“Immigrants? Ted! How much you girls have to learn. I don’t know how I can tell it to you in a few words, but if you had lived out in a large, new, unsettled State, you would know that the hope of its future lies in its blessed homeseekers. Where do they come from? Where don’t they, you mean, Polly. They are people who really need a home, who love the open, and the new land, and the chance of making good, as we say out West here. It is hard for you who have lived in the old States to get that point of view, but there lives to-day in the hearts and souls of our western homeseekers the essence of the old pioneer spirit.”
“Are they farmers?” asked Ruth practically.
“Farmers! Oh, Ruth, listen. Father and Arch and myself were at the great land-drawing in South Dakota, several years ago, and I wish you could have seen the ‘nesters’ then. A little girl like my sister Peggie drew the numbers, and I know a young girl got the best of the lot. Up in our section even, there is one school-teacher from New York State, who is making a success out of her homestead. Her mother and two younger sisters are with her. Right next to her is old Rattlesnake Bill Perkins. He used to be a scout, and then a trapper, in the old days. Now, he has settled down, and has a sugar-beet farm, and is raising sheep too.”
“Seems to me as if out West here, you never stop to fret,” Polly exclaimed. “When one thing changes, you just change too.”
“We have to, or be left behind in the race,” said Jean simply. “But we’re all of us pretty wide awake, Polly. We have not had time to sleep as much as you do when in the Old Dominion.”
It was the next day when they began to see hills, and even before the gray and violet shadows along the western horizon took shape, the train turned into the rolling prairie land. For miles there was not a single tree; nothing but the limitless, billowy sea of sunburnt yellow grass, with now and then a bleaching skull. Sometimes, they would pass a grazing herd, with a solitary figure on horseback. If it happened to be a boy, he would rise in the stirrups, and let out a whoop of welcome at the train as it flashed by.
The towns seemed like villages, so small were the houses, and all of wood, and brightly painted. “Like Noah’s Ark towns,” Ted said, laughingly. Even the trees looked new and precise, set out along the newly paved streets. But finally, the shadows that trailed low like clouds took form, and here and there a cone separated itself from the mass, only to be lost again in the blue distances.
Mr. Timony joined his family at Omaha. He was a tall, lean, sunburnt looking man, with happy eyes, and a habit of rubbing his bare chin. The baby seemed to know her father by instinct, and Mrs. Timony was like a busy mother robin, showing off her brood.
The invalid girl got off at Omaha, to change for the Colorado line, and Isabel made her promise to let them know how she progressed. At Osceola, Sue and Ted helped their charge off the train with all her bundles and satchels, and she landed plump into Danny’s arms. Danny turned out to be about forty, and weighed over two hundred pounds.
“Oh, Miss Murray, aren’t real people splendid?” Ted said, finally. “I think they’re more account than anything else. They’re books and music and everything, all at once. I’ve had so much fun on this trip, just getting acquainted, and being interested.”