“Will there be some one at the train to meet you?” he inquired.
“No; but my street-car line is only a block from the depot, and the car takes me almost to our door.”
“I will put you on the car,” he said; and this he did some few minutes later, bidding her “Good night,” and standing in the street to catch a last glimpse of her as the car droned away to the northward. Then he turned away to seek a hotel, and was well uptown before he remembered that he had not thought to ask her address, or to ask if he might call upon her.
“But that is all right,” he mused. “Denver isn’t London, and if I can ever pull myself up into the ranks of the well-behaved, I shall find her.”
CHAPTER IV
THE MIGRANTS
Time was, and is no more, when invalids, hopeful and hopeless, thronged the eastern foothills of the Rockies till there was no longer houseroom for them in the cities, and a new word “lunger” was grafted upon the exuberant stock of Western folk speech to distinguish them. Unlike the pioneers of a still earlier day, who crossed the plains with their worldly possessions snugly sheltered beneath the canvas tilt of a single prairie schooner, these migrants for health’s sake were chiefly of the class which neither toils nor spins, and to the foothill cities they presently added suburbs architecturally characteristic each after its kind. In these suburbs the trim-built town house of New England is the commonest type, but the more florid style of the middle West is not lacking, and now and then, in the roomier city fringe, there are replicas done in red brick of the low-storied, wide-verandaed country house of the South.
Such was the home of the Langfords in the Highlands of North Denver. Driven from the ancestral acres in the blue-grass region of Tennessee in the late afternoon of his life, the judge had determined to make the new home in the life-giving altitudes as nearly like the old as money and the materials at hand would compass, and he had succeeded passing well. He had bought acres where others bought lots, and the great roomy house, with its low-pitched roof and wide verandas on three sides, stood in the midst of whatsoever Tennessee greenery would stand transplantation from the blue-grass region to the less genial climate of the clear-skied altitudes.
On pleasant Sunday afternoons, when Dorothy was at her mission school and the judge slept peacefully in his own particular chair, when Mrs. Langford followed her husband’s example in the privacy of her room, and Will was no one ever knew just where, the hammock slung at the corner of the veranda which commanded a view of the mountains was Isabel’s especial convenience. For one reason, there was the view; for another, the hammock swung opposite that portion of the low railing which was Harry Antrim’s favourite perch during the hour or two which measured his customary Sunday afternoon visit.
Being very much in love with Isabel, Antrim was quite willing to turn his back upon the scenery for the sake of looking at her. And as between a winsome young woman swinging in a hammock—a young woman with laughing brown eyes and a profusion of glory-tinted hair framing a face to which piquancy and youthful beauty lent equal charms—who but a scenery-mad pilgrim of the excursion trains would think of making a comparison?
In these Sunday afternoon talks Isabel could be abstract or concrete as occasion demanded. What time the young man dwelt overmuch on railway matters, she found it convenient to be able to look over his shoulder at the mighty panorama unrolled and unrolling itself in endless transformation scenes against the western horizon. And when Antrim, finding himself ignored, would come back from things practical to things personal, she had but to close her eyes to the scenic background and to open them again upon the personality of her companion.