CHAPTER II
THE ARRIVAL
Virginia Hunter was right. Priscilla Winthrop, her roommate at St. Helen’s, and junior partner in the formation of the Vigilante Order, had not been still for ten minutes since five A. M. At that hour she had risen from bed, dressed hurriedly, and bribed the sleepy porter to allow her a seat on the observation platform. It was contrary to custom and orders at that hour, but he had done it notwithstanding. Apparently this young lady would take no refusal.
Priscilla had moved her chair to the extreme rear of the platform that nothing on either side might escape her eager eyes. She had watched the sun rise from behind the first mountain spurs, and gild their barren summits and sagebrush-covered sides. They looked so gaunt and lonely standing there, she thought, like great gods guarding the entrance 12 to an enchanted land. Between her and them stretched the plains—here white with alkali, there barren with sparse sagebrush. Not infrequently the train rumbled across a little creek or irrigation ditch around which cottonwoods grew and grass was green. In these fertile spots there were always rude houses of logs with outlying shacks and corrals. Priscilla had shuddered at the thought of living in such places. These must be other pioneers, she said to herself, whose ancestors Virginia delighted to honor. Well, they most certainly deserved it!
She had hardly kept her seat at all. There was constantly something on one side or the other which attracted her attention, and she darted right and left much to the amusement of the brakeman who sat within the car and watched her. As they hurried through one of the irrigated spots, she heard a bird sing—a clear, jubilant, rollicking song. Could it be the meadow-lark of which Virginia had always spoken? At six they had passed through a prairie-dog town, whose inhabitants had thus far existed for Priscilla only in books and in Virginia’s stories. 13 Her fascinated eyes spied the little animals, as for one instant they stood upright to survey this rude and noisy intruder, and then darted into their house doorways. She had knocked over two camp chairs in her excited efforts to reach the brakeman, and assure herself that they were really prairie dogs.
But the climax had occurred shortly afterward when while going through a country of sagebrush stretches and grim, almost naked buttes, she had seen—actually seen a cow boy! He was true to every description Virginia had ever given her—sombrero, bandana, chaps and all! She could not see his face, but she knew he must be fine-looking like the “Virginian” or like Dick at the Hunter ranch. He was galloping through the sagebrush on a mottled, ugly-looking broncho, doubtless bent on some secret errand.
Priscilla was seized with half a dozen impulses as she watched him. Should she hurry through four cars and tell the others that they might see him also? Should she send the porter? How any one could sleep at such a time as this was far beyond her 14 comprehension! But she had remained, rooted at last to one spot, and watched him until he was lost to sight. How would it seem, she wondered, to gallop alone through this country? She hoped the cow boy had noticed the sun rise over the buttes; she hoped that even now he was not blind to the great mountains in the distance, which were reaching their blue summits toward the sky.
She drew a long breath of the thin, clear mountain air! So this was Virginia’s country! It was a big land! She understood now what Virginia had meant by talking about the bigness of everything. The plains, stretching on and on, gray-green with sagebrush, the gaunt mountain spurs, the far-away real mountains, blue and snow-furrowed, the great, clear sky over all! It must be wonderful at night with countless stars and a moon looking down upon the loneliness of everything. There was something about it all that, in some strange way, pulled out one’s very soul—that made one want to be big in thought, tolerant, kind!