“Yes,” Polly said to herself, as she sped along the road that glittering winter’s day: “Dan isn’t just an ordinary boy. He’s an unusual boy. Why, the world couldn’t afford to lose Dan!” and she looked into the faces of the passers-by, as if to challenge their acquiescence in this bold statement.
Whether Dan was all that Polly thought him, only the future could prove,—that future that Polly was about to secure to him. If she idealised him a bit, why, all the better for Dan, and all the better for Polly, too. One thing is sure, that no one who could have looked into the sister’s heart that winter’s day would have doubted her for an instant when she said to herself:
“He sha’n’t die! I won’t let him die! But, oh! how I wish that cough were mine!”
From her interview with the doctor, Polly brought away with her only one word, “Colorado”; and with that word shining like a great snowy peak in her imagination, she took another swift walk 145 to a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village, where dwelt a man whose son had gone to Colorado three years ago.
“Great place!” he told her; “Great place, Colorado! Mile up in the air! Prairie-dogs and Rocky Mountains! Big cattle ranches that could put all Fieldham in their vest pockets! Cold as thunder, hot as thunder! Blizzards and cyclones and water-spouts! Wind! Blow you right out of your boots! Cures sick folks? Oh, yes. Better than all the doctors. Braces ’em right up—stands ’em on their legs! Nothing like it, so Bill says. Costs a sight to get out there; oh, yes! Fifty dollars and fifteen cents! Queer about that fifteen cents. Seems as though they might ha’ throwed that in on such a long trip’s that; but them railroads ain’t got no insides any way; and when you once git out there, why, there you are!”
The philosophy of that last remark appealed particularly to Polly. “When you once git out there, why, there you are!” Somehow it seemed to make everything 146 perfectly simple and easy. Blizzards and cyclones? Yes, to be sure. But then it was the air that you went out for, Polly reasoned, that was what was going to cure you; and perhaps the more you got of it the quicker you would get cured. And Polly hurried home from her last visit, flushed and eager for the fray. She found her uncle in the barn putting up his horses.
Mr. Seth Lapham was a good man; there could be no doubt about that. Nothing but a sincere and very efficient conscience could have so tempered his natural penuriousness as to cause him to receive into his family a mere sister-in-law’s children and allow them to “want for nothing”; that, too, at a time when his own children, John and Martha, were still a bill of expense to him, before their respective marriages. For many years, Uncle Seth had conscientiously, if not lavishly, fed and clothed the little orphans, whose entire patrimony in the Savings Bank scarcely yielded interest enough to pay for their boots and shoes; but it remained 147 for the present crisis to prove him as open-minded as he was conscientious. For, no sooner had Polly finished the rapid exposition of her great plan—how they were to draw the money from the bank to pay for their tickets and start them in their new life, and how they were to earn their own living when once they got started—than he was ready to admit the reasonableness of it.
“And when you once get out there, why, there you are!” Polly declared, in her most convincing tone.
As she stood before him, flushed and breathless, prepared to do battle for Dan to the very last extremity, her uncle gave old Dick a slap that sent him tramping into his stall, and then said, with the drawling accent peculiar to him:
“Well, Polly, you’re a pretty sensible girl. If the doctor says so, I guess it’s wuth trying.”