“Well—I don’t know you from a crow, do I?”
Kate’s eyes flashed.
“You will before I leave Omaha.”
He laughed incredulously as he took a key from the rack.
Kate followed him up the dirty stairway through a dingy hall to a still dingier room in the back of the house. Long and narrow, it looked like a kalsomined cave illumined by a lightning bug in a bottle when he turned the electric switch. She was too tired, however, to be critical and in her utter weariness lost consciousness as soon as her head touched the pillow and slept dreamlessly until the dawn came feebly through the coarse lace curtain that, stiff and gray with dust, hung at the one window of the room.
She rubbed her eyes and looked in bewilderment at the unfamiliar surroundings. Then she remembered, and the trip with all its attendant circumstances came back. She speculated as to the probable amount the sheep had shrunken on the way, how they would compare with other consignments in the yards, whether the market conditions were favorable or otherwise, what the commission agents whom she had known through correspondence for many years would be like.
Her experience with the night clerk came to mind and her frown at the recollection of his insolence changed to a puzzled look as she thought of her retort. Whatever had prompted her to make the empty boast that he would know her before she left Omaha? It was as unlike her as anything she could imagine, but it had seemed to say itself.
She had a subconscious feeling that there was still something else of which she wished to think before getting up, and as she searched her mind it flashed upon her—the stranger who had bumped into her in the dark. Of course, that was it! She heard his pleasant voice plainly and saw his face with great distinctness as revealed by the brakeman’s light. While she recalled his features individually—his eyes, his mouth, his chin, and the meaning they conveyed, his manner with its mixture of friendliness and reserve, she mechanically rubbed her forehead with her finger tips as though the action might assist in catching some elusive memory that was just beyond her reach. Her brows knit in perplexity and she murmured finally:
“He didn’t seem a stranger, somehow—and yet—he was, of course. It would not be possible for me ever to forget a man like that. It seemed as if—” there was bewilderment in her face as she laid her hand upon her heart—“as if, somehow, I knew him here.”
Kate’s belief that no better sheep of their class than hers would be found in the stockyards was justified by subsequent events. Her shipment not only “topped the market,” but she received for her yearling lambs fourteen dollars and sixty-five cents a head—the highest paid since the Civil War. This high rate was due not only to European disturbances, but to the quality and condition of the sheep; and, therefore, apart from the attention which she naturally would have attracted, she was, as the owner, an object of interest in the yards as well as in the stock exchange offices and the bank.