On the station platform in Quanah, one morning, I stopped “waiting for the train” for a moment to watch a man and woman painting on a large signboard across the way. The inevitable wiseacre in the little group of travelling men explained that they were really talented artists, a man and wife.
The husband had contracted—er—a throat affection in their studio back East, and physicians had ordered him to the open air and high, dry altitude of west Texas. So they had come, and were earning expenses, making a series of paintings on signboards, advertisements of a lumber corporation, throughout the Panhandle country.
I walked out across the tracks near where the slightly stooped husband, in overalls, and his little wife, looking very attractive in her neat apron and sunbonnet, were at work.
There was a pathos about the thing that went straight to my heart. The loyal little woman and the stricken husband there in the clear, crisp morning air and sunshine, earnestly striving, undismayed. Something—a common sympathy—thrilled me.
And now the painting seemed artistic. The general idea was a lovely cottage home (built, of course, with Oakley’s lumber, as was intimated). But the cottage was not glaringly new—rather mellowed a bit with time, it seemed, and was the more homelike for it.
In the front stood a sweet little woman, looking down a winding road, and in the expression on her face, painted by the real little woman, was joyous hope—almost certainty—of seeing the husband coming down the road to her and home, after his day’s work.
The colours of sunset added to the beauty of the conception, which altogether made desirable the having such a little wife to wait for one each evening at such a little cottage home. And that was the purpose of it; when you thought of home-building, you also thought of Oakley’s lumber.
The painters were happy in their work—happy as two birds building a nest. The wife, seated on her little stepladder, with palette and brushes, was deftly pointing up the vines about the windows, as all good wives should. She hummed something of a tune, now and then looking gayly down at him, who laughed back up at her from his work on the winding road and distant trees.
A courteous inquiry and my being an Easterner, was a passport into their confidences. “We only paint a little while in the cool of the morning and afternoon of each day,” he was saying to my remarks on the weather. “It’s dangerous to lay on much paint at a time,” he continued, “for the sand ruins it.”
“Oh, if it wasn’t for the sand storms!” she chimed in. “But we love the country, and the folks, too; they seem so much a part of the out of doors, you know. Though we hope—we expect—to go back home before long.” She was looking fondly down at him.