“Why did you come here, to Ely? How long are you going to stay?”
Briefly Beatrice explained about her aunt’s health and the arrangements her father had made.
“I believe Aunt Anna wanted to come because she had been here once before,” she concluded rather vaguely. “I don’t seem to remember if she told me when or why she came.”
“The place has changed since she was here, even since your father was here.” Christina declared. “There is a whole army of foreign laborers, Slavs, Poles, what the men call Bohunks, working on this irrigation project to water the valley. There is a strike brewing. Ah, do I not know? My brother Thorvik talks of nothing else. It is he who urges them on. When such a thing breaks out, Ely will not be a good place for you and your aunt and your sister.”
“But strikes mean just parades and people carrying banners and talking on street-corners,” Beatrice protested. She had seen industrial unrest at home and had thought very little of it. What she did fear was the long journey which had been so difficult for her aunt and which it seemed impossible to face soon again.
“Strikes are not the same in the West. Men carry something besides banners in the parades, and talking on street-corners ends in fights. You had better take your aunt away.”
“It does not seem possible,” Beatrice replied, “but thank you for telling me.” Again she said good-by and rode on, feeling only a little uneasy, for, she reflected, “To live with a man like that brother would make any one think that things were going wrong.”
There were lamps showing in some of the windows of the Village, as she rode clattering up the street, and streaks of light dropping through the rickety shutters of a big, ramshackle building in the center of the town. A stream of men was moving up the steps of this place, which seemed, as its door swung open, to be a public meeting hall. Its benches were crowded with rough-looking men, and someone on a platform at the far end was addressing the close-packed audience. She turned Buck loose at her own door to find his way home, as she had been instructed by Dan O’Leary. Then, tired, stiff, and with much to tell, she hurried into the house.
Dinner that night, in the candle-lit dining-room with the noiseless Chinaman serving them delicious food, was very welcome to the hungry Beatrice. Aunt Anna, looking very frail and weary, but still able to sit up in her cushioned chair, was at the head of the table, with one tall chestnut-haired niece at her right and with the other, the younger one, the pink and plump Nancy who was always laughing and nearly always asking questions, sitting at her left.
“Joe Ling is a good cook,” observed Beatrice with satisfaction, when their white-jacketed chef had gone into the kitchen for the dessert.