Lonesome Land Read Free

through trains which watered at the red tank near the creek, the place looked crudely picturesque—interesting, so long as one was not compelled to live there and
could retain a perfectly impersonal viewpoint. After five or ten minutes spent in watching curiously the one little street, with the long hitching poles planted firmly and frequently down both
sides—usually within a very few steps of a saloon door—and the horses nodding and stamping at the flies, and the loitering figures that appeared now and then in desultory fashion, many
of them imagined that they understood the West and sympathized with it, and appreciated its bigness and its freedom from conventions.
    One slim young woman had just told the thin-faced schoolteacher on a vacation, with whom she had formed one of those evanescent traveling acquaintances, that she already knew the West, from
instinct and from Manley’s letters. She loved it, she said, because Manley loved it, and because it was to be her home, and because it was so big and so free. Out here one could think and
grow and really live, she declared, with enthusiasm. Manley had lived here for three years, and his letters, she told the thin-faced teacher, were an education in themselves.
    The teacher had already learned that the slim young woman, with the yellow-brown hair and yellow-brown eyes to match, was going to marry Manley—she had forgotten his other name, though the
young woman had mentioned it—and would live on a ranch, a cattle ranch. She smiled with somewhat wistful sympathy, and hoped the young woman would be happy; and the young woman waved her
hand, with the glove only half pulled on, toward the shadow-dappled prairie and the willow-fringed creek, and the hills beyond.
    “Happy!” she echoed joyously. “Could one be anything else, in such a country? And then—you don’t know Manley, you see. It’s horribly bad form, and undignified
and all that, to prate of one’s private affairs, but I just can’t help bubbling over. I’m not looking for heaven, and I expect to have plenty of bumpy places in the
trail—trail is anything that you travel over, out here; Manley has coached me faithfully—but I’m going to be happy. My mind is quite made up. Well, good-by—I’m so glad
you happened to be on this train, and I wish I might meet you again. Isn’t it a funny little depot? Oh, yes—thank you! I almost forgot that umbrella, and I might need it. Yes,
I’ll write to you—I should hate to drop out of your mind completely. Address me Mrs. Manley Fleetwood, Hope, Montana. Good-by—I wish—”
    She trailed off down the aisle with eyes shining, in the wake of the grinning porter. She hurried down the steps, glanced hastily along the platform, up at the car window where the faded little
schoolteacher was smiling wearily down at her, waved her hand, threw a dainty little kiss, nodded a gay farewell, smiled vaguely at the conductor, who had been respectfully pleasant to
her—and then she was looking at the rear platform of the receding train mechanically, not yet quite realizing why it was that her heart went heavy so suddenly. She turned then and looked
about her in a surprised, inquiring fashion. Manley, it would seem, was not at hand to welcome her. She had expected his face to be the first she looked upon in that town, but she tried not to be
greatly perturbed at his absence; so many things may detain one.
    At that moment a young fellow, whose clothes emphatically proclaimed him a cowboy, came diffidently up to her, tilted his hat backward an inch or so, and left it that way, thereby unconsciously
giving himself an air of candor which should have been reassuring.
    “Fleetwood was detained. You were expecting to—you’re the lady he was expecting, aren’t you?”
    She had been looking questioningly at her violin box and two trunks standing on their ends farther down the platform, and she smiled vaguely without glancing at him.
    “Yes. I hope he isn’t