CHAPTER II. The City Swallows Daisy.
The summer dawn came with a warm melting of the dark and a running out over the sky-floor of spilled light from under the edge of the world. Daisy, her nerves thrilling like the nerves of one drunken with wine, leaned untired on the varnished window-sill; looking, with all her young vitality gathered into shine of eyes and beat of heart, for her first view of the city.
The shadow of the express, as the early sun came up, coursed like a hound along the barrow-pits of the right-of-way, and quivered, as it were, in noiseless impact against the stolid cedar fence-posts that stood still and were whipped by in the guise of staring bumpkins as the smart, swift train hummed on its way.
Daisy saw these effects at the edge of her travel-picture out of the corner of her eye merely. Her attention was concentrated forward—forward, to watch for the first white trimming of roof-tops on the dewy green fabric of the prairie-rim. Hateful to her were the square fields by the track, where phlegmatic men and teams moved up and down the black fallow; hateful the whitewashed houses, the homely poplar-clumps, the stacks of straw. Appurtenances, all, of the life with which she had been surfeited (she thought): reminding her of cows to be milked, of barnyard drudgery, of gawky, red-visaged, wholly unpiquant boys, of men content to smoke and drawl away their rare hours of ease.
Hateful! The term is too mild to express the immense energy of the girl's distaste for the life she had, with youth's dash, pushed behind her in one reckless thrust.
She was done with it. For good or for ill, she was done with it all, or thought so, in these kinetic and dancing moments, as new leagues of her unexplored earth uprolled along the endless ribbon of this two-railed track of dreams. New leagues, yes—but, so far, no new scenery. The stations she had passed, and continued to pass, were nothing but an endless chain of Toddburns; the intervening reaches of farm land, no more than linked replicas without number or variation, of the Nixon farm. In spite of the "flyer" and its obvious achievement over distance, Daisy Nixon at moments had the odd sensation that the track was revolving beneath the car-wheels, treadmill-style, and the train merely standing maddeningly still amid the old locale.
But there—there! A quick hypodermic needle of joy pricked her throat, and Daisy caught her breath as the strong keen drug of excitement tingled out to all her nerve-ends. A white kite-tail of houses seemed to drop down and flicker, half in the air, at the point where the uprolling earth revolved against the broad-open casement of the morning sky. Appearing for a moment as a fantasy, it soon settled into a lengthening white saw-blade of joined buildings, low in the distance, dividing the solid green world from the dreamy firmament of a June dawn. Straight toward it rushed the cleaving bullet of the train.
Her head out beneath the raised window-sash, her companion forgotten as though he had never existed, Daisy wrapped herself in the joy of the hour. The white house-line, advancing along the angle of its perspective, broadened and took form and character, split into rays of streets, discovered great chimneys with smoke-plumes, unveiled square buildings in a caparison of glittering windows, began to live and move and give forth human signs. The first workers were already in the streets, for a goose-herd of city whistles was croaking out seven, vying therein with the warning blast of the "flyer's" engine as, barely slackening speed, it rushed along the cobweb of tracks, arrogant and favored possessor, for the time being, of the right of way to the great urban station in the heart of all.
"Well, kid," said the voice of Beatty, "how d'ye like it?"