Jane Journeys On Part 3

_Monday Noon._

SARAH,

Sh-h...! I'm off!

J.

_Wednesday, more than midnight._

DEAREST S.,

I'm a dying woman but my sketch is done! I've lived on board the typewriter since twelve o'clock on Monday, coming briefly ash.o.r.e for a s.n.a.t.c.h of food or sleep, but it's done and I adore it! (Says the author, modestly.) The heavenly mad haste of the actual doing makes up for all the agonies of the start, restoring the years that the locusts have eaten. I'll tell you all about it in the morning.

Drowsily but triumphantly,

JANE.

_Thursday._

Sally, my dear, I wouldn't thank King George to be my uncle, as Aunt Lyddy would say! I never experienced anything in all my life as satisfying as pounding out that word CURTAIN!

Want to hear about it? You must,--you can't elude me.

Well, I've called it "ONE CROWDED HOUR." The scene is a lonely telegraph station on the desert and the time is the present. The characters are: THE GIRL--THE BROTHER--THE MAN.

The setting shows the front room of the telegraph station crude and rough and bare, just the ticker on the table, another table and three chairs, yet there is a pathetic attempt at softening the ugliness,--a bunch of dried gra.s.ses, magazine covers pinned to the wall, gay cushions in the chairs, a work basket, books.

At rise of curtain GIRL is discovered alone, sewing. She is faintly, quaintly pretty in a mild New England way, no longer young, yet with a pathetic, persistent girlishness about her. A faint whistle is heard. She rises, goes to door of rear room and calls to BROTHER that the train has whistled for the bend. The two trains--east-bound and west-bound--are the events of their silent and solitary days.

She brings him from rear room, her arm about him, steadying him. He is younger than his sister, frail, despondent. She seats him at the instrument and brings him a cup of hot broth, standing over him until he drinks it up.

The necessary exposition comes in brief dialogue: he has been sent west for his cough, has become so weak he is unable to do his work, has taught her, and she in reality carries on all the affairs of the lonely station. He stays in bed most of the time, only dragging himself up at train time, so that the trainmen will not suspect their secret.

The noise of the approaching limited grows louder and louder until it arrives with loud clamor just off stage. GIRL runs out with the orders and the train is heard pulling out again. She comes in and is about to help him back to bed when the instrument begins to click and instantly they are electrified.

"THE HAWK," a daring hold-up man who has baffled justice for a year, has just made off with the Bar K Ranch paysack and posses are forming, but the new sheriff has sworn to take him single-handed.

BROTHER excitedly a.s.serts that the sheriff can do it,--a regular fellow, that new sheriff,--looks and acts just like a man in a movie! He regrets that his sister was not at home the day he came to see them--the one time she'd left the station for more than an hour.

She'd have liked him fine! They excitedly discuss the chances of the bandit's coming their way, for just beyond their station is the famous Pa.s.s through the mountains, through which so many rogues have ridden to freedom. In feverish haste BROTHER gets out his clumsy pistol and loads it, to her timid distress. Their drab day has turned to scarlet; he talks glowingly of the new sheriff, envies him.... Instrument clicks again. It is the sheriff, asking if they have seen a solitary horseman, and saying that he is on his way there, to watch the Pa.s.s.

BROTHER gets himself so wrought up that he brings on a fit of coughing and she makes him go back to bed.

Left alone again in the front room, she tries to settle down to her sewing, but she sings as she rocks--

"In days of old When knights were bold, And barons held their sway--"

Then, childishly, half ashamed, she begins to "pretend." She s.n.a.t.c.hes off the red table cover and drapes it about herself for a train, casts the crude furniture for the roles of moat and drawbridge and castle wall, and herself for a captive princess, held by a robber chief, flinging herself into her fantasy with such abandon that she does not hear the approaching hoof beats. At the pinnacle of her big speech the door is wrenched open and THE MAN stands there, a gun in each hand, demanding--

"Who's here?"

It fits in with her make-believe so amazingly that for an instant she is dazed and can hardly tell reality from romance, but then she gathers herself and says with a little gasp--

"Why, Mister Sheriff, we aren't hiding THE HAWK!"

THE MAN, who is, of course, the bandit, instantly catches her mistake and poses as the sheriff. She asks him eagerly if she may send a message for him, to cover up her confusion as she takes off her table-cloth train. Then, realizing that she has betrayed their secret, she throws herself on his mercy and tells of her brother's failing health, and of how she has had to do the work to hold the job, and begs him not to tell. He promises, and then has her send several messages for him in the name of the sheriff, and from his expression as she is telegraphing, the audience will infer that he has good and sufficient reason to know that the sheriff will not arrive. He states to the several ranches where she wires for him that he--the sheriff--will guard the Pa.s.s.

BROTHER, roused by voices, comes silently to the door. Their backs are toward him and they do not see him. BROTHER hears her call him "Mister Sheriff," stares, takes in the situation, his face speaking his terror. He softly pulls the door to and disappears.

GIRL and MAN talk. He is a gay, dashing, Robin Hood sort of chap and she is charmed. She asks him to step outside to see the gallant little garden she is raising in the desert. They go out, and instantly BROTHER creeps out, stumbles to table, waits until they are out of hearing, sends a quick message. Then he creeps to the door and conveys by his mutterings that he is going to untie THE HAWK's horse and let him run away. Apparently the horse doesn't go, for he reaches back, picks up a cane and leans out again. This time there is the sound of skurrying hoofs and the horse tears away. BROTHER staggers back into the rear room, closing the door.

MAN and GIRL rush in. He is desperate,--the horse,--a wild and half-broken one, has made straight for the Pa.s.s. GIRL wants to wire for another horse to be brought to him, but after a moment's grim thought, he decides to jump on the eastbound train, due in a few minutes, and go on to the next station, where he can get a good horse.

Then there is a pretty scene between them, when she confesses her pity for THE HAWK and her wicked hope that he may get away--"I can't bear to have even _things_ hunted, let alone a man!"

THE MAN is touched, and tells her that he knows a good deal about the bandit; that he has had a rotten deal straight through life; that there's a streak of decency in him for all the yellow; that he's heard that THE HAWK meant to make this his last job ... to go back east again and make a fresh start....

THE GIRL, star-eyed and pink-cheeked now, tells him of her home "down east," of how keen she was to come to the wild, wonderful west, of how she thinks that "one crowded hour of glorious life" is worth a whole leaden existence. That reminds her of her graduating essay, which she digs out of the trunk, tied with baby-blue ribbon. "One Crowded Hour" was her burning topic, but her hours and days and years have been crowded only with homely toil and poverty and worries.

THE MAN, softened incredibly, tells her she is the gentlest thing he ever knew.... He takes the blue ribbon and says he's going to keep it for luck. There is a beautiful, wordless moment for her, touched by magic into girlhood again.

Then--shouts, galloping hoofs, shots! THE MAN springs to his feet, hands on his guns.

BROTHER, at door of rear room, his old pistol describing wavering circles in his shaking hand, cries hoa.r.s.ely,

"Harriet Mary, you come here to me! That's not the sheriff! That's THE HAWK!"

THE MAN, with a gentle word to her, tells her to stand aside....

"They'll never put THE HAWK in a cage!"

THE GIRL, after a dazed moment, turns to a veritable fury of resolution. The east-bound train whistles. There is still a chance, if she can get him on board. Sound of posse riding nearer. She makes MAN hide under the curtain where her dresses hang.

BROTHER starts toward the front door but she seizes him roughly, pushing him back toward the bedroom.

"Listen," he gasps, "Harriet Mary--that's THE HAWK!"

"I don't care! I don't care! I don't _care_! You hush! You keep still!" She pushes him into the room so violently that he falls, coughing terribly, to the floor. A look of fleeting horror crosses her face but she bangs and bolts the door. She draws the curtain more carefully over THE MAN, flings open the front door and calls above the clamor of the on-coming train--

"He's gone! Gone! We tried to keep him--quick--through the Pa.s.s!

_Don't you see the hoof-prints?_"

The posse wheels and thunders away. The train roars in. THE MAN, coming out from under the curtain, s.n.a.t.c.hes up her thin hand, kisses it, dashes out. She forces herself to take the message out to the trainmen. She comes back, stands in strained and breathless listening.... The train pulls noisily out.

Little by little her tension relaxes. The magic robe of youth, renewed, falls from her thin shoulders. At a sound from the inner room she gasps, clutches her hands together on her breast, her eyes wide with terror and remorse, starts running to her brother.

CURTAIN!

Can you _see_ it, Sally? Do you think it will "get across?" Will I be able to "put it over"?