“At a desolate settlement in Arizona a number of years ago. The Southern Pacific had lately reached the coast, and I was traveling West without a ticket. When it was unavoidable I walked; but railroad hands were more sympathetic in those days, and I came most of the way from Omaha inside and sometimes underneath the freight cars. Down under them was a dusty position in the dry belts.”
Glancing round from the pretty wooden house, which had been furnished without thought of cost, across the wide stretch of lawn, where a smart gardener was guiding a gasoline mower, Ruth found it hard to imagine her father stealing a ride on a freight train. But another thought struck her.
“Where was I then?” she asked.
“With your aunt, or perhaps you had just gone to school. I can’t fix the exact time,” Osborne answered unguardedly; and the girl was filled with a confused sense of love and gratitude.
The school was expensive, and her mother’s relatives were by no means rich, but she knew that her father had been the recipient of a small sum yearly under somebody’s will. It looked as if he had turned it all over for her benefit while he faced stern poverty.
Ruth impulsively pulled her chair nearer to her father, and her cool little fingers closed over one of his big hands.
“I understand now,” she said softly, “why there are lines on your forehead and you sometimes look worn. Your life must have been very hard.”
“Oh, it had its brighter side,” Osborne answered lightly. “Well, Clay was also engaged in beating his passage, and I found him enjoying a long drink from the locomotive tank. We were confronted with the problem how to cross about a hundred miles of arid desert on a joint capital of two dollars. Clay got over the first difficulty by making a water-bag out of some railroad rubber sheeting which he borrowed, while I went round the settlement in search of provisions. I got some, though prices were ruinously high, and at midnight we hid beside the track, waiting for a freight train to pull out. The brakemen had a trick of looking round the cars before they made a start. Though the days were blazing hot, the nights were cold, and we shivered as we lay behind a clump of cacti near the wheels. A man almost trod on us as he ran along the line, but just afterward the engine bell rang, and Clay sprang up to push back one of the big sliding doors while I held the food and water. The runners were stiff, the train began to move; when he opened the door a few inches I had to trot; and by the time he could crawl through, it was too late for me to get up. Then, with a hazy recollection that he had a long way to go, I threw the food and water into the car.”
“That was just like you!” Ruth exclaimed with a flush of pride.
“I imagine it was largely due to absence of mind. I felt very sorry for myself when I stood between the ties and watched the train vanish into the dark. What made it worse, was that of the joint two dollars only fifty cents was his.”