"But there is some one here who knows more about that than I do," she said, casually, referring to a point she was covering. "Mrs. Mears, who is on the platform with me to-night, is one of you. She knows from twenty years of actual experience what I am learning from study and observation. She can tell you better than I can how many buckets of water a plainsman's wife carries into an unpiped ranch during the day. Will you tell us, Mrs. Mears?"
She asked a few questions, and hesitatingly, stammeringly at first, the panic-stricken plainswoman answered her. Then a woman in the audience spoke up timidly to compare notes, and in five minutes more Dr. Harland was sitting quietly in the background while Tildy Mears, her brown eyes blazing with interest and excitement, talked to her fellow plainswomen about the problems she and they were meeting together.
Seeing the success of Dr. Harland's experiment, I felt an increased respect for that remarkable woman. She had known that this would happen; she had realized, as I had not, that Tildy Mears could talk to others as simply and as pregnantly as to us, and that her human appeal to her sister workers would be far greater than any even Anna Harland herself could make. One night she described a stampede in words that made a slow chill run the length of my spine. Half an hour later she was discussing "hired hands," with a shrewd philosophy and a quaint humor that drew good-natured guffaws from "hired hands" themselves as well as from their employers in the audience.
Within the next few days Tildy Mears became a strong feature of our campaign. Evening after evening, in primitive Dakota towns, her self-consciousness now wholly gone, she supplemented Dr. Harland's lectures by a talk to her sister women, so simple, so homely, so crudely eloquent that its message reached every heart. During the days she studied the suffrage question, reading and rereading the books we had brought with us, and asking as many questions as an eager and precocious child. Openly and unabashedly Dr. Harland gloried in her.
"Why, she's a born orator," she told me one day, almost breathlessly. "She's a feminine Lincoln. There's no limit to her possibilities. I'd like to take her East. I'd like to educate her—train her. Then she could come back here and go through the West like a whirlwind."
The iridescent bubble was floating so beautifully that it seemed a pity to prick it; but I did, with a callous reminder.
"How about her home?" I suggested—"and her children? and her husband?"
Dr. Harland frowned and bit her lip.
"Humph!" she muttered, her voice taking on the flat notes of disappointment and chagrin. "Humph! I'd forgotten them."
For a moment she stood reflecting, readjusting her plans to a scale which embraced the husband, the home, and the children of her protégée. Then her brow cleared, her irresistible twinkle broke over her face; she smiled like a mischievous child.