FullReads

We two have the back seat, Tom sits in front with Billings, and the “swamper” sits anywhere on the lumps and bumps which our baggage makes, covered by the canvas wagon-sheet. He might have ridden his horse–everybody supposed he would; but that would have separated him from the object of his existence; the object sternly ignoring him, and riding for miles with her face turned away, her hand to her hat, which the wind persistently snatched at. It was her wide-brimmed sketching-hat–rather a daring creation but monstrously becoming, and I had persuaded her to wear it, the morning being delusively clear, thinking we were to have one of our midsummer scorchers that would have burned her fair English face to a blister.

Mr. Harshaw thought she would be tired, wearing her hand continually in the air, and suggested various mechanical substitutes,–a string attached to the hat-trimming, a scarf tied over her head; but a snubbing was all the reward he got for his sympathy.

“When this hand is tired I take the other one,” she said airily.

We lunched at Ten Mile, by the railroad track. Do you remember that desolate place? The Oregon Short Line used to leave us there at a little station called Kuna. There is no Kuna now; the station-house is gone; the station-keeper’s little children are buried between four stakes on the bare hill–diphtheria, I think it was. Miss Kitty asked what the stakes were there for. Tom didn’t like to tell her, so he said some traveler had made a “cache” there of something he couldn’t carry with him, and the stakes were to mark the spot till his return.

“And will nobody disturb the cache?” asked Miss Kitty. I couldn’t bear to hear them. “They are graves,” I whispered. “Two little children–the station-keeper’s–all they had.” And she asked no more questions.

Mr. Harshaw had got possession of the canteen, and so was able to serve the maiden, both when she drank and when she held out her rosy fingers to be sprinkled, he tilting a little water on them slowly–with such provoking slowness that she chid him; then he let it come in gulps, and she chid him more, for spattering her shoes. She could play my Lady Disdain very prettily, only she is something too much in earnest at present for the game to be a pretty one to watch. I feel like calling her down from her pedestal of virgin wrath, if only for the sake of us peaceful old folk, who don’t care to be made the stamping-ground for their little differences.

The horses were longer at their lunch than we, and Miss Kitty requested her traveling-bag. “And now,” she said, “I will get rid of this fiend of a hat,” whereas she had steadily protested for miles that she didn’t mind it in the least. She took out of her bag a steamer-cap, and when she had put it on I could see that poor Harshaw dared not trust himself to look at her, her fair face exposed, and so very fair, in its tender, soft coloring, against that grim, wind-beaten waste of dust and sage.

I shall skip the scenery on the road to Walter’s Ferry, partly because we couldn’t see it for the dust; and if we had seen it, I would not waste it upon you, an army woman. But Walter’s Ferry was a hard-looking place when we crawled in last night out of the howling, dirt-throwing wind.

The little hand-raised poplars about the ferry-house were shivering and tugging and straining their thin necks in the gale, the windows so loaded with dust that we could barely see if there were lights inside. We hooted and we howled,–the men did,–and the ferry-keeper came out and stared at us in blank amazement that we should be wanting supper and beds. As if we could have wanted anything else at that place except to cross the river, which we don’t do. We go up on this side. We came down the hill merely to sleep at the ferry-house, the night being too bad for a road camp.