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beat up a nasty fellow for insulting a Mexican woman who
helped about the grub-car in the work train, and his fists
had worked like two steel hammers. Giddy wasn't looking
for trouble.
At eight o'clock the next morning Ray greeted his ladies
and helped them into the car. Giddy had put on a clean
shirt and yellow pig-skin gloves and was whistling his
best. He considered Kennedy a fluke as a ladies' man,
and if there was to be a party, the honors had to be done
by some one who wasn't a blacksmith at small-talk.
Giddy had, as Ray sarcastically admitted, "a local repu-
tation as a jollier," and he was fluent in gallant speeches
of a not too-veiled nature. He insisted that Thea should
take his seat in the cupola, opposite Ray's, where she
could look out over the country. Thea told him, as she
clambered up, that she cared a good deal more about
riding in that seat than about going to Denver. Ray was
never so companionable and easy as when he sat chatting
in the lookout of his little house on wheels. Good stories
came to him, and interesting recollections. Thea had a
great respect for the reports he had to write out, and for
the telegrams that were handed to him at stations; for
all the knowledge and experience it must take to run a
freight train.
Giddy, down in the car, in the pauses of his work, made
himself agreeable to Mrs. Kronborg.
"It's a great rest to be where my family can't get at me,
Mr. Giddy," she told him. "I thought you and Ray might
have some housework here for me to look after, but I
couldn't improve any on this car."
"Oh, we like to keep her neat," returned Giddy glibly,
winking up at Ray's expressive back. "If you want to see
a clean ice-box, look at this one. Yes, Kennedy always
carries fresh cream to eat on his oatmeal. I'm not particu-
lar. The tin cow's good enough for me."
"Most of you boys smoke so much that all victuals taste
alike to you," said Mrs. Kronborg. "I've got no religious
scruples against smoking, but I couldn't take as much
interest cooking for a man that used tobacco. I guess it's
all right for bachelors who have to eat round."
Mrs. Kronborg took off her hat and veil and made her-
self comfortable. She seldom had an opportunity to be
idle, and she enjoyed it. She could sit for hours and watch
the sage-hens fly up and the jack-rabbits dart away from
the track, without being bored. She wore a tan bombazine
dress, made very plainly, and carried a roomy, worn,
mother-of-the-family handbag.
Ray Kennedy always insisted that Mrs. Kronborg was
"a fine-looking lady," but this was not the common opin-
ion in Moonstone. Ray had lived long enough among the
Mexicans to dislike fussiness, to feel that there was some-
thing more attractive in ease of manner than in absent-
minded concern about hairpins and dabs of lace. He had
learned to think that the way a woman stood, moved, sat
in her chair, looked at you, was more important than the
absence of wrinkles from her skirt. Ray had, indeed, such
unusual perceptions in some directions, that one could
not help wondering what he would have been if he had
ever, as he said, had "half a chance."
He was right; Mrs. Kronborg was a fine-looking woman.
She was short and square, but her head was a real head,
not a mere jerky termination of the body. It had some
individuality apart from hats and hairpins. Her hair,
Moonstone women admitted, would have been very pretty
"on anybody else." Frizzy bangs were worn then, but
Mrs. Kronborg always dressed her hair in the same way,
parted in the middle, brushed smoothly back from her
low, white forehead, pinned loosely on the back of her
head in two thick braids. It was growing gray about the
temples, but after the manner of yellow hair it seemed
only to have grown paler there, and had taken on a color
like that of English primroses. Her eyes were clear and
untroubled; her face smooth and calm, and, as Ray said,
"strong."
Thea and Ray, up in the sunny cupola, were laughing
and talking. Ray got great pleasure out of seeing her face
there in the little box where he so often imagined it. They
were crossing a plateau where great red sandstone boulders
lay about, most of them much wider at the top than at the
base, so that they looked like great toadstools.
"The sand has been blowing against them for a good
many hundred years," Ray explained, directing Thea's
eyes with his gloved hand. "You see the sand blows low,
being so heavy, and cuts them out underneath. Wind and
sand are pretty high-class architects. That's the principle
of most of the Cliff-Dweller remains down at Canyon de
Chelly. The sandstorms had dug out big depressions in the
face of a cliff, and the Indians built their houses back in
that depression."
"You told me that before, Ray, and of course you know.
But the geography says their houses were cut out of the
face of the living rock, and I like that better."
Ray sniffed. "What nonsense does get printed! It's
enough to give a man disrespect for learning. How could
them Indians cut houses out of the living rock, when they
knew nothing about the art of forging metals?" Ray
leaned back in his chair, swung his foot, and looked thought-
ful and happy. He was in one of his favorite fields of specu-
lation, and nothing gave him more pleasure than talking
these things over with Thea Kronborg. "I'll tell you,
Thee, if those old fellows had learned to work metals once,
your ancient Egyptians and Assyrians wouldn't have beat
them very much. Whatever they did do, they did well.
Their masonry's standing there to-day, the corners as true
as the Denver Capitol. They were clever at most every-
thing but metals; and that one failure kept them from
getting across. It was the quicksand that swallowed 'em
up, as a race. I guess civilization proper began when men
mastered metals."
Ray was not vain about his bookish phrases. He did not
use them to show off, but because they seemed to him more
adequate than colloquial speech. He felt strongly about
these things, and groped for words, as he said, "to express
himself." He had the lamentable American belief that
"expression" is obligatory. He still carried in his trunk,
among the unrelated possessions of a railroad man, a note-
book on the title-page of which was written "Impressions
on First Viewing the Grand Canyon, Ray H. Kennedy."
The pages of that book were like a battlefield; the laboring
author had fallen back from metaphor after metaphor,
abandoned position after position. He would have admit-
ted that the art of forging metals was nothing to this treach-
erous business of recording impressions, in which the
material you were so full of vanished mysteriously under
your striving hand. "Escaping steam!" he had said to him-
self, the last time he tried to read that notebook.
Thea didn't mind Ray's travel-lecture expressions. She
dodged them, unconsciously, as she did her father's pro-
fessional palaver. The light in Ray's pale-blue eyes and
the feeling in his voice more than made up for the stiff-
ness of his language.
"Were the Cliff-Dwellers really clever with their hands,
Ray, or do you always have to make allowance and say,
'That was pretty good for an Indian'?" she asked.
Ray went down into the car to give some instructions to
Giddy. "Well," he said when he returned, "about the
aborigines: once or twice I've been with some fellows who
were cracking burial mounds. Always felt a little ashamed
of it, but we did pull out some remarkable things. We got
some pottery out whole; seemed pretty fine to me. I guess
their women were their artists. We found lots of old shoes
and sandals made out of yucca fiber, neat and strong; and
feather blankets, too."
"Feather blankets? You never told me about them."
"Didn't I? The old fellows--or the squaws--wove
a close netting of yucca fiber, and then tied on little bunches
of down feathers, overlapping, just the way feathers grow
on a bird. Some of them were feathered on both sides.
You can't get anything warmer than that, now, can you?
--or prettier. What I like about those old aborigines is,
that they got all their ideas from nature."
Thea laughed. "That means you're going to say some-
thing about girls' wearing corsets. But some of your In-
dians flattened their babies' heads, and that's worse than
wearing corsets."
"Give me an Indian girl's figure for beauty," Ray in-
sisted. "And a girl with a voice like yours ought to have
plenty of lung-action. But you know my sentiments on
that subject. I was going to tell you about the handsomest
thing we ever looted out of those burial mounds. It was on
a woman, too, I regret to say. She was preserved as perfect
as any mummy that ever came out of the pyramids. She
had a big string of turquoises around her neck, and she was
wrapped in a fox-fur cloak, lined with little yellow feathers
that must have come off wild canaries. Can you beat that,
now? The fellow that claimed it sold it to a Boston man
for a hundred and fifty dollars."
Thea looked at him admiringly. "Oh, Ray, and didn't
you get anything off her, to remember her by, even? She
must have been a princess."
Ray took a wallet from the pocket of the coat that was
hanging beside him, and drew from it a little lump wrapped
in worn tissue paper. In a moment a stone, soft and blue
as a robin's egg, lay in the hard palm of his hand. It was a
turquoise, rubbed smooth in the Indian finish, which is so
much more beautiful than the incongruous high polish the
white man gives that tender stone. "I got this from her
necklace. See the hole where the string went through?
You know how the Indians drill them? Work the drill with
their teeth. You like it, don't you? They're just right for
you. Blue and yellow are the Swedish colors." Ray looked
intently at her head, bent over his hand, and then gave his
whole attention to the track.
"I'll tell you, Thee," he began after a pause, "I'm going
to form a camping party one of these days and persuade
your PADRE to take you and your mother down to that coun-
try, and we'll live in the rock houses--they're as comfort-
able as can be--and start the cook fires up in 'em once
again. I'll go into the burial mounds and get you more
keepsakes than any girl ever had before." Ray had planned
such an expedition for his wedding journey, and it made
his heart thump to see how Thea's eyes kindled when he
talked about it. "I've learned more down there about
what makes history," he went on, "than in all the books
I've ever read. When you sit in the sun and let your heels
hang out of a doorway that drops a thousand feet, ideas
come to you. You begin to feel what the human race has
been up against from the beginning. There's something
mighty elevating about those old habitations. You feel like
it's up to you to do your best, on account of those fellows
having it so hard. You feel like you owed them something."
At Wassiwappa, Ray got instructions to sidetrack until
Thirty-six went by. After reading the message, he turned
to his guests. "I'm afraid this will hold us up about two
hours, Mrs. Kronborg, and we won't get into Denver till
near midnight."
"That won't trouble me," said Mrs. Kronborg content-
edly. "They know me at the Y.W.C.A., and they'll let
me in any time of night. I came to see the country, not to
make time. I've always wanted to get out at this white
place and look around, and now I'll have a chance. What
makes it so white?"
"Some kind of chalky rock....
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