The Eagle's Heart Part 34

Morning brought to light a land of small farms, with cattle in minute pastures, surrounded by stacks of hay and grain, plowed fields, threshing crews, and teams plodding to and fro on dusty roads. The plainsman was gone, the prairie farmer filled the landscape. Towns thickened and grew larger. At noon the freight lay at a siding to let the express trains come in at a populous city, and in the wait Mose found time to pace the platform. The people were better dressed, the cowboy hat was absent, and nearly everybody wore not merely a coat but a vest and linen collar. Some lovely girls looking crisp as columbines or plains' poppies looked at him from the doors of the parlor cars. They suggested Mary to him, of course, and made him realize how far he was getting from the range.

These dainty girls looked and acted like some of those he had seen in Canon City and the Springs. They walked with the same step and held their dresses the same way. That must be the fashion, he thought. The men of the town were less solemn than plainsmen, they smiled oftener and they joked more easily. Mose wondered how so many of them made a living in one place. He heard one girl say to another, "Yes--but he's awful sad looking, don't you think so?" and it was some minutes before he began to understand that they were talking about him. Then he wished he knew what else they had said.

There was little chance to see the towns for the train whirled through them with furious jangle of bell and whiz of steam--or else drew up in the freight yard a long way out from the station. When night fell on this, the third day, they were nearing the Great River and all the cattlemen were lamenting the fact. Those who had been over the line before said:

"Too bad, fellers! You'd ought to see the Mississippi, she's a loo-loo.

The bridge, too, is worth seein'."

During the evening there was a serious talk about hotels and the amus.e.m.e.nts to be had. One faction, led by McCleary, of Currant Creek, stood for the "Drovers' Home." "It's right out near the stockyards an'

it's a good place. Dollar a day covers everything, unless you want a big room, which is a quarter extra. Grub is all right--and some darn nice girls waitin' on the table, too."

But Thompson who owned the sheep was contemptuous. "I want to be in town; I don't go to Chicago to live out in the stockyards; I want to be where things go by. I ante my valise at the Grand Palace or the New Merchants'; the best is good enough for me."

McCleary looked a little put down. "Well, that's all right for a man who can afford it. I've got a big family and I wouldn't feel right to be blowing in two or three dollars a day just for style."

"Wherever the girls are thickest, there's where you'll find me," said one of the young fellows.

"That's me," said another.

Thompson smiled with a superior air. "You fellers'll bring up down on South Clark Street before you end. Some choice dive on the levee is gappin' for you. Now, mind you, I won't bail you out. You go into the game with your eyes open," he said, and his banter was highly pleasing to the accused ones.

McCleary turned to Harold, whom he knew only as "Hank," and said:

"Hank, you ain't sayin' a word; what're your plans?"

"I'll stay with you as long as you need me."

"All right; I'll take care o' you then."

Night fell before they came in sight of the city. They were woefully behindhand and everything delayed them. After a hundred hesitations succeeded by fierce forward dashes, after switching this way and that, they came to a final halt in a jungle of freight cars, a chaos of mysterious activities, and a dense, hot, steaming atmosphere that oppressed and sickened the men from the mountains. Lanterns sparkled and looped and circled, and fierce cries arose. Engines snorted in sullen labor, charging to and fro, aimlessly it appeared. And all around cattle were bawling, sheep were pleading for release, and swine lifted their piercing protests against imprisonment.

"Here we are, in Chicago!" said McCleary, who always entered the city on that side. "Now, fellers, watch out for yourselves. Keep your hands on your wallets and don't blow out the electric light."

"Oh, you go to h.e.l.l," was their jocular reply.

"We're no spring chickens."

"You go up against this town, my boys, and you'll think you're just out o' the sh.e.l.l."

Mose said nothing. He had the indifferent air of a man who had been often to the great metropolis and knew exactly what he wished to do.

It was after twelve o'clock when the crowd of noisy cattlemen tramped into the Drovers' Home, glad of a safe ending of their trip. They were all boisterous and all of them were liquorous except Harold, who drank little and remained silent and uncommunicative. He had been most efficient in all ways and McCleary was grateful and filled with admiration of him. He had taken him without knowing who he was, merely because Reynolds requested it, but he now said:

"Hank, you're a jim-dandy; I want you. When you've had your spree here, you come back with me and I'll do the right thing by ye."

Harold thanked him in offhand phrase and went early to bed.

He had not slept in a hotel bed since the night in Marmion when Jack was with him, and the wonderful charm and mystery and pa.s.sion of those two days, so intimately wrought in with pa.s.sionate memories of Mary, came back upon him now, keeping him awake till nearly dawn. He arose late and yet found only McCleary at breakfast; the other men had remained so long in the barroom that sleep and drunkenness came together.

After breakfast Harold wandered out into the street. To his left a hundred towers of dull gray smoke rose, and prodigious buildings set in empty s.p.a.ces were like the cliffs of red stone in the Quirino. Beyond, great roofs thickened in the haze, farther on in that way lay Chicago, and somewhere in that welter, that tumult, that terror of the unknown, lived Mary.

With McCleary he took a car that galloped like a broncho, and started for the very heart of the mystery. As the crowds thickened, as the cars they met grew more heavily laden, McCleary said:

"My G.o.d! Where are they all goin'? How do they all make a livin'?"

"That beats me," said Harold. "Seems as if they eat up all the grub in the world."

The older man sighed. "Well, I reckon they know what they're doin', but I'd hate to take my chances among 'em."

If any man had told Harold before he started that he would grow irresolute and weak in the presence of the city he would have bitterly resented it, but now the ma.s.s and weight of things. .h.i.therto unimagined appalled and bewildered him.

A profound melancholy settled over his heart as the smoke and gray light of the metropolis closed in over his head. For half a day he did little more than wander up and down Clark Street. His ears, acute as a hound's, took hold of every sound and attempted to identify it, just as his eyes seized and tried to understand the forms and faces of the swarming pavements. He felt his weakness as never before and it made him sullen and irritable. He acknowledged also the folly of thrusting himself into such a world, and had it not been for a certain tenacity of purpose which was beyond his will, he would have returned with his companions at the end of their riotous week.

Up till the day of their going he had made no effort to find Mary but had merely loitered in the streets in the daytime, and at night had visited the cheap theaters, not knowing the good from the bad. The city grew each day more vast and more hateful to him. The mere thought of being forced to earn a living in such a mad tumult made him shudder. The day that McCleary started West Harold went to see him off, and after they had shaken hands for the last time, Harold went to the ticket window and handed in his return coupon to the agent, saying, "I'd like to have you put that aside for me; I don't want to run any chances of losing it."

The agent smiled knowingly. "All right, what name?"

"Excell, 'XL,' that's my brand."

"All right, she's right here any time you want her--inside of the thirty days--time runs out on the fifteenth."

"I savvy," said Harold as he turned away.

He disposed his money about his person in four or five small wads, and so fortified, faced the city. To lose his little fund would be like having his pack mule give out in the desert, and he took every precaution against such a calamity.

Nothing of this uncertainty and inner weakness appeared in his outward actions, however. No one accused him of looking like an "easy mark" or "a soft thing." The line of his lips and the lower of his strongly marked eyebrows made strangers slow of approach. He was never awkward, he could not be so any more than could a fox or a puma, but he was restless, irresolute, brooding, and gloomy.

He moved down to the Occidental Grand, where he was able to secure a room on the top floor for fifty cents per day. His meals he picked up wherever he chanced to be when feeling hungry. When weary with his wanderings he often returned to his seat on the sidewalk before the hotel and watched the people pa.s.s, finding in this a melancholy pleasure.

One evening the night clerk, a brisk young fellow, took a seat beside him. "This is a great corner for the girls all right. A feller can just about take his pick here along about eight. They're after a ticket to the theater and a supper. If a feller only has a few seemolleons to spare he can have a life worth livin'."

Mose turned a curious glance upon him. "If you wanted to find a party in this town how would you go at it?"

"Well, I'd try the directory first go-off. If I didn't find him there I'd write to some of his folks, if I knew any of 'em, and get a clew. If I didn't succeed then I'd try the police. What's his name?"

Harold ignored this query.

"Where could I try this directory?"

"There's one right in there on the desk."

"That big book?"

"Yes."

"I didn't know what that was. I thought it was a dictionary."

The clerk shrieked with merriment. "The dictionary! Well, say, where have you been raised?"