“It wouldn’t be any bother, would it?”
“Of course not, silly! Come on. Ma and I always eat after the stiffs’ve gone out to work. Pa eats with them. We’ve got a dandy cook. Come on—Joshua.”
The morning sun accentuated the Pocahontas coloring in her cheeks. She wore a red-checked gingham dress. Her bronze hair hung loose down her back, and was gathered with a ribbon at the nape of her neck. Joshua noticed now that it was “frizzly” instead of straight or wavy or curly, and he thought that if he were to squeeze it in his hand it would immediately spring free again, like the stuffing of a curled-hair mattress.
At the door of the dining tent Madge introduced him to her mother:
“Ma, this is the boy I was telling you about. He slept in a boxcar all night. And—and he hasn’t had any breakfast. So I invited him.”
Madge’s mother proved to be a comely woman of over forty, and Joshua was not a little surprised at her apparent refinement. While a boy of fourteen makes few pretenses of being himself refined, he is quick to note it or the lack of it in his elders. She was dressed simply and neatly in an inexpensive house gown. Joshua wondered, too, how she could look so fresh and unsoiled in a camp by the railroad tracks, where men worked all day long at moving dirt.
She held out her hand and smiled. “We’d like to have you stay to breakfast with us,” she said. “Madge has told me quite a bit about you. I’d like to hear more. And it may be that I can help you.”
“No’m,” said Joshua. “I guess nobody can help me. I guess I only wanta go West. I can’t go home again—I guess that’s the way you want to help me.”
Mrs. Mundy only smiled and led the way into the dining tent.
The three sat at one end of a long oilcloth-covered table, and the camp cook, a dark man with a heavy mustache, in a dingy white apron and white cook’s coat and cap, waited on them, setting a wide assortment of food before them in deep granite pans.