Symes shoved up the shade to see the lovely Pearline Starr, with her head tied in a nubia, fighting her way through his front gate. She was bearing ahead of her some garment on the end of a stick. Mr. Symes dressed hastily that he might respond to her knock.
When Mr. Symes opened the door Miss Starr was clinging, breathless, to a pillar of the veranda in order to keep her footing. She cast down her eyes as she extended her offering.
"Are these yours, Mr. Symes? We found them around a sagebrush in the backyard."
"If they were," said Mr. Symes shortly, "I'd be in bed. They look like Tuttses."
The air was filled with flying papers, shingles, pans, and there were times when he could not see across the street. Alva Jackson was in his corral distributing hay among his horses from a sack instead of a pitchfork. The Perfect Climate! Symes watched Miss Starr dig in her heels and depart lying back horizontally on the breeze. Then he slammed the door, but not before he saw Parrott's coal-house making its way toward his lot. He already had a cellar-door and a chicken coop which did not belong to him, while a "wash" he did not recognize was lodged in his woodpile of jack-pine and ground-cedar in the backyard.
The Homeseekers' Excursion arrived at last—hours late—delayed by the worst dust-storm in months. The committee of prominent citizens met it where the cinder platform had been before it blew off.
The excursionists looked through the car-windows to see members of the Cowboy Band with one arm locked around the frame-work of the water-tank and with the other endeavoring to keep divers horns, trombones and flutes in their mouth. No sound reached the ears of the excursionists owing to the fact that they were on the windward side of the band and the stirring notes of "Hot Time in the Old Town" were going the other way.
Mr. Symes's neat speech of welcome was literally blown out of his mouth, so he contented himself with shouting a warning to "look out for his hat" in the ear of the first Homeseeker to venture from the car, and led the way to the Terriberry House.
Crowheart found itself in the position of the boy at the double-ringed circus who suffers from the knowledge that there is something he must miss. It could not give its undivided attention to the strangers and at the same time attend the funeral of old Edouard Dubois, which was to be held under the auspices of the beneficiary society of which he had been a member.
To extend the warm, western hand of fellowship to the Homeseekers and find out where they came from, what their business was, and how much money they had was a pleasure to which the citizens of Crowheart had long looked forward, but also it was a pleasure and a duty to walk down the Main street in white cotton gloves and strange habiliments, following the new hearse. The lateness of the train had made it impossible to do both.