The tenderfoots

FROM where he sat in the crowded day-coach, Philip Trask’s outlook was bounded by the backward-wheeling plain of eastern Colorado on one hand, and on the other by the scarcely less uninteresting cross-section of humanity filling the car to its seating capacity. Much earlier in the day he had exhausted the possibilities of the view from the car window. Shack-built prairie towns, steadily lessening in size and importance with the westward flight, had later given place to widely separated sod houses, the outworks of a slowly advancing army of pioneer homesteaders. Now even these had been left behind and there was nothing but the treeless, limitless plain, with only an occasional prairie-dog town or, more rarely, a flying herd of antelope, their fawn-colored bodies fading to invisibility in the fallow-dun distances, to break the monotony.

New England born and bred, provincial, and just now with a touch of belated homesickness acute enough to make him contrast all things primitive with the particular sort of civilization he had left behind, Philip owned to no kindling enthusiasm for the region which the school books were still teaching children to call the Great American Desert. A student by choice, with an unfinished college course for his keenest regret, he had left New Hampshire six months earlier on a plain quest of bread. Though the migrating moment was late in the year 1879, the aftermath of the panic of ’73 still lingered in the East; and while there was work to be had for immigrant brawn, there was little enough for native brain.

At this crisis, an uncle of one of his college classmates, a large shareholder in Kansas Pacific railway stocks, had come to the rescue by securing a clerkship for him in the company’s general offices in Kansas City. Here, after an uneventful half-year spent at an auditing desk--a period which had left his New England prejudices and prepossessions practically untouched--consolidation, the pursuing fate of the railroad clerk in the ’70’s and ’80’s, overtook him. But in the labor-saving shake-up he had drawn a lucky number. Being by this time a fairly efficient juggler of figures, he was offered a choice of going to Omaha with the consolidated offices, or of taking a clerkship with another and newer railroad in Denver.

For no very robust reason, but rather for a very slender one, Denver had won the toss. Four years previous to the enforced breaking of Philip’s college course the elder Trask had disappeared from New Hampshire under a cloud. A defalcation in the Concord bank, in which he was one of the tellers, was threatening to involve him, and between two days John Trask had vanished, leaving no trace. Alone in the family connection, which was large, the son had stubbornly continued to believe in his father’s innocence; and since the West was ever the port of missing men, it was in a vague hope of coming upon some trace of the missing man that Philip had refused the Omaha alternative and turned his face toward the farther West.

It was not until he had tried unavailingly to obtain sleeping-car accommodations, at the outsetting from the Missouri city, that he was made to realize that Colorado had suddenly become a Mecca of some sort toward which a horde of ardent pilgrims was hastening. True, there had been perfervid accounts in the Kansas City newspapers of a great silver discovery at a place called Leadville, somewhere in the Colorado mountains; but in his leisure, which was scanty, Philip--or, for that matter, the Trasks as a family--read books rather than newspapers. Hence the scene at the Kansas City Union Depot, when he went to take his departure, was a revelation. Trains over the various lines from the East were arriving, and excited mobs were pouring out of them to scramble wildly for seats in the waiting Overland which, in less time than it took him to grasp the situation, was in process of being jammed to overflowing.

Fighting with the mob as best he could--and with every immiscible fibre of him protesting that it was a most barbarous thing to do--he finally secured a seat in one of the day-coaches; and here, save for the three intervening stops at the meal stations, he had been wedged in, powerless to do anything but to endure the banalities and discomforts, wholly out of sympathy with the riant, free-and-easy treasure-seekers crowding the car and the train, and anxious only to reach his destination and be quit of the alien contacts.

The contacts, as he had marked at the outsetting, were chiefly masculine. Though his coach was the one next to the sleeping-cars, there were not more than a dozen women and children in it; and the men, for the greater part, were, in New England phrase, an outlandish company. His seatmate, to whom he gave all the room possible, was a roughly dressed man of uncertain age, bearded to the eyes and smelling strongly of liquor. Philip forgave him much because he slept most of the time, and in his waking intervals did not try to make conversation. Across the aisle a poker game with matches for chips was in progress, and a few seats forward there was another. Now and again pocket bottles were passed from hand to hand, and men drank openly with the bald freedom of those who are far from home and its restraints and so are at liberty to flout the nicer proprieties.

Philip pitied the few women who were forced by the travel exigencies into such rude companionship; particularly he was sorry for a family three seats ahead on his own side of the car. There were five of them in all; a father, mother and three girls; and Philip assured himself that they had nothing remotely in common with the boisterous majority. In the scramble for seats at the Kansas City terminal the family had been divided; the father and mother and the two younger girls occupying two seats facing each other, and the older girl--Philip thought she would be about his own age--sharing the seat next in the rear with an elderly man, a Catholic priest by the cut of his clothes and the shape of his hat.

Before the long day’s run was many hours old, Philip had accounted for the family to his own satisfaction. The fame of Colorado as a health resort had already penetrated to the East, and the colorless face and sunken eyes of the father only too plainly advertised his malady. Philip knew the marks of the white plague when he saw them; they were all too common in his own homeland; and he found himself wondering sympathetically if the flight to the high and dry altitudes had not been determined upon too late to help the hollow-eyed man in the seat ahead.

It was not until the middle of the afternoon that Philip’s attention was drawn more pointedly to the family three seats removed. In the day-long journeying there had been no shifting of places among its members; but at the last water-tank station passed, the priest, who had been studiously reading his breviary for the better part of the day, had left the train, and the place beside the oldest girl had been taken by a man whose evil face immediately awakened a curious thrill of antagonism in Philip.

In a little time he saw that this man was trying to make the girl talk; also, that she was seeking, ineffectually, to ignore him. Philip had had little to do with women other than those of his own family, and he hailed from a civilization in which the primitive passions were decently held in leash by the conventions. Yet he could feel his pulses quickening and a most unaccustomed prompting to violence taking possession of him when he realized that a call for some manly intervention was urging itself upon him.

In a fit of perturbation that was almost boyish, and with a prescriptive experience that offered no precedent, he was still hesitating when he saw the girl lean forward and speak to her father. The sick man twisted himself in his seat and there was a low-toned colloquy between him and the offender. Philip could not hear what was said, but he could easily imagine that the father was protesting, and that the offender was probably adding insult to injury, noting, as a coward would, that he had nothing to fear from a sick man. In the midst of things the invalid made as if he would rise to exchange seats with his daughter, but the girl, with a hand on his shoulder, made him sit down again.

After this, nothing happened for a few minutes. Then Philip saw the man slide an arm along the seat behind the girl’s shoulders so that she could not lean back without yielding to a half embrace, and again his blood boiled and his temples began to throb. Clearly, something ought to be done ... if he only knew how to go about it. He was half rising when he saw the crowning insult offered. The man had drawn a flat bottle, whiskey-filled, from his pocket and was offering it to the girl.

Quite beside himself now, Philip struggled to his feet; but another was before him. Across the aisle one of the poker players, a bearded giant in a flannel shirt and with his belted trousers tucked into his boot-tops, faced his cards down upon the board that served as a gaming table and rose up with a roar that brought an instant craning of necks all over the car.

“Say! I been keepin’ cases on yuh, yuh dern’ son of a sea cook!” he bellowed, laying a pair of ham-like hands upon the man in the opposite seat and jerking him to his feet in the aisle. Then: “Oh--yuh would, would yuh!”

Philip, half-dazed by this sudden ebullition of violence, caught his breath in a gasp when he saw the flash of a bowie-knife in the hand of the smaller man. There was a momentary struggle in which the knife was sent flying through an open window, harsh oaths from the onlookers, cries of “Pitch him out after his toad-sticker!” and then a Gargantuan burst of laughter as the giant pinned both hands of his antagonist in one of his own and cuffed him into whimpering subjection with the other. The next thing Philip knew, the big man, still with his captive hand-manacled and helpless, was singling him out and bawling at him.

“Here, you young feller; climb out o’ that and make room fer this yere skunk! Yuh look like you might sit alongside of a perfect lady without makin’ a dern’ hyena o’ yerself. Step it!”

More to forestall further horrors of embarrassment than for any other reason, Philip stumbled out over the knees of his sleeping partner and slipped into the indicated seat beside the girl. Whereupon the giant shoved his subdued quarry into the place thus made vacant and went back to his seat to take up his hand of cards quite as if the late encounter were a mere incident in the day’s faring.

Scarcely less embarrassed by having been singled out as a model of decency than he had been by his inability to think quickly enough in the crisis, Philip sat in bottled-up silence for the space of the clicking of many rail-lengths under the drumming wheels, carefully refraining from venturing even a sidelong glance at his new seatmate. Not that the glance was needful. The day was no longer young, and he had had ample time in which to visualize the piquantly attractive face of the girl beside him. Its perfect oval was of a type with which he was not familiar, and at first he had thought it must be foreign. But there was no suggestion of the alien in the other members of the family. In sharp contrast to the clear olive skin and jet-black hair and eyes of the eldest sister, the two younger girls were fair, and so was the mother. As for the father, there was little save the cut of his beard to distinguish him. In a period when the few were clean shaven and the many let the beard grow as it would, the invalid reminded Philip of the pictures he had seen of the third Napoleon, though, to be sure, the likeness was chiefly in the heavy graying mustaches and goatee.