CHAPTER XIII.
The Argonauts Return to the Rising Sun
It was mid-October. The two saddle-horses and a team for carriage use had been shipped ahead. In the private car the little party was beginning its own journey Eastward. From the rear platform they had watched the tall figure of Uncle Peter Bines standing in the bright autumn sun, aloof from the band of kerchief-waving friends, the droop of his head and shoulders showing the dejection he felt at seeing them go. He had resisted all entreaties to accompany them.
His last injunction to Percival had been to marry early.
"I know your stock and I know you" he said; "and you got no call to be rangin' them pastures without a brand. You never was meant fur a maverick. Only don't let the first woman that comes ridin' herd get her iron on you. No man knows much about the critters, of course, but I've noticed a few things in my time. You pick one that's full-chested, that's got a fairish-sized nose, and that likes cats. The full chest means she's healthy, the nose means she ain't finicky, and likin' cats means she's kind and honest and unselfish. Ever notice some women when a cat's around? They pretend to like 'em and say 'Nice kitty!' but you can see they're viewin' 'em with bitter hate and suspicion. If they have to stroke 'em they do it plenty gingerly and you can see 'em shudderin' inside like. It means they're catty themselves. But when one grabs a cat up as if she was goin' to eat it and cuddles it in her neck and talks baby-talk to it, you play her fur bein' sound and true. Pass up the others, son.
"And speakin' of the fair sex," he added, as he and Percival were alone for a moment, "that enterprisin' lady we settled with is goin' to do one thing you'll approve of.
"She's goin'," he continued, in answer to Percival's look of inquiry, "to take her bank-roll to New York. She says it's the only place fur folks with money, jest like you say. She tells Coplen that there wa'n't any fit society out here at all,—no advantages fur a lady of capacity and ambitions. I reckon she's goin' to be 403 all right."
"Seems to me she did pretty well here; I don't see any kicks due her."
"Yes, but she's like all the rest. The West was good enough to make her money in, but the East gets her when spendin' time comes."
As the train started he swung himself off with a sad little "Be good to yourself!"
"Thank the Lord we're under way at last!" cried Percival, fervently, when the group at the station had been shut from view. "Isn't it just heavenly!" exclaimed his sister.
"Think of having all of New York you want—being at home there—and not having to look forward to this desolation of a place."
Mrs. Bines was neither depressed nor elated. She was maintaining that calm level of submission to fate which had been her lifelong habit. The journey and the new life were to be undertaken because they formed for her the line of least resistance along which all energy must flow. Had her children elected to camp for the remainder of their days in the centre of the desert of Gobi, she would have faced that life with as little sense of personal concern and with no more misgivings.
Down out of the maze of hills the train wound; and then by easy grades after two days of travel down off the great plateau to where the plains of Nebraska lay away to a far horizon in brown billows of withered grass.
Then came the crossing of the sullen, sluggish Missouri, that highway of an earlier day to the great Northwest; and after that the better wooded and better settled lands of Iowa and Illinois.
"Now we're getting where Christians live," said Percival, with warm appreciation.
"Why, Percival," exclaimed his mother, reprovingly, "do you mean to say there aren't any Christians in Montana City? How you talk! There are lots of good Christian people there, though I must say I have my doubts about that new Christian Science church they started last spring." "The term, Mrs. Thorndike, was used in its social rather than its theological significance," replied her son, urbanely. "Far be it from me to impugn the religion of that community of which we are ceasing to be integers at the pleasing rate of sixty miles an hour. God knows they need their faith in a different kind of land hereafter!"
And even Mrs. Bines was not without a sense of quiet and rest induced by the gentler contours of the landscape through which they now sped.
"The country here does seem a lot cosier," she admitted.
The hills rolled away amiably and reassuringly; the wooded slopes in their gay colouring of autumn invited confidence. Here were no forbidding stretches of the grey alkali desert, no grim bare mountains, no solitude of desolation. It was a kind land, fat with riches. The shorn yellow fields, the capacious red barns, the well-conditioned homes, all told eloquently of peace and plenty. So, too, did the villages—those lively little clearing-houses for immense farming districts. To the adventurer from New York they seem always new and crude. To our travellers from a newer, cruder region they were actually aesthetic in their suggestions of an old and well-established civilisation.
In due time they were rattling over a tangled maze of switches, dodging interminable processions of freight-cars, barely missing crowded passenger trains whose bells struck clear and then flatted as the trains flew by; defiling by narrow water-ways, crowded with small shipping; winding through streets lined with high, gloomy warehouses, amid the clang and clatter, the strangely-sounding bells and whistles of a thousand industries, each sending up its just contribution of black smoke to the pall that lay always spread above; and steaming at last into a great roomy shed where all was system, and where the big engine trembled and panted as if in relief at having run in safety a gantlet so hazardous.
"Anyway, I'd rather live in Montana City than Chicago," ventured Mrs. Bines.
"Whatever pride you may feel in your discernment, Mrs. Cadwallader, is amply justified," replied her son, performing before the amazed lady a bow that indicated the lowest depths of slavish deference.
"I am now," he continued, "going out to pace the floor of this locomotive-boudoir for a few exhilarating breaths of smoke, and pretend to myself that I've got to live in Chicago for ever. A little discipline like that is salutary to keep one from forgetting the great blessing which a merciful Providence has conferred upon one."
"I'll walk a bit with you," said his sister, donning her jacket and a cap.
"Lest my remarks have seemed indeterminate, madam," sternly continued Percival at the door of the car, "permit me to add that if Chicago were heaven I should at once enter upon a life of crime. Do not affect to misunderstand me, I beg of you. I should leave no avenue of salvation open to my precious soul. I should incur no risk of being numbered among the saved. I should be b-a-d, and I should sit up nights to invent new ways of evil. If I had any leisure left from being as wicked as I could be, I should devote it to teaching those I loved how to become abandoned. I should doubtless issue a pamphlet, 'How to Merit Perdition Without a Master. Learn to be Wicked in your Own Home in Ten Lessons. Instructions Sent Securely Sealed from Observation. Thousands of Testimonials from the Most Accomplished Reprobates of the Day.' I trust Mrs. Llewellen Leffingwell-Thompson, that you will never again so far forget yourself as to utter that word 'Chicago' in my presence. If you feel that you must give way to the evil impulse, go off by yourself and utter the name behind the protection of closed doors—where this innocent girl cannot hear you. Come, sister. Otherwise I may behave in a manner to be regretted in my calmer moments. Let us leave the woman alone, now. Besides, I've got to go out and help the hands make up that New York train. You never can tell. Some horrible accident might happen to delay us here thirty minutes. Cheer up, ma; it's always darkest just before leaving Chicago, you know."
Thus flippantly do some of the younger sons of men blaspheme this metropolis of the mid-West—a city the creation of which is, by many persons of discrimination, held to be the chief romance and abiding miracle of the nineteenth century. Let us rejoice that one such partisan was now at hand to stem the torrent of abuse. As Percival held back the door for his sister to pass out, a stout little ruddy-faced man with trim grey sidewhiskers came quickly up the steps and barred their way with cheery aggressiveness.
"Ah! Mr. Higbee—well, well!" exclaimed Percival, cordially.
"Thought it might be some of you folks when I saw the car," said Higbee, shaking hands all around.
"And Mrs. Bines, too! and the girl, looking like a Delaware peach when the crop's 'failed.' How's everybody, and how long you going to be in the good old town?"
"Ah! we were just speaking of Chicago as you came in," said Percival, blandly. "Isn't she a great old town, though—a wonder!"
"My boy," said Higbee, in low, solemn tones that came straight from his heart, "she gets greater every day you live. You can see her at it, fairly. How long since you been here?"
"I came through last June, you know, after I left your yacht at Newport."
"Yes, yes; to be sure; so you did—poor Daniel J.—but say, you wouldn't know the town now if you haven't seen it since then. Why, I run over from New York every thirty days or so and she grows out of my ken every time, like a five-year-old boy. Say, I've got Mrs. Higbee up in the New York sleeper, but if you're going to be here a spell we'll stop a few days longer and I'll drive you around—what say?—packing houses—Lake Shore Drive—Lincoln Park—"
He waited, glowing confidently, as one submitting irresistible temptations.
Percival beamed upon him with moist eyes.
"By Jove, Mr. Higbee! that's clever of you—it's royal! Sis and I would like nothing better—but you see my poor mother here is almost down with nervous prostration and we've got to hurry her to New York without an hour's delay to consult a specialist. We're afraid"—he glanced anxiously at the astounded Mrs. Bines, and lowered his voice—"we're afraid she may not be with us long."
"Why, Percival," began Mrs. Bines, dazedly, "you was just saying—"
"Now don't fly all to pieces, ma!—take it easy—you're with friends, be sure of that. You needn't beg us to go on. You know we wouldn't think of stopping when it may mean life or death to you. You see just the way she is," he continued to the sympathetic Higbee—"we're afraid she may collapse any moment. So we must wait for another time; but I'll tell you what you do; go get Mrs. Higbee and your traps and come let us put you up to New York. We've got lots of room—run along now—and we'll have some of that ham, 'the kind you have always bought,' for lunch. A.L. Jackson is a miserable cook, too, if I don't know the truth." Gently urging Higbee through the door, he stifled a systematic inquiry into the details of Mrs. Bines's affliction.
"Come along quick! I'll go help you and we'll have Mrs. Higbee back before the train starts."
"Do you know," Mrs. Bines thoughtfully observed to her daughter, "I sometimes mistrust Percival ain't just right in his head; you remember he did have a bad fall on it when he was two years and five months old—two years, five months, and eighteen days. The way he carries on right before folks' faces! That time I went through the asylum at Butte there was a young man kept going on with the same outlandish rigmarole just like Percival. The idea of Percival telling me to eat a lemon-ice with an ice-pick, and 'Oh, why don't the flesh-brushes wear nice, proper clothes-brushes!' and be sure and hammer my nails good and hard after I get them manicured. And back home he was always wanting to know where the meat-augers were, saying he'd just bought nine hundred new ones and he'd have to order a ton more if they were all lost. I don't believe there is such a thing as a meat-auger. I don't know what on earth a body could do with one. And that other young man," she concluded, significantly, "they had him in a little bit of a room with an iron-barred door to it like a prison-cell."