“By the way, Thee, I hear the old woman goes to church every Sunday to hear you sing. Fritz tells me he has to wait till two o’clock for his Sunday dinner these days. The church people ought to give you credit for that, when they go for you.”
Thea shook her head and spoke in a tone of resignation. “They’ll always go for me, just as they did for Wunsch. It wasn’t because he drank they went for him; not really. It was something else.”
“You want to salt your money down, Thee, and go to Chicago and take some lessons. Then you come back, and wear a long feather and high heels and put on a few airs, and that’ll fix ’em. That’s what they like.”
“I’ll never have money enough to go to Chicago. Mother meant to lend me some, I think, but now they’ve got hard times back in Nebraska, and her farm don’t bring her in anything. Takes all the tenant can raise to pay the taxes. Don’t let’s talk about that. You promised to tell me about the play you went to see in Denver.”
Any one would have liked to hear Ray’s simple and clear account of the performance he had seen at the Tabor Grand Opera House—Maggie Mitchell in Little Barefoot—and any one would have liked to watch his kind face. Ray looked his best out of doors, when his thick red hands were covered by gloves, and the dull red of his sunburned face somehow seemed right in the light and wind. He looked better, too, with his hat on; his hair was thin and dry, with no particular color or character, “regular Willy-boy hair,” as he himself described it. His eyes were pale beside the reddish bronze of his skin. They had the faded look often seen in the eyes of men who have lived much in the sun and wind and who have been accustomed to train their vision upon distant objects.
Ray realized that Thea’s life was dull and exacting, and that she missed Wunsch. He knew she worked hard, that she put up with a great many little annoyances, and that her duties as a teacher separated her more than ever from the boys and girls of her own age. He did everything he could to provide recreation for her. He brought her candy and magazines and pineapples—of which she was very fond—from Denver, and kept his eyes and ears open for anything that might interest her. He was, of course, living for Thea. He had thought it all out carefully and had made up his mind just when he would speak to her. When she was seventeen, then he would tell her his plan and ask her to marry him. He would be willing to wait two, or even three years, until she was twenty, if she thought best. By that time he would surely have got in on something: copper, oil, gold, silver, sheep,—something.
Meanwhile, it was pleasure enough to feel that she depended on him more and more, that she leaned upon his steady kindness. He never broke faith with himself about her; he never hinted to her of his hopes for the future, never suggested that she might be more intimately confidential with him, or talked to her of the thing he thought about so constantly. He had the chivalry which is perhaps the proudest possession of his race. He had never embarrassed her by so much as a glance. Sometimes, when they drove out to the sand hills, he let his left arm lie along the back of the buggy seat, but it never came any nearer to Thea than that, never touched her. He often turned to her a face full of pride, and frank admiration, but his glance was never so intimate or so penetrating as Dr. Archie’s. His blue eyes were clear and shallow, friendly, uninquiring. He rested Thea because he was so different; because, though he often told her interesting things, he never set lively fancies going in her head; because he never misunderstood her, and because he never, by any chance, for a single instant, understood her! Yes, with Ray she was safe; by him she would never be discovered!
XVI
The pleasantest experience Thea had that summer was a trip that she and her mother made to Denver in Ray Kennedy’s caboose. Mrs. Kronborg had been looking forward to this excursion for a long while, but as Ray never knew at what hour his freight would leave Moonstone, it was difficult to arrange. The call-boy was as likely to summon him to start on his run at twelve o’clock midnight as at twelve o’clock noon. The first week in June started out with all the scheduled trains running on time, and a light freight business. Tuesday evening Ray, after consulting with the dispatcher, stopped at the Kronborgs’ front gate to tell Mrs. Kronborg—who was helping Tillie water the flowers—that if she and Thea could be at the depot at eight o’clock the next morning, he thought he could promise them a pleasant ride and get them into Denver before nine o’clock in the evening. Mrs. Kronborg told him cheerfully, across the fence, that she would “take him up on it,” and Ray hurried back to the yards to scrub out his car.
The one complaint Ray’s brakemen had to make of him was that he was too fussy about his caboose. His former brakeman had asked to be transferred because, he said, “Kennedy was as fussy about his car as an old maid about her bird-cage.” Joe Giddy, who was braking with Ray now, called him “the bride,” because he kept the caboose and bunks so clean.