forty minutes.  Thea sat still in her seat while Dr.
Archie and her father talked about the wreck.  She took
no part in the conversation and asked no questions, but
occasionally she looked at Dr. Archie with a frightened,
inquiring glance, which he answered by an encouraging
nod.  Neither he nor her father said anything about how
badly Ray was hurt.  When the engine stopped near Saxony,
the main track was already cleared.  As they got out of the
car, Dr. Archie pointed to a pile of ties.

    "Thea, you'd better sit down here and watch the wreck
crew while your father and I go up and look Kennedy over.
I'll come back for you when I get him fixed up."

    The two men went off up the sand gulch, and Thea sat
down and looked at the pile of splintered wood and twisted
iron that had lately been Ray's caboose.  She was fright-
ened and absent-minded.  She felt that she ought to be
thinking about Ray, but her mind kept racing off to all sorts
of trivial and irrelevant things.  She wondered whether
Grace Johnson would be furious when she came to take her
music lesson and found nobody there to give it to her;
whether she had forgotten to close the piano last night and
whether Thor would get into the new room and mess the
keys all up with his sticky fingers; whether Tillie would go
upstairs and make her bed for her.  Her mind worked fast,
but she could fix it upon nothing.  The grasshoppers, the
lizards, distracted her attention and seemed more real to
her than poor Ray.

    On their way to the sand bank where Ray had been car-
ried, Dr. Archie and Mr. Kronborg met the Saxony doctor.
He shook hands with them.

    "Nothing you can do, doctor.  I couldn't count the
fractures.  His back's broken, too.  He wouldn't be alive
now if he weren't so confoundedly strong, poor chap.  No
use bothering him.  I've given him morphia, one and a
half, in eighths."

    Dr. Archie hurried on.  Ray was lying on a flat canvas
litter, under the shelter of a shelving bank, lightly shaded
by a slender cottonwood tree.  When the doctor and the
preacher approached, he looked at them intently.

    "Didn't--" he closed his eyes to hide his bitter disap-
pointment.

    Dr. Archie knew what was the matter.  "Thea's back
there, Ray.  I'll bring her as soon as I've had a look at you."

    Ray looked up.  "You might clean me up a trifle, doc.
Won't need you for anything else, thank you all the same."

    However little there was left of him, that little was cer-
tainly Ray Kennedy.  His personality was as positive as
ever, and the blood and dirt on his face seemed merely
accidental, to have nothing to do with the man himself.
Dr. Archie told Mr. Kronborg to bring a pail of water, and
he began to sponge Ray's face and neck.  Mr. Kronborg
stood by, nervously rubbing his hands together and trying
to think of something to say.  Serious situations always
embarrassed him and made him formal, even when he felt
real sympathy.

    "In times like this, Ray," he brought out at last, crum-
pling up his handkerchief in his long fingers,--"in times
like this, we don't want to forget the Friend that sticketh
closer than a brother."

    Ray looked up at him; a lonely, disconsolate smile played
over his mouth and his square cheeks.  "Never mind about
all that, PADRE," he said quietly.  "Christ and me fell out
long ago."

    There was a moment of silence.  Then Ray took pity on
Mr. Kronborg's embarrassment.  "You go back for the
little girl, PADRE.  I want a word with the doc in private."

    Ray talked to Dr. Archie for a few moments, then
stopped suddenly, with a broad smile.  Over the doctor's
shoulder he saw Thea coming up the gulch, in her pink
chambray dress, carrying her sun-hat by the strings.  Such
a yellow head!  He often told himself that he "was per-

fectly foolish about her hair."  The sight of her, coming,
went through him softly, like the morphia.  "There she
is," he whispered.  "Get the old preacher out of the way,
doc.  I want to have a little talk with her."

    Dr. Archie looked up.  Thea was hurrying and yet hang-
ing back.  She was more frightened than he had thought
she would be.  She had gone with him to see very sick
people and had always been steady and calm.  As she came
up, she looked at the ground, and he could see that she had
been crying.

    Ray Kennedy made an unsuccessful effort to put out his
hand.  "Hello, little kid, nothing to be afraid of.  Darned
if I don't believe they've gone and scared you!  Nothing
to cry about.  I'm the same old goods, only a little dented.
Sit down on my coat there, and keep me company.  I've
got to lay still a bit."

    Dr. Archie and Mr. Kronborg disappeared.  Thea cast a
timid glance after them, but she sat down resolutely and
took Ray's hand.

    "You ain't scared now, are you?" he asked affection-
ately.  "You were a regular brick to come, Thee.  Did you
get any breakfast?"

    "No, Ray, I'm not scared.  Only I'm dreadful sorry
you're hurt, and I can't help crying."

    His broad, earnest face, languid from the opium and
smiling with such simple happiness, reassured her.  She
drew nearer to him and lifted his hand to her knee.  He
looked at her with his clear, shallow blue eyes.  How he
loved everything about that face and head!  How many
nights in his cupola, looking up the track, he had seen that
face in the darkness; through the sleet and snow, or in the
soft blue air when the moonlight slept on the desert.

    "You needn't bother to talk, Thee.  The doctor's medi-
cine makes me sort of dopey.  But it's nice to have com-
pany.  Kind of cozy, don't you think?  Pull my coat under
you more.  It's a darned shame I can't wait on you."

    "No, no, Ray.  I'm all right.  Yes, I like it here.  And I
guess you ought not to talk much, ought you?  If you can
sleep, I'll stay right here, and be awful quiet.  I feel just
as much at home with you as ever, now."

    That simple, humble, faithful something in Ray's eyes
went straight to Thea's heart.  She did feel comfortable
with him, and happy to give him so much happiness.  It was
the first time she had ever been conscious of that power to
bestow intense happiness by simply being near any one.
She always remembered this day as the beginning of that
knowledge.  She bent over him and put her lips softly to
his cheek.

    Ray's eyes filled with light.  "Oh, do that again, kid!"
he said impulsively.  Thea kissed him on the forehead,
blushing faintly.  Ray held her hand fast and closed his eyes
with a deep sigh of happiness.  The morphia and the sense
of her nearness filled him with content.  The gold mine,
the oil well, the copper ledge--all pipe dreams, he mused,
and this was a dream, too.  He might have known it before.
It had always been like that; the things he admired had
always been away out of his reach: a college education, a
gentleman's manner, an Englishman's accent--things over
his head.  And Thea was farther out of his reach than all
the rest put together.  He had been a fool to imagine it, but
he was glad he had been a fool.  She had given him one grand
dream.  Every mile of his run, from Moonstone to Denver,
was painted with the colors of that hope.  Every cactus
knew about it.  But now that it was not to be, he knew the
truth.  Thea was never meant for any rough fellow like
him--hadn't he really known that all along, he asked
himself?  She wasn't meant for common men.  She was
like wedding cake, a thing to dream on.  He raised his eye-
lids a little.  She was stroking his hand and looking off into
the distance.  He felt in her face that look of unconscious
power that Wunsch had seen there.  Yes, she was bound for
the big terminals of the world; no way stations for her.  His

lids drooped.  In the dark he could see her as she would be
after a while; in a box at the Tabor Grand in Denver, with
diamonds on her neck and a tiara in her yellow hair, with
all the people looking at her through their opera-glasses,
and a United States Senator, maybe, talking to her.  "Then
you'll remember me!"  He opened his eyes, and they were
full of tears.

    Thea leaned closer.  "What did you say, Ray?  I couldn't
hear."

    "Then you'll remember me," he whispered.

    The spark in his eye, which is one's very self, caught the
spark in hers that was herself, and for a moment they
looked into each other's natures.  Thea realized how good
and how great-hearted he was, and he realized about her
many things.  When that elusive spark of personality re-
treated in each of them, Thea still saw in his wet eyes her
own face, very small, but much prettier than the cracked
glass at home had ever shown it.  It was the first time she
had seen her face in that kindest mirror a woman can ever
find.

    Ray had felt things in that moment when he seemed to
be looking into the very soul of Thea Kronborg.  Yes, the
gold mine, the oil well, the copper ledge, they'd all got
away from him, as things will; but he'd backed a winner
once in his life!  With all his might he gave his faith to the
broad little hand he held.  He wished he could leave her
the rugged strength of his body to help her through with it
all.  He would have liked to tell her a little about his old
dream,--there seemed long years between him and it al-
ready,--but to tell her now would somehow be unfair;
wouldn't be quite the straightest thing in the world.
Probably she knew, anyway.  He looked up quickly.  "You
know, don't you, Thee, that I think you are just the finest
thing I've struck in this world?"

    The tears ran down Thea's cheeks.  "You're too good
to me, Ray.  You're a lot too good to me," she faltered.

    "Why, kid," he murmured, "everybody in this world's
going to be good to you!"

    Dr. Archie came to the gulch and stood over his patient.
"How's it going?"

    "Can't you give me another punch with your pacifier,
doc?  The little girl had better run along now."  Ray re-
leased Thea's hand.  "See you later, Thee."

    She got up and moved away aimlessly, carrying her hat
by the strings.  Ray looked after her with the exaltation
born of bodily pain and said between his teeth, "Always
look after that girl, doc.  She's a queen!"

    Thea and her father went back to Moonstone on the
one-o'clock passenger.  Dr. Archie stayed with Ray Ken-
nedy until he died, late in the afternoon.

                               XX


    On Monday morning, the day after Ray Kennedy's
funeral, Dr. Archie called at Mr. Kronborg's study,
a little room behind the church.  Mr. Kronborg did not
write out his sermons, but spoke from notes jotted upon
small pieces of cardboard in a kind of shorthand of his own.
As sermons go, they were not worse than most.  His con-
ventional rhetoric pleased the majority of his congregation,
and Mr. Kronborg was generally regarded as a model
preacher.  He did not smoke, he never touched spirits.  His
indulgence in the pleasures of the table was an endearing
bond between him and the women of his congregation.
He ate enormously, with a zest which seemed incongruous
with his spare frame.

    This morning the doctor found him opening his mail and
reading a pile of advertising circulars with deep attention.

    "Good-morning, Mr. Kronborg," said Dr. Archie, sit-
ting down.  "I came to see you on business.  Poor Kennedy
asked me to look after his affairs for him.  Like most rail-
road men he spent his wages, except for a few invest-
ments in mines which don't look to me very promising.
But his life was insured for six hundred dollars in Thea's
favor."

    Mr. Kronborg wound his feet about the standard of his
desk-chair.  "I assure you, doctor, this is a complete sur-
prise to me."

    "Well, it's not very surprising to me," Dr. Archie went
on.  "He talked to me about it the day he was hurt.  He
said he wanted the money to be used in a particular way,
and in no other."  Dr. Archie paused meaningly.

    Mr. Kronborg fidgeted.  "I am sure Thea would observe
his wishes in every respect."

    "No doubt; but he wanted me to see that you agreed to
his plan.  It seems that for some time Thea has wanted to
go away to study music.  It was Kennedy's wish that she
should take this money and go to Chicago this winter.  He
felt that it would be an advantage to her in a business way:
that even if she came back here to teach, it would give her
more authority and make her position here more com-
fortable."

    Mr. Kronborg looked a little startled.  "She is very
young," he hesitated; "she is barely seventeen.  Chicago
is a long way from home.  We would have to consider.  I
think, Dr. Archie, we had better consult Mrs. Kronborg."

    "I think I can bring Mrs. Kronborg around, if I have
your consent.  I've always found her pretty level-headed.
I have several old classmates practicing in Chicago.  One
is a throat specialist.  He has a good deal to do with singers.
He probably knows the best piano teachers and could re-
commend a boarding-house where music students stay.  I
think Thea needs to get among a lot of young people who
are clever like herself.  Here she has no companions but old
fellows like me.  It's not a natural life for a young girl.
She'll either get warped, or wither up before her time.  If it
will make you and Mrs. Kronborg feel any easier, I'll be
glad to take Thea to Chicago and see that she gets started
right.  This throat man I speak of is a big fellow in his line,
and if I can get him interested, he may be able to put her
in the way of a good many things.  At any rate, he'll know
the right teachers.  Of course, six hundred dollars won't
take her very far, but even half the winter there would be
a great advantage.  I think Kennedy sized the situation
up exactly."

    "Perhaps; I don't doubt it.  You are very kind, Dr.
Archie."  Mr. Kronborg was ornamenting his desk-blotter
with hieroglyphics.  "I should think Denver might be
better.  There we could watch over her.  She is very young."

    Dr. Archie rose.  "Kennedy didn't mention Denver.

He said Chicago, repeatedly.  Under the circumstances, it
seems to me we ought to try to carry out his wishes ex-
actly, if Thea is willing."

    "Certainly, certainly.  Thea is conscientious.  She would
not waste her opportunities."  Mr. Kronborg paused.  "If
Thea were your own daughter, doctor, would you consent
to such a plan, at her present age?"

    "I most certainly should.  In fact, if she were my
daughter, I'd have sent her away before this.  She's a
most unusual child, and she's only wasting herself here.
At her age she ought to be learning, not teaching.  She'll
never learn so quickly and easily as she will right now."

    "Well, doctor, you had better talk it over with Mrs.
Kronborg.  I make it a point to defer to her wishes in such
matters.  She understands all her children perfectly.  I
may say that she has all a mother's insight, and more."

    Dr. Archie smiled.  "Yes, and then some.  I feel quite
confident about Mrs. Kronborg.  We usually agree.  Good-
morning."

    Dr. Archie stepped out into the hot sunshine and walked
rapidly toward his office, with a determined look on his face.
He found his waiting-room full of patients, and it was one
o'clock before he had dismissed the last one.  Then he shut
his door and took a drink before going over to the hotel for
his lunch.  He smiled as he locked his cupboard.  "I feel
almost as gay as if I were going to get away for a winter
myself," he thought.


    Afterward Thea could never remember much about
that summer, or how she lived through her impatience.
She was to set off with Dr. Archie on the fifteenth of Octo-
ber, and she gave lessons until the first of September.  Then
she began to get her clothes ready, and spent whole after-
noons in the village dressmaker's stuffy, littered little sew-
ing-room.  Thea and her mother made a trip to Denver to
buy the materials for her dresses.  Ready-made clothes for

girls were not to be had in those days.  Miss Spencer, the
dressmaker, declared that she could do handsomely by Thea
if they would only let her carry out her own ideas.  But Mrs.
Kronborg and Thea felt that Miss Spencer's most daring
productions might seem out of place in Chicago, so they
restrained her with a firm hand.  Tillie, who always helped
Mrs. Kronborg with the family sewing, was for letting
Miss Spencer challenge Chicago on Thea's person.  Since
Ray Kennedy's death, Thea had become more than ever
one of Tillie's heroines.  Tillie swore each of her friends to
secrecy, and, coming home from church or leaning over the
fence, told them the most touching stories about Ray's
devotion, and how Thea would "never get over it."

    Tillie's confidences stimulated the general discussion of
Thea's venture.  This discussion went on, upon front
porches and in back yards, pretty much all summer.  Some
people approved of Thea's going to Chicago, but most peo-
ple did not.  There were others who changed their minds
about it every day.

    Tillie said she wanted Thea to have a ball dress "above
all things."  She bought a fashion book especially devoted
to evening clothes and looked hungrily over the colored
plates, picking out costumes that would be becoming to
"a blonde."  She wanted Thea to have all the gay clothes
she herself had always longed for; clothes she often told
herself she needed "to recite in."

    "Tillie," Thea used to cry impatiently, "can't you see
that if Miss Spencer tried to make one of those things,
she'd make me look like a circus girl?  Anyhow, I don't
know anybody in Chicago.  I won't be going to parties."

    Tillie always replied with a knowing toss of her head,
"You see!  You'll be in society before you know it.  There
ain't many girls as accomplished as you."

    On the morning of the fifteenth of October the Kronborg
family, all of them but Gus, who couldn't leave the store,
started for the station an hour before train time.  Charley

had taken Thea's trunk and telescope to the depot in his
delivery wagon early that morning.  Thea wore her new
blue serge traveling-dress, chosen for its serviceable quali-
ties.  She had done her hair up carefully, and had put a
pale-blue ribbon around her throat, under a little lace col-
lar that Mrs. Kohler had crocheted for her.  As they went
out of the gate, Mrs. Kronborg looked her over thought-
fully.  Yes, that blue ribbon went very well with the dress,
and with Thea's eyes.  Thea had a rather unusual touch
about such things, she reflected comfortably.  Tillie al-
ways said that Thea was "so indifferent to dress," but her
mother noticed that she usually put her clothes on well.
She felt the more at ease about letting Thea go away from
home, because she had good sense about her clothes and
never tried to dress up too much.  Her coloring was so
individual, she was so unusually fair, that in the wrong
clothes she might easily have been "conspicuous."

    It was a fine morning, and the family set out from the
house in good spirits.  Thea was quiet and calm.  She had
forgotten nothing, and she clung tightly to her handbag,
which held her trunk-key and all of her money that was
not in an envelope pinned to her chemise.  Thea walked
behind the others, holding Thor by the hand, and this time
she did not feel that the procession was too long.  Thor
was uncommunicative that morning, and would only talk
about how he would rather get a sand bur in his toe every
day than wear shoes and stockings.  As they passed the
cottonwood grove where Thea often used to bring him in
his cart, she asked him who would take him for nice long
walks after sister went away.

    "Oh, I can walk in our yard," he replied unapprecia-
tively.  "I guess I can make a pond for my duck."

    Thea leaned down and looked into his face.  "But you
won't forget about sister, will you?"  Thor shook his head.
"And won't you be glad when sister comes back and can
take you over to Mrs. Kohler's to see the pigeons?"

    "Yes, I'll be glad.  But I'm going to have a pigeon my
own self."

    "But you haven't got any little house for one.  Maybe
Axel would make you a little house."

    "Oh, her can live in the barn, her can," Thor drawled
indifferently.

    Thea laughed and squeezed his hand.  She always liked
his sturdy matter-of-factness.  Boys ought to be like that,
she thought.

    When they reached the depot, Mr. Kronborg paced the
platform somewhat ceremoniously with his daughter.  Any
member of his flock would have gathered that he was giv-
ing her good counsel about meeting the temptations of the
world.  He did, indeed, begin to admonish her not to forget
that talents come from our Heavenly Father and are to be
used for his glory, but he cut his remarks short and looked
at his watch.  He believed that Thea was a religious girl,
but when she looked at him with that intent, that pas-
sionately inquiring gaze which used to move even Wunsch,
Mr. Kronborg suddenly felt his eloquence fail.  Thea was
like her mother, he reflected; you couldn't put much
sentiment across with her.  As a usual thing, he liked girls
to be a little more responsive.  He liked them to blush at
his compliments; as Mrs. Kronborg candidly said, "Father
could be very soft with the girls."  But this morning he was
thinking that hard-headedness was a reassuring quality in
a daughter who was going to Chicago alone.

    Mr. Kronborg believed that big cities were places where
people went to lose their identity and to be wicked.  He
himself, when he was a student at the Seminary--he
coughed and opened his watch again.  He knew, of course,
that a great deal of business went on in Chicago, that there
was an active Board of Trade, and that hogs and cattle
were slaughtered there.  But when, as a young man, he had
stopped over in Chicago, he had not interested himself in
the commercial activities of the city.  He remembered it as

a place full of cheap shows and dance halls and boys from
the country who were behaving disgustingly.

    Dr. Archie drove up to the station about ten minutes
before the train was due.  His man tied the ponies and stood
holding the doctor's alligator-skin bag--very elegant,
Thea thought it.  Mrs. Kronborg did not burden the doctor
with warnings and cautions.  She said again that she hoped
he could get Thea a comfortable place to stay, where they
had good beds, and she hoped the landlady would be a
woman who'd had children of her own.  "I don't go much
on old maids looking after girls," she remarked as she took
a pin out of her own hat and thrust it into Thea's blue
turban.  "You'll be sure to lose your hatpins on the train,
Thea.  It's better to have an extra one in case."  She tucked
in a little curl that had escaped from Thea's careful twist.
"Don't forget to brush your dress often, and pin it up to
the curtains of your berth to-night, so it won't wrinkle.
If you get it wet, have a tailor press it before it draws."

    She turned Thea about by the shoulders and looked her
over a last time.  Yes, she looked very well.  She wasn't
pretty, exactly,--her face was too broad and her nose was
too big.  But she had that lovely skin, and she looked fresh
and sweet.  She had always been a sweet-smelling child.
Her mother had always liked to kiss her, when she hap-
pened to think of it.

    The train whistled in, and Mr. Kronborg carried the
canvas "telescope" into the car.  Thea kissed them all
good-bye.  Tillie cried, but she was the only one who did.
They all shouted things up at the closed window of the Pull-
man car, from which Thea looked down at them as from
a frame, her face glowing with excitement, her turban a
little tilted in spite of three hatpins.  She had already taken
off her new gloves to save them.  Mrs. Kronborg reflected
that she would never see just that same picture again,
and as Thea's car slid off along the rails, she wiped a
tear from her eye.  "She won't come back a little girl,"

Mrs. Kronborg said to her husband as they turned to go
home.  "Anyhow, she's been a sweet one."

    While the Kronborg family were trooping slowly home-
ward, Thea was sitting in the Pullman, her telescope in the
seat beside her, her handbag tightly gripped in her fingers.
Dr. Archie had gone into the smoker.  He thought she
might be a little tearful, and that it would be kinder to
leave her alone for a while.  Her eyes did fill once, when
she saw the last of the sand hills and realized that she was
going to leave them behind for a long while.  They always
made her think of Ray, too.  She had had such good times
with him out there.

    But, of course, it was herself and her own adventure that
mattered to her.  If youth did not matter so much to itself,
it would never have the heart to go on.  Thea was sur-
prised that she did not feel a deeper sense of loss at leaving
her old life behind her.  It seemed, on the contrary, as she
looked out at the yellow desert speeding by, that she had
left very little.  Everything that was essential seemed to be
right there in the car with her.  She lacked nothing.  She
even felt more compact and confident than usual.  She
was all there, and something else was there, too,--in
her heart, was it, or under her cheek?  Anyhow, it was
about her somewhere, that warm sureness, that sturdy
little companion with whom she shared a secret.

    When Dr. Archie came in from the smoker, she was sit-
ting still, looking intently out of the window and smiling,
her lips a little parted, her hair in a blaze of sunshine.  The
doctor thought she was the prettiest thing he had ever
seen, and very funny, with her telescope and big handbag.
She made him feel jolly, and a little mournful, too.  He
knew that the splendid things of life are few, after all, and
so very easy to miss.

                             PART II


                      THE SONG OF THE LARK


                                I


    THEA and Dr. Archie had been gone from Moonstone
four days.  On the afternoon of the nineteenth of Octo-
ber they were in a street-car, riding through the depressing,
unkept wastes of North Chicago, on their way to call upon
the Reverend Lars Larsen, a friend to whom Mr. Kron-
borg had written.  Thea was still staying at the rooms of
the Young Women's Christian Association, and was miser-
able and homesick there.  The housekeeper watched her in
a way that made her uncomfortable.  Things had not gone
very well, so far.  The noise and confusion of a big city
tired and disheartened her.  She had not had her trunk sent
to the Christian Association rooms because she did not
want to double cartage charges, and now she was running
up a bill for storage on it.  The contents of her gray tele-
scope were becoming untidy, and it seemed impossible to
keep one's face and hands clean in Chicago.  She felt as if
she were still on the train, traveling without enough
clothes to keep clean.  She wanted another nightgown,
and it did not occur to her that she could buy one.  There
were other clothes in her trunk that she needed very much,
and she seemed no nearer a place to stay than when
she arrived in the rain, on that first disillusioning morning.

    Dr. Archie had gone at once to his friend Hartley Evans,
the throat specialist, and had asked him to tell him of a good
piano teacher and direct him to a good boarding-house.
Dr. Evans said he could easily tell him who was the best
piano teacher in Chicago, but that most students' board-

ing-houses were "abominable places, where girls got poor
food for body and mind."  He gave Dr. Archie several ad-
dresses, however, and the doctor went to look the places
over.  He left Thea in her room, for she seemed tired and
was not at all like herself.  His inspection of boarding-
houses was not encouraging.  The only place that seemed
to him at all desirable was full, and the mistress of the
house could not give Thea a room in which she could have
a piano.  She said Thea might use the piano in her parlor;
but when Dr. Archie went to look at the parlor he found
a girl talking to a young man on one of the corner sofas.
Learning that the boarders received all their callers there,
he gave up that house, too, as hopeless.

    So when they set out to make the acquaintance of Mr.
Larsen on the afternoon he had appointed, the question
of a lodging was still undecided.  The Swedish Reform
Church was in a sloughy, weedy district, near a group of
factories.  The church itself was a very neat little building.
The parsonage, next door, looked clean and comfortable,
and there was a well-kept yard about it, with a picket
fence.  Thea saw several little children playing under a
swing, and wondered why ministers always had so many.
When they rang at the parsonage door, a capable-looking
Swedish servant girl answered the bell and told them that
Mr. Larsen's study was in the church, and that he was
waiting for them there.

    Mr. Larsen received them very cordially.  The furniture
in his study was so new and the pictures were so heavily
framed, that Thea thought it looked more like the wait-
ing-room of the fashionable Denver dentist to whom Dr.
Archie had taken her that summer, than like a preacher's
study.  There were even flowers in a glass vase on the
desk.  Mr. Larsen was a small, plump man, with a short,
yellow beard, very white teeth, and a little turned-up nose
on which he wore gold-rimmed eye-glasses.  He looked
about thirty-five, but he was growing bald, and his thin,

hair was parted above his left ear and brought up over
the bare spot on the top of his head.  He looked cheerful
and agreeable.  He wore a blue coat and no cuffs.

    After Dr. Archie and Thea sat down on a slippery leather
couch, the minister asked for an outline of Thea's plans.
Dr. Archie explained that she meant to study piano with
Andor Harsanyi; that they had already seen him, that
Thea had played for him and he said he would be glad to
teach her.

    Mr. Larsen lifted his pale eyebrows and rubbed his
plump white hands together.  "But he is a concert pianist
already.  He will be very expensive."

    "That's why Miss Kronborg wants to get a church posi-
tion if possible.  She has not money enough to see her
through the winter.  There's no use her coming all the way
from Colorado and studying with a second-rate teacher.
My friends here tell me Harsanyi is the best."

    "Oh, very likely!  I have heard him play with Thomas.
You Western people do things on a big scale.  There are
half a dozen teachers that I should think--  However, you
know what you want."  Mr. Larsen showed his contempt
for such extravagant standards by a shrug.  He felt that
Dr. Archie was trying to impress him.  He had succeeded,
indeed, in bringing out the doctor's stiffest manner.  Mr.
Larsen went on to explain that he managed the music in
his church himself, and drilled his choir, though the tenor
was the official choirmaster.  Unfortunately there were no
vacancies in his choir just now.  He had his four voices,
very good ones.  He looked away from Dr. Archie and
glanced at Thea.  She looked troubled, even a little fright-
ened when he said this, and drew in her lower lip.  She, cer-
tainly, was not pretentious, if her protector was.  He con-
tinued to study her.  She was sitting on the lounge, her
knees far apart, her gloved hands lying stiffly in her lap,
like a country girl.  Her turban, which seemed a little too big
for her, had got tilted in the wind,--it was always windy

in that part of Chicago,--and she looked tired.  She wore
no veil, and her hair, too, was the worse for the wind and
dust.  When he said he had all the voices he required, he
noticed that her gloved hands shut tightly.  Mr. Larsen
reflected that she was not, after all, responsible for the lofty
manner of her father's physician; that she was not even
responsible for her father, whom he remembered as a tire-
some fellow.  As he watched her tired, worried face, he felt
sorry for her.

    "All the same, I would like to try your voice," he said,
turning pointedly away from her companion.  "I am inter-
ested in voices.  Can you sing to the violin?"

    "I guess so," Thea replied dully.  "I don't know.  I
never tried."

    Mr. Larsen took his violin out of the case and began to
tighten the keys.  "We might go into the lecture-room and
see how it goes.  I can't tell much about a voice by the
organ.  The violin is really the proper instrument to try
a voice."  He opened a door at the back of his study, pushed
Thea gently through it, and looking over his shoulder to
Dr. Archie said, "Excuse us, sir.  We will be back soon."

    Dr. Archie chuckled.  All preachers were alike, officious
and on their dignity; liked to deal with women and girls,
but not with men.  He took up a thin volume from the
minister's desk.  To his amusement it proved to be a book
of "Devotional and Kindred Poems; by Mrs. Aurelia S.
Larsen."  He looked them over, thinking that the world
changed very little.  He could remember when the wife of
his father's minister had published a volume of verses,
which all the church members had to buy and all the chil-
dren were encouraged to read.  His grandfather had made
a face at the book and said, "Puir body!"  Both ladies
seemed to have chosen the same subjects, too: Jephthah's
Daughter, Rizpah, David's Lament for Absalom, etc.  The
doctor found the book very amusing.

    The Reverend Lars Larsen was a reactionary Swede.

His father came to Iowa in the sixties, married a Swedish
girl who was ambitious, like himself, and they moved to
Kansas and took up land under the Homestead Act.  After
that, they bought land and leased it from the Government,
acquired land in every possible way.  They worked like
horses, both of them; indeed, they would never have used
any horse-flesh they owned as they used themselves.  They
reared a large family and worked their sons and daughters
as mercilessly as they worked themselves; all of them but
Lars.  Lars was the fourth son, and he was born lazy.  He
seemed to bear the mark of overstrain on the part of his
parents.  Even in his cradle he was an example of physical
inertia; anything to lie still.  When he was a growing boy
his mother had to drag him out of bed every morning,
and he had to be driven to his chores.  At school he had a
model "attendance record," because he found getting his
lessons easier than farm work.  He was the only one of the
family who went through the high school, and by the time
he graduated he had already made up his mind to study
for the ministry, because it seemed to him the least labori-
ous of all callings.  In so far as he could see, it was the only
business in which there was practically no competition, in
which a man was not all the time pitted against other men
who were willing to work themselves to death.  His father
stubbornly opposed Lars's plan, but after keeping the boy
at home for a year and finding how useless he was on the
farm, he sent him to a theological seminary--as much to
conceal his laziness from the neighbors as because he did
not know what else to do with him.

    Larsen, like Peter Kronborg, got on well in the ministry,
because he got on well with the women.  His English was
no worse than that of most young preachers of American
parentage, and he made the most of his skill with the vio-
lin.  He was supposed to exert a very desirable influence
over young people and to stimulate their interest in church
work.  He married an American girl, and when his father

died he got his share of the property--which was very
considerable.  He invested his money carefully and was
that rare thing, a preacher of independent means.  His
white, well-kept hands were his result,--the evidence that
he had worked out his life successfully in the way that
pleased him.  His Kansas brothers hated the sight of his
hands.

    Larsen liked all the softer things of life,--in so far as he
knew about them.  He slept late in the morning, was fussy
about his food, and read a great many novels, preferring
sentimental ones.  He did not smoke, but he ate a great
deal of candy "for his throat," and always kept a box of
chocolate drops in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk.
He always bought season tickets for the symphony con-
certs, and he played his violin for women's culture clubs.
He did not wear cuffs, except on Sunday, because he be-
lieved that a free wrist facilitated his violin practice.
When he drilled his choir he always held his hand with the
little and index fingers curved higher than the other two,
like a noted German conductor he had seen.  On the whole,
the Reverend Larsen was not an insincere man; he merely
spent his life resting and playing, to make up for the time
his forebears had wasted grubbing in the earth.  He was
simple-hearted and kind; he enjoyed his candy and his
children and his sacred cantatas.  He could work energet-
ically at almost any form of play.

    Dr. Archie was deep in "The Lament of Mary Mag-
dalen," when Mr. Larsen and Thea came back to the
study.  From the minister's expression he judged that
Thea had succeeded in interesting him.

    Mr. Larsen seemed to have forgotten his hostility to-
ward him, and addressed him frankly as soon as he entered.
He stood holding his violin, and as Thea sat down he
pointed to her with his bow:--

    "I have just been telling Miss Kronborg that though I
cannot promise her anything permanent, I might give her

something for the next few months.  My soprano is a young
married woman and is temporarily indisposed.  She would
be glad to be excused from her duties for a while.  I like
Miss Kronborg's singing very much, and I think she would
benefit by the instruction in my choir.  Singing here might
very well lead to something else.  We pay our soprano only
eight dollars a Sunday, but she always gets ten dollars for
singing at funerals.  Miss Kronborg has a sympathetic
voice, and I think there would be a good deal of demand for
her at funerals.  Several American churches apply to me
for a soloist on such occasions, and I could help her to
pick up quite a little money that way."

    This sounded lugubrious to Dr. Archie, who had a physi-
cian's dislike of funerals, but he tried to accept the sug-
gestion cordially.

    "Miss Kronborg tells me she is having some trouble
getting located," Mr. Larsen went on with animation,
still holding his violin.  "I would advise her to keep away
from boarding-houses altogether.  Among my parishioners
there are two German women, a mother and daughter.
The daughter is a Swede by marriage, and clings to the
Swedish Church.  They live near here, and they rent some
of their rooms.  They have now a large room vacant, and
have asked me to recommend some one.  They have never
taken boarders, but Mrs. Lorch, the mother, is a good
cook,--at least, I am always glad to take supper with
her,--and I think I could persuade her to let this young
woman partake of the family table.  The daughter, Mrs.
Andersen, is musical, too, and sings in the Mozart Society.
I think they might like to have a music student in the
house.  You speak German, I suppose?" he turned to
Thea.

    "Oh, no; a few words.  I don't know the grammar," she
murmured.

    Dr. Archie noticed that her eyes looked alive again, not
frozen as they had looked all morning.  "If this fellow can

help her, it's not for me to be stand-offish," he said to him-
self.

    "Do you think you would like to stay in such a quiet
place, with old-fashioned people?" Mr. Larsen asked.  "I
shouldn't think you could find a better place to work, if
that's what you want."

    "I think mother would like to have me with people like
that," Thea replied.  "And I'd be glad to settle down most
anywhere.  I'm losing time."

    "Very well, there's no time like the present.  Let us go
to see Mrs. Lorch and Mrs. Andersen."

    The minister put his violin in its case and caught up a
black-and-white checked traveling-cap that he wore when
he rode his high Columbia wheel.  The three left the church
together.

                               II


    SO Thea did not go to a boarding-house after all.  When
Dr. Archie left Chicago she was comfortably settled
with Mrs. Lorch, and her happy reunion with her trunk
somewhat consoled her for his departure.

    Mrs. Lorch and her daughter lived half a mile from the
Swedish Reform Church, in an old square frame house,
with a porch supported by frail pillars, set in a damp yard
full of big lilac bushes.  The house, which had been left over
from country times, needed paint badly, and looked gloomy
and despondent among its smart Queen Anne neighbors.
There was a big back yard with two rows of apple trees
and a grape arbor, and a warped walk, two planks wide,
which led to the coal bins at the back of the lot.  Thea's
room was on the second floor, overlooking this back yard,
and she understood that in the winter she must carry up
her own coal and kindling from the bin.  There was no fur-
nace in the house, no running water except in the kitchen,
and that was why the room rent was small.  All the rooms
were heated by stoves, and the lodgers pumped the water
they needed from the cistern under the porch, or from the
well at the entrance of the grape arbor.  Old Mrs. Lorch
could never bring herself to have costly improvements
made in her house; indeed she had very little money.  She
preferred to keep the house just as her husband built it,
and she thought her way of living good enough for plain
people.

    Thea's room was large enough to admit a rented upright
piano without crowding.  It was, the widowed daughter
said, "a double room that had always before been occupied
by two gentlemen"; the piano now took the place of a
second occupant.  There was an ingrain carpet on the floor,

green ivy leaves on a red ground, and clumsy, old-fashioned
walnut furniture.  The bed was very wide, and the mat-
tress thin and hard.  Over the fat pillows were "shams"
embroidered in Turkey red, each with a flowering
scroll--one with "Gute' Nacht," the other with "Guten
Morgen."  The dresser was so big that Thea wondered
how it had ever been got into the house and up the narrow
stairs.  Besides an old horsehair armchair, there were two
low plush "spring-rockers," against the massive pedestals
of which one was always stumbling in the dark.  Thea sat
in the dark a good deal those first weeks, and sometimes
a painful bump against one of those brutally immovable
pedestals roused her temper and pulled her out of a heavy
hour.  The wall-paper was brownish yellow, with blue
flowers.  When it was put on, the carpet, certainly, had
not been consulted.  There was only one picture on the
wall when Thea moved in: a large colored print of a
brightly lighted church in a snow-storm, on Christmas
Eve, with greens hanging about the stone doorway and
arched windows.  There was something warm and home,
like about this picture, and Thea grew fond of it.  One
day, on her way into town to take her lesson, she stopped
at a bookstore and bought a photograph of the Naples
bust of Julius Caesar.  This she had framed, and hung it on
the big bare wall behind her stove.  It was a curious choice,
but she was at the age when people do inexplicable
things.  She had been interested in Caesar's "Commen-
taries" when she left school to begin teaching, and she
loved to read about great generals; but these facts would
scarcely explain her wanting that grim bald head to share
her daily existence.  It seemed a strange freak, when she
bought so few things, and when she had, as Mrs. Andersen
said to Mrs. Lorch, "no pictures of the composers at all."

    Both the widows were kind to her, but Thea liked the
mother better.  Old Mrs. Lorch was fat and jolly, with a
red face, always shining as if she had just come from the

stove, bright little eyes, and hair of several colors.  Her
own hair was one cast of iron-gray, her switch another,
and her false front still another.  Her clothes always smelled
of savory cooking, except when she was dressed for church
or KAFFEEKLATSCH, and then she smelled of bay rum or of
the lemon-verbena sprig which she tucked inside her puffy
black kid glove.  Her cooking justified all that Mr. Larsen
had said of it, and Thea had never been so well nourished
before.

    The daughter, Mrs. Andersen,--Irene, her mother
called her,--was a different sort of woman altogether.
She was perhaps forty years old, angular, big-boned, with
large, thin features, light-blue eyes, and dry, yellow hair,
the bang tightly frizzed.  She was pale, anaemic, and senti-
mental.  She had married the youngest son of a rich, arro-
gant Swedish family who were lumber merchants in St.
Paul.  There she dwelt during her married life.  Oscar
Andersen was a strong, full-blooded fellow who had counted
on a long life and had been rather careless about his busi-
ness affairs.  He was killed by the explosion of a steam
boiler in the mills, and his brothers managed to prove that
he had very little stock in the big business.  They had
strongly disapproved of his marriage and they agreed
among themselves that they were entirely justified in de-
frauding his widow, who, they said, "would only marry
again and give some fellow a good thing of it."  Mrs. Ander-
sen would not go to law with the family that had always
snubbed and wounded her--she felt the humiliation of be-
ing thrust out more than she felt her impoverishment; so
she went back to Chicago to live with her widowed mother
on an income of five hundred a year.  This experience had
given her sentimental nature an incurable hurt.  Something
withered away in her.  Her head had a downward droop;
her step was soft and apologetic, even in her mother's
house, and her smile had the sickly, uncertain flicker that
so often comes from a secret humiliation.  She was affable

and yet shrinking, like one who has come down in the
world, who has known better clothes, better carpets, bet-
ter people, brighter hopes.  Her husband was buried in the
Andersen lot in St. Paul, with a locked iron fence around
it.  She had to go to his eldest brother for the key when she
went to say good-bye to his grave.  She clung to the Swedish
Church because it had been her husband's church.

    As her mother had no room for her household belongings,
Mrs. Andersen had brought home with her only her bed-
room set, which now furnished her own room at Mrs.
Lorch's.  There she spent most of her time, doing fancy-
work or writing letters to sympathizing German friends
in St. Paul, surrounded by keepsakes and photographs of
the burly Oscar Andersen.  Thea, when she was admitted
to this room, and shown these photographs, found her-
self wondering, like the Andersen family, why such a lusty,
gay-looking fellow ever thought he wanted this pallid,
long-cheeked woman, whose manner was always that of
withdrawing, and who must have been rather thin-blooded
even as a girl.

    Mrs. Andersen was certainly a depressing person.  It
sometimes annoyed Thea very much to hear her insinuat-
ing knock on the door, her flurried explanation of why she
had come, as she backed toward the stairs.  Mrs. Andersen
admired Thea greatly.  She thought it a distinction to be
even a "temporary soprano"--Thea called herself so quite
seriously--in the Swedish Church.  She also thought it
distinguished to be a pupil of Harsanyi's.  She considered
Thea very handsome, very Swedish, very talented.  She
fluttered about the upper floor when Thea was practicing.
In short, she tried to make a heroine of her, just as Tillie
Kronborg had always done, and Thea was conscious of
something of the sort.  When she was working and heard
Mrs. Andersen tip-toeing past her door, she used to shrug
her shoulders and wonder whether she was always to have
a Tillie diving furtively about her in some disguise or other.

    At the dressmaker's Mrs. Andersen recalled Tillie even
more painfully.  After her first Sunday in Mr. Larsen's
choir, Thea saw that she must have a proper dress for
morning service.  Her Moonstone party dress might do to
wear in the evening, but she must have one frock that could
stand the light of day.  She, of course, knew nothing about
Chicago dressmakers, so she let Mrs. Andersen take her to
a German woman whom she recommended warmly.  The
German dressmaker was excitable and dramatic.  Concert
dresses, she said, were her specialty.  In her fitting-room
there were photographs of singers in the dresses she had
made them for this or that SANGERFEST.  She and Mrs. An-
dersen together achieved a costume which would have
warmed Tillie Kronborg's heart.  It was clearly intended
for a woman of forty, with violent tastes.  There seemed to
be a piece of every known fabric in it somewhere.  When
it came home, and was spread out on her huge bed, Thea
looked it over and told herself candidly that it was "a
horror."  However, her money was gone, and there was
nothing to do but make the best of the dress.  She never
wore it except, as she said, "to sing in," as if it were an
unbecoming uniform.  When Mrs. Lorch and Irene told her
that she "looked like a little bird-of-Paradise in it," Thea
shut her teeth and repeated to herself words she had
learned from Joe Giddy and Spanish Johnny.

    In these two good women Thea found faithful friends,
and in their house she found the quiet and peace which
helped her to support the great experiences of that winter.

                               III


    ANDOR HARSANYI had never had a pupil in the
least like Thea Kronborg.  He had never had one
more intelligent, and he had never had one so ignorant.
When Thea sat down to take her first lesson from him, she
had never heard a work by Beethoven or a composition
by Chopin.  She knew their names vaguely.  Wunsch had
been a musician once, long before he wandered into Moon-
stone, but when Thea awoke his interest there was not
much left of him.  From him Thea had learned something
about the works of Gluck and Bach, and he used to play her
some of the compositions of Schumann.  In his trunk he had
a mutilated score of the F sharp minor sonata, which he had
heard Clara Schumann play at a festival in Leipsic.  Though
his powers of execution were at such a low ebb, he used to
play at this sonata for his pupil and managed to give her
some idea of its beauty.  When Wunsch was a young man,
it was still daring to like Schumann; enthusiasm for his
work was considered an expression of youthful wayward-
ness.  Perhaps that was why Wunsch remembered him best.
Thea studied some of the KINDERSZENEN with him, as well
as some little sonatas by Mozart and Clementi.  But for
the most part Wunsch stuck to Czerny and Hummel.

    Harsanyi found in Thea a pupil with sure, strong hands,
one who read rapidly and intelligently, who had, he felt, a
richly gifted nature.  But she had been given no direction,
and her ardor was unawakened.  She had never heard a
symphony orchestra.  The literature of the piano was an
undiscovered world to her.  He wondered how she had been
able to work so hard when she knew so little of what she
was working toward.  She had been taught according to the
old Stuttgart method; stiff back, stiff elbows, a very formal

position of the hands.  The best thing about her prepara-
tion was that she had developed an unusual power of work.
He noticed at once her way of charging at difficulties.  She
ran to meet them as if they were foes she had long been
seeking, seized them as if they were destined for her and
she for them.  Whatever she did well, she took for granted.
Her eagerness aroused all the young Hungarian's chivalry.
Instinctively one went to the rescue of a creature who had
so much to overcome and who struggled so hard.  He used
to tell his wife that Miss Kronborg's hour took more out of
him than half a dozen other lessons.  He usually kept her
long over time; he changed her lessons about so that he
could do so, and often gave her time at the end of the day,
when he could talk to her afterward and play for her a
little from what he happened to be studying.  It was always
interesting to play for her.  Sometimes she was so silent
that he wondered, when she left him, whether she had got
anything out of it.  But a week later, two weeks later, she
would give back his idea again in a way that set him
vibrating.

    All this was very well for Harsanyi; an interesting varia-
tion in the routine of teaching.  But for Thea Kronborg,
that winter was almost beyond enduring.  She always re-
membered it as the happiest and wildest and saddest of her
life.  Things came too fast for her; she had not had enough
preparation.  There were times when she came home from
her lesson and lay upon her bed hating Wunsch and her
family, hating a world that had let her grow up so ignorant;
when she wished that she could die then and there, and be
born over again to begin anew.  She said something of this
kind once to her teacher, in the midst of a bitter struggle.
Harsanyi turned the light of his wonderful eye upon her--
poor fellow, he had but one, though that was set in such a
handsome head--and said slowly: "Every artist makes
himself born.  It is very much harder than the other time,
and longer.  Your mother did not bring anything into the

world to play piano.  That you must bring into the world
yourself."

    This comforted Thea temporarily, for it seemed to give
her a chance.  But a great deal of the time she was com-
fortless.  Her letters to Dr. Archie were brief and business-
like.  She was not apt to chatter much, even in the stim-
ulating company of people she liked, and to chatter on
paper was simply impossible for her.  If she tried to write
him anything definite about her work, she immediately
scratched it out as being only partially true, or not true at
all.  Nothing that she could say about her studies seemed
unqualifiedly true, once she put it down on paper.

    Late one afternoon, when she was thoroughly tired and
wanted to struggle on into the dusk, Harsanyi, tired too,
threw up his hands and laughed at her.  "Not to-day, Miss
Kronborg.  That sonata will keep; it won't run away.
Even if you and I should not waken up to-morrow, it will
be there."

    Thea turned to him fiercely.  "No, it isn't here unless
I have it--not for me," she cried passionately.  "Only
what I hold in my two hands is there for me!"

    Harsanyi made no reply.  He took a deep breath and
sat down again.  "The second movement now, quietly,
with the shoulders relaxed."

    There were hours, too, of great exaltation; when she was
at her best and became a part of what she was doing and
ceased to exist in any other sense.  There were other times
when she was so shattered by ideas that she could do noth-
ing worth while; when they trampled over her like an army
and she felt as if she were bleeding to death under them.
She sometimes came home from a late lesson so exhausted
that she could eat no supper.  If she tried to eat, she was
ill afterward.  She used to throw herself upon the bed and
lie there in the dark, not thinking, not feeling, but evapo-
rating.  That same night, perhaps, she would waken up
rested and calm, and as she went over her work in her mind,

the passages seemed to become something of themselves,
to take a sort of pattern in the darkness.  She had never
learned to work away from the piano until she came to
Harsanyi, and it helped her more than anything had ever
helped her before.

    She almost never worked now with the sunny, happy
contentment that had filled the hours when she worked
with Wunsch--"like a fat horse turning a sorgum mill,"
she said bitterly to herself.  Then, by sticking to it, she
could always do what she set out to do.  Now, every-
thing that she really wanted was impossible; a CANTABILE
like Harsanyi's, for instance, instead of her own cloudy
tone.  No use telling her she might have it in ten years.
She wanted it now.  She wondered how she had ever found
other things interesting: books, "Anna Karenina"--all
that seemed so unreal and on the outside of things.  She
was not born a musician, she decided; there was no other
way of explaining it.

    Sometimes she got so nervous at the piano that she left
it, and snatching up her hat and cape went out and walked,
hurrying through the streets like Christian fleeing from
the City of Destruction.  And while she walked she cried.
There was scarcely a street in the neighborhood that she
had not cried up and down before that winter was over.
The thing that used to lie under her cheek, that sat so
warmly over her heart when she glided away from the sand
hills that autumn morning, was far from her.  She had come
to Chicago to be with it, and it had deserted her, leaving
in its place a painful longing, an unresigned despair.


    Harsanyi knew that his interesting pupil--"the sav-
age blonde," one of his male students called her--was
sometimes very unhappy.  He saw in her discontent a
curious definition of character.  He would have said that
a girl with so much musical feeling, so intelligent, with good
training of eye and hand, would, when thus suddenly in-

troduced to the great literature of the piano, have found
boundless happiness.  But he soon learned that she was
not able to forget her own poverty in the richness of the
world he opened to her.  Often when he played to her,
her face was the picture of restless misery.  She would sit
crouching forward, her elbows on her knees, her brows
drawn together and her gray-green eyes smaller than ever,
reduced to mere pin-points of cold, piercing light.  Some-
times, while she listened, she would swallow hard, two or
three times, and look nervously from left to right, drawing
her shoulders together.  "Exactly," he thought, "as if she
were being watched, or as if she were naked and heard
some one coming."

    On the other hand, when she came several times to see
Mrs. Harsanyi and the two babies, she was like a little
girl, jolly and gay and eager to play with the children, who
loved her.  The little daughter, Tanya, liked to touch Miss
Kronborg's yellow hair and pat it, saying, "Dolly, dolly,"
because it was of a color much oftener seen on dolls than on
people.  But if Harsanyi opened the piano and sat down to
play, Miss Kronborg gradually drew away from the chil-
dren, retreated to a corner and became sullen or troubled.
Mrs. Harsanyi noticed this, also, and thought it very
strange behavior.

    Another thing that puzzled Harsanyi was Thea's ap-
parent lack of curiosity.  Several times he offered to give
her tickets to concerts, but she said she was too tired or
that it "knocked her out to be up late."  Harsanyi did not
know that she was singing in a choir, and had often to sing
at funerals, neither did he realize how much her work with
him stirred her and exhausted her.  Once, just as she was
leaving his studio, he called her back and told her he could
give her some tickets that had been sent him for Emma
Juch that evening.  Thea fingered the black wool on the
edge of her plush cape and replied, "Oh, thank you, Mr.
Harsanyi, but I have to wash my hair to-night."

    Mrs. Harsanyi liked Miss Kronborg thoroughly.  She
saw in her the making of a pupil who would reflect credit
upon Harsanyi.  She felt that the girl could be made to look
strikingly handsome, and that she had the kind of per-
sonality which takes hold of audiences.  Moreover, Miss
Kronborg was not in the least sentimental about her hus-
band.  Sometimes from the show pupils one had to endure
a good deal.  "I like that girl," she used to say, when
Harsanyi told her of one of Thea's GAUCHERIES.  "She doesn't
sigh every time the wind blows.  With her one swallow
doesn't make a summer."

    Thea told them very little about herself.  She was not
naturally communicative, and she found it hard to feel
confidence in new people.  She did not know why, but she
could not talk to Harsanyi as she could to Dr. Archie, or to
Johnny and Mrs. Tellamantez.  With Mr. Larsen she felt
more at home, and when she was walking she sometimes
stopped at his study to eat candy with him or to hear the
plot of the novel he happened to be reading.

    One evening toward the middle of December Thea was
to dine with the Harsanyis.  She arrived early, to have
time to play with the children before they went to bed.
Mrs. Harsanyi took her into her own room and helped her
take off her country "fascinator" and her clumsy plush
cape.  Thea had bought this cape at a big department store
and had paid $16.50 for it.  As she had never paid more
than ten dollars for a coat before, that seemed to her a
large price.  It was very heavy and not very warm, orna-
mented with a showy pattern in black disks, and trimmed
around the collar and the edges with some kind of black
wool that "crocked" badly in snow or rain.  It was lined
with a cotton stuff called "farmer's satin."  Mrs. Harsanyi
was one woman in a thousand.  As she lifted this cape from
Thea's shoulders and laid it on her white bed, she wished
that her husband did not have to charge pupils like this
one for their lessons.  Thea wore her Moonstone party

dress, white organdie, made with a "V" neck and elbow
sleeves, and a blue sash.  She looked very pretty in it, and
around her throat she had a string of pink coral and tiny
white shells that Ray once brought her from Los Angeles.
Mrs. Harsanyi noticed that she wore high heavy shoes
which needed blacking.  The choir in Mr. Larsen's church
stood behind a railing, so Thea did not pay much attention
to her shoes.

    "You have nothing to do to your hair," Mrs. Harsanyi
said kindly, as Thea turned to the mirror.  "However it
happens to lie, it's always pretty.  I admire it as much as
Tanya does."

    Thea glanced awkwardly away from her and looked
stern, but Mrs. Harsanyi knew that she was pleased.  They
went into the living-room, behind the studio, where the
two children were playing on the big rug before the coal
grate.  Andor, the boy, was six, a sturdy, handsome child,
and the little girl was four.  She came tripping to meet
Thea, looking like a little doll in her white net dress--her
mother made all her clothes.  Thea picked her up and
hugged her.  Mrs. Harsanyi excused herself and went to the
dining-room.  She kept only one maid and did a good deal
of the housework herself, besides cooking her husband's
favorite dishes for him.  She was still under thirty, a slender,
graceful woman, gracious, intelligent, and capable.  She
adapted herself to circumstances with a well-bred ease
which solved many of her husband's difficulties, and kept
him, as he said, from feeling cheap and down at the heel.
No musician ever had a better wife.  Unfortunately her
beauty was of a very frail and impressionable kind, and
she was beginning to lose it.  Her face was too thin now,
and there were often dark circles under her eyes.

    Left alone with the children, Thea sat down on Tanya's
little chair--she would rather have sat on the floor, but
was afraid of rumpling her dress--and helped them play
"cars" with Andor's iron railway set.  She showed him

new ways to lay his tracks and how to make switches, set
up his Noah's ark village for stations and packed the ani-
mals in the open coal cars to send them to the stockyards.
They worked out their shipment so realistically that when
Andor put the two little reindeer into the stock car, Tanya
snatched them out and began to cry, saying she wasn't
going to have all their animals killed.

    Harsanyi came in, jaded and tired, and asked Thea to go
on with her game, as he was not equal to talking much
before dinner.  He sat down and made pretense of glancing
at the evening paper, but he soon dropped it.  After the
railroad began to grow tiresome, Thea went with the child-
ren to the lounge in the corner, and played for them the
game with which she used to amuse Thor for hours to-
gether behind the parlor stove at home, making shadow
pictures against the wall with her hands.  Her fingers were
very supple, and she could make a duck and a cow and a
sheep and a fox and a rabbit and even an elephant.  Har-
sanyi, from his low chair, watched them, smiling.  The boy
was on his knees, jumping up and down with the excite-
ment of guessing the beasts, and Tanya sat with her feet
tucked under her and clapped her frail little hands.  Thea's
profile, in the lamplight, teased his fancy.  Where had he
seen a head like it before?

    When dinner was announced, little Andor took Thea's
hand and walked to the dining-room with her.  The chil-
dren always had dinner with their parents and behaved
very nicely at table.  "Mamma," said Andor seriously as
he climbed into his chair and tucked his napkin into the
collar of his blouse, "Miss Kronborg's hands are every
kind of animal there is."

    His father laughed.  "I wish somebody would say that
about my hands, Andor."

    When Thea dined at the Harsanyis before, she noticed
that there was an intense suspense from the moment they
took their places at the table until the master of the house

had tasted the soup.  He had a theory that if the soup
went well, the dinner would go well; but if the soup was
poor, all was lost.  To-night he tasted his soup and smiled,
and Mrs. Harsanyi sat more easily in her chair and turned
her attention to Thea.  Thea loved their dinner table, be-
cause it was lighted by candles in silver candle-sticks,
and she had never seen a table so lighted anywhere else.
There were always flowers, too.  To-night there was a
little orange tree, with oranges on it, that one of Harsanyi's
pupils had sent him at Thanksgiving time.  After Harsanyi
had finished his soup and a glass of red Hungarian wine, he
lost his fagged look and became cordial and witty.  He
persuaded Thea to drink a little wine to-night.  The first
time she dined with them, when he urged her to taste the
glass of sherry beside her plate, she astonished them by
telling them that she "never drank."

    Harsanyi was then a man of thirty-two.  He was to have
a very brilliant career, but he did not know it then.
Theodore Thomas was perhaps the only man in Chicago
who felt that Harsanyi might have a great future.  Har-
sanyi belonged to the softer Slavic type, and was more like
a Pole than a Hungarian.  He was tall, slender, active, with
sloping, graceful shoulders and long arms.  His head was
very fine, strongly and delicately modelled, and, as Thea
put it, "so independent."  A lock of his thick brown hair
usually hung over his forehead.  His eye was wonderful;
full of light and fire when he was interested, soft and
thoughtful when he was tired or melancholy.  The mean-
ing and power of two very fine eyes must all have gone
into this one--the right one, fortunately, the one next
his audience when he played.  He believed that the glass
eye which gave one side of his face such a dull, blind look,
had ruined his career, or rather had made a career impos-
sible for him.  Harsanyi lost his eye when he was twelve
years old, in a Pennsylvania mining town where explo-
sives happened to be kept too near the frame shanties

in which the company packed newly arrived Hungarian
families.

    His father was a musician and a good one, but he had
cruelly over-worked the boy; keeping him at the piano for
six hours a day and making him play in cafes and dance
halls for half the night.  Andor ran away and crossed the
ocean with an uncle, who smuggled him through the port
as one of his own many children.  The explosion in which
Andor was hurt killed a score of people, and he was
thought lucky to get off with an eye.  He still had a clip-
ping from a Pittsburg paper, giving a list of the dead
and injured.  He appeared as "Harsanyi, Andor, left eye
and slight injuries about the head."  That was his first
American "notice"; and he kept it.  He held no grudge
against the coal company; he understood that the acci-
dent was merely one of the things that are bound to hap-
pen in the general scramble of American life, where every
one comes to grab and takes his chance.

    While they were eating dessert, Thea asked Harsanyi
if she could change her Tuesday lesson from afternoon to
morning.  "I have to be at a choir rehearsal in the after-
noon, to get ready for the Christmas music, and I expect
it will last until late."

    Harsanyi put down his fork and looked up.  "A choir
rehearsal?  You sing in a church?"

    "Yes.  A little Swedish church, over on the North
side."

    "Why did you not tell us?"

    "Oh, I'm only a temporary.  The regular soprano is not
well."

    "How long have you been singing there?"

    "Ever since I came.  I had to get a position of some
kind," Thea explained, flushing, "and the preacher took
me on.  He runs the choir himself.  He knew my father, and
I guess he took me to oblige."

    Harsanyi tapped the tablecloth with the ends of his

fingers.  "But why did you never tell us?  Why are you so
reticent with us?"

    Thea looked shyly at him from under her brows.  "Well,
it's certainly not very interesting.  It's only a little church.
I only do it for business reasons."

    "What do you mean?  Don't you like to sing?  Don't you
sing well?"

    "I like it well enough, but, of course, I don't know any-
thing about singing.  I guess that's why I never said any-
thing about it.  Anybody that's got a voice can sing in a
little church like that."

    Harsanyi laughed softly--a little scornfully, Thea
thought.  "So you have a voice, have you?"

    Thea hesitated, looked intently at the candles and then
at Harsanyi.  "Yes," she said firmly; "I have got some,
anyway."

    "Good girl," said Mrs. Harsanyi, nodding and smiling
at Thea.  "You must let us hear you sing after dinner."

    This remark seemingly closed the subject, and when the
coffee was brought they began to talk of other things.
Harsanyi asked Thea how she happened to know so much
about the way in which freight trains are operated, and
she tried to give him some idea of how the people in little
desert towns live by the railway and order their lives by the
coming and going of the trains.  When they left the dining-
room the children were sent to bed and Mrs. Harsanyi
took Thea into the studio.  She and her husband usually
sat there in the evening.

    Although their apartment seemed so elegant to Thea, it
was small and cramped.  The studio was the only spacious
room.  The Harsanyis were poor, and it was due to Mrs.
Harsanyi's good management that their lives, even in
hard times, moved along with dignity and order.  She
had long ago found out that bills or debts of any kind
frightened her husband and crippled his working power.
He said they were like bars on the windows, and shut out

the future; they meant that just so many hundred dollars'
worth of his life was debilitated and exhausted before he
got to it.  So Mrs. Harsanyi saw to it that they never
owed anything.  Harsanyi was not extravagant, though he
was sometimes careless about money.  Quiet and order
and his wife's good taste were the things that meant most
to him.  After these, good food, good cigars, a little good
wine.  He wore his clothes until they were shabby, until his
wife had to ask the tailor to come to the house and mea-
sure him for new ones.  His neckties she usually made her-
self, and when she was in shops she always kept her eye
open for silks in very dull or pale shades, grays and olives,
warm blacks and browns.

    When they went into the studio Mrs. Harsanyi took up
her embroidery and Thea sat down beside her on a low
stool, her hands clasped about her knees.  While his wife
and his pupil talked, Harsanyi sank into a CHAISE LONGUE in
which he sometimes snatched a few moments' rest between
his lessons, and smoked.  He sat well out of the circle of the
lamplight, his feet to the fire.  His feet were slender and
well shaped, always elegantly shod.  Much of the grace of
his movements was due to the fact that his feet were almost
as sure and flexible as his hands.  He listened to the con-
versation with amusement.  He admired his wife's tact
and kindness with crude young people; she taught them
so much without seeming to be instructing.  When the
clock struck nine, Thea said she must be going home.

    Harsanyi rose and flung away his cigarette.  "Not yet.
We have just begun the evening.  Now you are going to
sing for us.  I have been waiting for you to recover from
dinner.  Come, what shall it be?" he crossed to the piano.

    Thea laughed and shook her head, locking her elbows
still tighter about her knees.  "Thank you, Mr. Harsanyi,
but if you really make me sing, I'll accompany myself.
You couldn't stand it to play the sort of things I have to
sing."

    As Harsanyi still pointed to the chair at the piano, she
left her stool and went to it, while he returned to his CHAISE
LONGUE.  Thea looked at the keyboard uneasily for a mo-
ment, then she began "Come, ye Disconsolate," the hymn
Wunsch had always liked to hear her sing.  Mrs. Harsanyi
glanced questioningly at her husband, but he was looking
intently at the toes of his boots, shading his forehead with
his long white hand.  When Thea finished the hymn she
did not turn around, but immediately began "The Ninety
and Nine."  Mrs. Harsanyi kept trying to catch her hus-
band's eye; but his chin only sank lower on his collar.


         "There were ninety and nine that safely lay

            In the shelter of the fold,

          But one was out on the hills away,

            Far off from the gates of gold."


    Harsanyi looked at her, then back at the fire.


         "Rejoice, for the Shepherd has found his sheep."


    Thea turned on the chair and grinned.  "That's about
enough, isn't it?  That song got me my job.  The preacher
said it was sympathetic," she minced the word, remember-
ing Mr. Larsen's manner.

    Harsanyi drew himself up in his chair, resting his elbows
on the low arms.  "Yes?  That is better suited to your
voice.  Your upper tones are good, above G.  I must teach
you some songs.  Don't you know anything--pleasant?"

    Thea shook her head ruefully.  "I'm afraid I don't.  Let
me see--  Perhaps," she turned to the piano and put her
hands on the keys.  "I used to sing this for Mr. Wunsch a
long while ago.  It's for contralto, but I'll try it."  She
frowned at the keyboard a moment, played the few in-
troductory measures, and began


         "ACH, ICH HABE SIE VERLOREN,"


    She had not sung it for a long time, and it came back
like an old friendship.  When she finished, Harsanyi sprang
from his chair and dropped lightly upon his toes, a kind of

ENTRE-CHAT that he sometimes executed when he formed a
sudden resolution, or when he was about to follow a pure
intuition, against reason.  His wife said that when he gave
that spring he was shot from the bow of his ancestors, and
now when he left his chair in that manner she knew he was
intensely interested.  He went quickly to the piano.

    "Sing that again.  There is nothing the matter with
your low voice, my girl.  I will play for you.  Let your
voice out."  Without looking at her he began the accom-
paniment.  Thea drew back her shoulders, relaxed them
instinctively, and sang.

    When she finished the aria, Harsanyi beckoned her
nearer.  "Sing AH--AH for me, as I indicate."  He kept
his right hand on the keyboard and put his left to her
throat, placing the tips of his delicate fingers over her
larynx.  "Again,--until your breath is gone.--  Trill
between the two tones, always; good!  Again; excellent!--
Now up,--stay there.  E and F.  Not so good, is it?  F is
always a hard one.--  Now, try the half-tone.--  That's
right, nothing difficult about it.--  Now, pianissimo, AH--
AH.  Now, swell it, AH--AH.--  Again, follow my hand.--
Now, carry it down.--  Anybody ever tell you anything
about your breathing?"

    "Mr. Larsen says I have an unusually long breath,"
Thea replied with spirit.

    Harsanyi smiled.  "So you have, so you have.  That
was what I meant.  Now, once more; carry it up and then
down, AH--AH."  He put his hand back to her throat and
sat with his head bent, his one eye closed.  He loved to
hear a big voice throb in a relaxed, natural throat, and
he was thinking that no one had ever felt this voice vibrate
before.  It was like a wild bird that had flown into his
studio on Middleton Street from goodness knew how far!
No one knew that it had come, or even that it existed;
least of all the strange, crude girl in whose throat it beat
its passionate wings.  What a simple thing it was, he re-

flected; why had he never guessed it before?  Everything
about her indicated it,--the big mouth, the wide jaw and
chin, the strong white teeth, the deep laugh.  The machine
was so simple and strong, seemed to be so easily operated.
She sang from the bottom of herself.  Her breath came from
down where her laugh came from, the deep laugh which
Mrs. Harsanyi had once called "the laugh of the people."
A relaxed throat, a voice that lay on the breath, that had
never been forced off the breath; it rose and fell in the
air-column like the little balls which are put to shine in the
jet of a fountain.  The voice did not thin as it went up;
the upper tones were as full and rich as the lower, pro-
duced in the same way and as unconsciously, only with
deeper breath.

    At last Harsanyi threw back his head and rose.  "You
must be tired, Miss Kronborg."

    When she replied, she startled him; he had forgotten how
hard and full of burs her speaking voice was.  "No," she
said, "singing never tires me."

    Harsanyi pushed back his hair with a nervous hand.
"I don't know much about the voice, but I shall take
liberties and teach you some good songs.  I think you have
a very interesting voice."

    "I'm glad if you like it.  Good-night, Mr. Harsanyi."
Thea went with Mrs. Harsanyi to get her wraps.

    When Mrs. Harsanyi came back to her husband, she
found him walking restlessly up and down the room.

    "Don't you think her voice wonderful, dear?" she
asked.

    "I scarcely know what to think.  All I really know about
that girl is that she tires me to death.  We must not have
her often.  If I did not have my living to make, then--"
he dropped into a chair and closed his eyes.  "How tired
I am.  What a voice!"

                               IV


    AFTER that evening Thea's work with Harsanyi
changed somewhat.  He insisted that she should
study some songs with him, and after almost every lesson
he gave up half an hour of his own time to practicing them
with her.  He did not pretend to know much about voice
production, but so far, he thought, she had acquired no
really injurious habits.  A healthy and powerful organ had
found its own method, which was not a bad one.  He
wished to find out a good deal before he recommended a
vocal teacher.  He never told Thea what he thought about
her voice, and made her general ignorance of anything
worth singing his pretext for the trouble he took.  That
was in the beginning.  After the first few lessons his own
pleasure and hers were pretext enough.  The singing came
at the end of the lesson hour, and they both treated it as
a form of relaxation.

    Harsanyi did not say much even to his wife about his
discovery.  He brooded upon it in a curious way.  He
found that these unscientific singing lessons stimulated
him in his own study.  After Miss Kronborg left him he
often lay down in his studio for an hour before dinner, with
his head full of musical ideas, with an effervescence in his
brain which he had sometimes lost for weeks together un-
der the grind of teaching.  He had never got so much back
for himself from any pupil as he did from Miss Kronborg.
From the first she had stimulated him; something in her
personality invariably affected him.  Now that he was
feeling his way toward her voice, he found her more in-
teresting than ever before.  She lifted the tedium of the
winter for him, gave him curious fancies and reveries.
Musically, she was sympathetic to him.  Why all this was

true, he never asked himself.  He had learned that one must
take where and when one can the mysterious mental ir-
ritant that rouses one's imagination; that it is not to be
had by order.  She often wearied him, but she never bored
him.  Under her crudeness and brusque hardness, he felt
there was a nature quite different, of which he never got so
much as a hint except when she was at the piano, or when
she sang.  It was toward this hidden creature that he was
trying, for his own pleasure, to find his way.  In short,
Harsanyi looked forward to his hour with Thea for the
same reason that poor Wunsch had sometimes dreaded
his; because she stirred him more than anything she did
could adequately explain.

    One afternoon Harsanyi, after the lesson, was standing
by the window putting some collodion on a cracked finger,
and Thea was at the piano trying over "Die Lorelei"
which he had given her last week to practice.  It was scarcely
a song which a singing master would have given her, but
he had his own reasons.  How she sang it mattered only to
him and to her.  He was playing his own game now, without
interference; he suspected that he could not do so always.

    When she finished the song, she looked back over her
shoulder at him and spoke thoughtfully.  "That wasn't
right, at the end, was it?"

    "No, that should be an open, flowing tone, something
like this,"--he waved his fingers rapidly in the air.  "You
get the idea?"

    "No, I don't.  Seems a queer ending, after the rest."

    Harsanyi corked his little bottle and dropped it into the
pocket of his velvet coat.  "Why so?  Shipwrecks come and
go, MARCHEN come and go, but the river keeps right on.
There you have your open, flowing tone."

    Thea looked intently at the music.  "I see," she said
dully.  "Oh, I see!" she repeated quickly and turned to
him a glowing countenance.  "It is the river.--  Oh, yes,
I get it now!"  She looked at him but long enough to catch