Romance was in her hungry heart; such romance as the Sunday-groomed youths who frequented the house on the hill might never satisfy. She'd read books, all sorts of books, but one of the plains she loved. In it a somewhat saturnine horseman, a son of the sage-brush, unlettered but tutored much by life, had wooed and won a prim little schoolmistress from the East. Whether she went with the hope of emulation in her heart or not none can venture to say. Maybe it was in search of manhood, a different kind of man.
Anyhow, she went. And found a school to teach. And disillusionment. She could not teach school; she knew more than her scholars, yet not so much more of what they needed to be taught. It was not always clear in her mind whether it had been the Delaware or the Rappahannock which furnished Washington's transportation problem. And two and two didn't always make four; not if she didn't keep her mind terribly concentrated, when she wanted to dream.
The children loved her; they cried, unaccountably to their parents, when she had to leave. But the parents were ruthless about it; they weren't paying school taxes to support a slip of a girl who couldn't hammer the three essential R's into their undoubtedly gifted offsprings' heads, even though her hair was high-piled and tawny-red, and her skin like cream; even though there were violet lights in her singularly eager eyes.
When one less practical than the rest tried to point out that she had a bearing different from theirs; "genteel" he called it, yet without offense to the most humble, and that she "talked good, too," and in a less nasal way, they rode him down. Their progeny was yet a long step from a drawing-room they averred, or the need to know how to enter one.
She lost her position. In Estabrook, loath to acknowledge herself disappointed, she found another, and lost that. But she considered this scarcely a mishap, for she couldn't have lived upon what it paid anyway. Moreover she was becoming rapidly afraid of this country; it was bigger and she was littler than she had supposed. And no dashing horsemen had ridden up to her schoolhouse door and handed her nosegays and assured her that her eyes were the same shade of blue. She'd pricked that bubble! Most of them chewed tobacco with no delicate regard for outward appearances.
With her money running perilously low she had taken stock of her wardrobe and found it already shabby, and decided to go back East while there was still time. She'd try New York. Her pride would not handicap her there any more than it had here, for no one would know her. She'd find something to do in New York; of course she would. She'd have to!
Then the toad-person had laid unclean eyes upon her in the dining-room of the Cactus House, and contrived meetings where their bodies must brush close in passing. And followed her to the station. And she was biting her lip now to keep from being silly and screaming; trying to plan in panic the scathing things which she must say.
It was dark there. The toad could not see her face and thus learn that her eyes were dilated. The East-bound roared in as he came up. She tried to run—it was her train—and couldn't. The toad put a hand upon her. And then Blue Jeans—blue serge now—dropped off the steps of the smoker in the shadow close behind her, and became instantly absorbed in the tableau.
Blue Jeans had whipped Condit. Indeed, he had considered it an unfair thing. Why, Condit was only a boy—not more than twenty-one or twenty-two at the most—a baby!—no bigger than himself. Not half so big as the superintendent! And he could not fight well, either. He danced a lot, and feinted, and made a great show of annihilation, but he couldn't really fight. Blue Jeans had been sorry for him a little; not much, because he'd ought to be in some other business if he couldn't take care of himself. But he'd dropped so still, the first time Blue Jeans hit him. So huddled like!
"Have I killed him?" he asked Larrabie, remorsefully, after it had happened.