CHAPTER XXXVII
He and Dora took a train for New York early the next morning. The air seemed to be growing more crisp. Dora's color was better, her skin clearer, her eyes brighter. She seemed more and more interested in the scenery along the way. They had to stop over in Washington for about three hours, and, leaving their valises in a check-room, they strolled about the city. John did not realize it, but the care and entertainment of the child had much to do with keeping his mind from dwelling on his troubles. Once he caught himself actually laughing over a droll mistake Dora made. She was so much interested in the sights that she walked nearly half a block at the side of a stranger, thinking that the man was John, who had paused to buy a cigar, and when she discovered her mistake she fairly screamed and hastened to John, whose hand she wanted to hold thereafter.
"He wouldn't bite you," John said. "In fact, he thought it was a good joke."
At four o'clock that afternoon they reached Jersey City, and at once took the ferry for New York, sitting on the upper deck and viewing the harbor and sky-line.
"It is a big town," John said, "a powerful big town. We'll be lost here like needles in a haystack. Well, that is what we are after, Sis," he added, a serious cast to his features.
They went ashore at Twenty-third Street. They were so ignorant of the life they were entering that they were fairly dazed by the crush and din of human beings and traffic which met them at the long pier and in the congested thoroughfare upon which it fronted. They were all but as helpless as incoming foreigners who could not speak the language of the country. However, with a bag in each hand, and Dora closely following, John managed to reach a street that was less crowded, and they walked on now more calmly. He was looking for a boarding-house, John informed his companion. "I understand there are plenty of them all about," he added.
They had reached West Fourteenth Street, and there in the windows of many of the old-fashioned brownstone former residences of the well-to-do John saw cards advertising rooms and board.
"There are three in a row," he smiled at Dora. "Which one shall we pick?"
"The one this way," she decided. "It looks cleaner, and there are some flowers on the window-sills."
"Good! Let's try it—ask the rates, anyway."