Julia frolicked on the wide velvety lawn with all the dogs and cats and children that could be drawn from the surrounding neighborhood. David sat on the porch in a big chair, enjoying the soft breezes sweeping down over the plains, looking through half closed lids out upon the quiet shaded street. Carol crouched excitedly in another chair beside him, squeezing his hand to call attention to every sunburned picturesque son of the plains that galloped down that way. But Connie, with the lustful eyes of a fortune-hunter walked up and down the corridors, peering here and peeking there, listening avidly to every unaccustomed word that was spoken,—getting material.
Quickly the hotels were filled to capacity, and overflowed to cots in the hall, rugs on the porches, and piles of straw in the stables. The street so quietly peaceful on Sunday, by Wednesday was a throbbing thoroughfare, with autos, wagons and horses whirling by in clouds of dust The main street, a block away, was a noisy, active, flourishing, carnival city, with fortune-tellers, two-headed dogs, snake-charmers, minstrels and all the other street-fair habitues in full possession. A dance platform was erected on a prominent corner, and bands were brought in from all the neighboring towns on the plains.
Connie was convinced she could get enough material to last a lifetime. No detective was hotter on the scent of a trail than she. Never two cowboys met in a secluded corner in the lobby to divide their hardly earned coins, but Connie sauntered slowly by, catching every word, noting the size of every coin that changed possession. No gaily garbed horseman could signal to a girl of his admiration, but Connie caught the motion first, and was taking mental notes for future coinage. They were not people to her, just material. She loved them, she reveled in them, she dreamed of them, just as a collector of curios gloats over the treasures he amasses. She classified them in a literary note-book for her own use, and kept them on file for instant reference.
When they went to the fair-grounds, early, in order to secure a comfortable seat for David where he should not miss one twist of a rider's supple body, they were as delighted as children truanting from school. It was the most exhilarating thing in the world,—this clever little trick on the sleeping porch and the white cot, on egg-nogs and beef juice and buttermilk. No wonder their faces tingled with excitement and their eyes sparkled with delight.
Connie was surprised that the girls were pretty, really pretty, with pink and white skin and polished finger nails, those girls in the silk blouses and khaki shirts, those girls with the wide sombrero and the iron muscles, who rode the bucking horses, and raced around the track, and did a thousand other appalling things that pink-skinned, shiny-nailed girls were not wont to do back home. They stayed at the Bijou, a whole crowd of them, and Connie never let them out of her sight until they closed their bedroom doors for the night. They talked in brief broken sentences, rather curtly, but their voices were quiet and low, and they weren't half as slangy as cowgirls, by every literary precedent, ought to be. They were not like Connie, of course, tall and slim, with the fine exalted face, with soft pink palms and soft round arms. And their striking saddle costumes were not half as curious to Fort Morgan as Connie's lacy waists, and her tailored skirts, and her frilly little silk gowns. But they were more curious to Connie.
She tried to picture herself in a sombrero like that, with gauntlets on her hands, and with a fringed leather skirt that reached to her knees, and with a scarlet silk blouse and a yellow silk belt,—and even her distinctly literary imagination could not compass such a miracle. But she was sure if she ever could rig herself up like that, she would look like a dream, and she really envied the cowgirls, who leaped head first from the saddle but always landed right side up.
People of another world, well, yes. But there are ways of getting together.
Connie talked very little that first afternoon. She watched the people around her, and listened as they discussed the points of the horses, the cowgirls and the jockeys with equal impartiality. She heard their bets, their guttural grunts of disapproval with the judges' decisions, their roars of satisfaction when the right horse won. She watched the cowgirls, walking unconcernedly about the ring, flapping their riding-whips against their leather boots. She watched the lithe-limbed cowboys slouching not ungracefully around the nervous ponies, waving their hats in greeting to their friends, calling loud jests to their fellows in the cowboy band. How strange they were, how startlingly human, and yet how thousand-miles removed.
Connie rebelled against it. They were folks. And so was Connie. The thousand miles was a barrier, an injustice. In order to handle literary material, she must get within touching distance of it. All those notes she had collected so painstakingly were cold, inanimate. In order to write of folks she must touch them, feel them, must know they lived and breathed as she did. Why couldn't she get at them,—folks, plain folks, and so was she. A slow fury rose up in her, and she watched the great events Of the afternoon with resentful eyes. Even when a man not entered for racing, swung over the railing into the center field, and scrambled upon the bare back of King Devil, the wild horse of the plains which had never yielded to man's bridling hand, and was tossed and dragged and jerked and twisted, until it seemed there could be no life left in him, yet who finally pulled the horse almost by brute force into submission, while the spectators went wild, and Julia screamed, and Carol sank breathless and white into her seat, and David stood on the bench and yelled until Carol pulled him down,—even then Connie could not get the feeling. She wanted to write these people, to put them on paper, and she couldn't, because they were not people to her, they were just "Good points."
Afterward, when they slowly made their way to the car, and drove home to the Bijou again, Connie was still silent. She saw David comfortably settled in the big chair on the sunny corner of the porch, with Carol beside him and Julia romping on the lawn. Then she walked up and down in front of the hotel. Finally she came back to the corner of the porch.