Heart's Kindred

He looked down at her, and for the first time since they had boarded the Overland, he saw the hunted look in her eyes. She was turning toward the City with exactly the look with which she had turned, over shoulder, toward Inch and Bunchy.

… He looked at her bright fallen hair, at the white curve of her throat, at the strong brown hand with which she held her pack that she steadfastly refused to let him carry. Here she was, remote from all the places and people that she had ever known. Here she was, almost penniless. He thought of her bright insolence as she had sat his horse that morning on the desert, of her breathless appeal to him in the dark of his hut, of her self-sufficiency in the night of his cowardice and failure… Now here she was, haunted by another fear.

In the days of their comradeship, he had felt in her presence shame, humility, the desire to protect; and passion, steadfastly put down by the memory of that night for which he was trying desperately to make amends. But never till that moment had he felt for her a flash of tenderness. Now – it must have been the brown hand nearest him, on her pack, which so moved him – he felt a great longing just to give her comfort and strength and a moment of cherishing.

She looked up at him. And abruptly, and with no warning, it seemed to the Inger as they walked there together, and he looking down at her, that he was she. He seemed to move as she moved, to be breathing as she breathed, to be looking from her eyes at that storm-cloud of a city lying in wait for her. For an instant of time, he seemed to cease to exist of himself, and to be wholly Lory. Then she looked away, and he lifted his eyes to the flat green and brown, and was striding on, himself again.

“I never thought of it before,” he burst out. “It is a job to be a woman. And alone in Chicago – Lord!”

Her look flashed back at him.

“I can get along just as well there, or anywhere else, as you can,” she challenged.

Going back on the car, he argued it with her. Why should they not go on to Washington. His bank was to telegraph him funds – these were probably waiting for him now. Why should she not find work with her aunt, in Washington as well as in Chicago – and be that much farther from Bunchy in the bargain?

She listened, imperturbably bought a newspaper, and looked out an employment agency; and ended by being left at the agency while the Inger went off to the telegraph office.

He had gone but a step or two when he felt her touch on his arm.

“And oh, listen!” she said. “If the money ain’t come, don’t kill the man!”

He laughed, a great ringing laugh that made the passers-by on Wabash Avenue look amusedly after him. Then he strode off among them. At intervals, all the way to the telegraph office, he cursed the town. The noise confused him, the smoke blinded and choked him, he understood nobody’s talk of “east” and “west.” Unmercifully he jostled people who got in his way, and he pushed by them, unmindful of remonstrance. At a corner a traffic policeman roared out at him to halt. He stared at the officer, then leaped on the running board of a motor that was making a left-hand turn, and dropped off on the other side of the causeway.

“Get a grown man’s job, little fellow!” he yelled in derision.

He could find neither the signs nor the numbers. The beat of the traffic made indistinguishable the voices of those who tried to reply to his questions. To the fifth or sixth man whom he sought to understand, he roared out in a terrible voice:

“My Lord, haven’t you got any lungs?”

The man fled. The Inger tramped on, to a chant which was growing in his soul:

“Give me Inch. Give me Inch. Give me Inch…”

But by the time he had gained the telegraph office, and the man at the window, after long delay, had told him that identification would be necessary before he could collect his money, the Inger’s mood had changed. He stood before the window and broke into a roar of laughter.

“Identify me!” he said. “Me! Why, man, I’m Inger. I own the Flag-pole mine. I just got here, from Inch, Balboa County. You might as well try to identify the West coast. Look at me, you fool!”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Inger,” said the man, respectfully. “You’ll have to bring somebody here who knows you. A resident.”

“There ain’t a resident of nothing this side the Rockies that ever laid eyes to me,” said the Inger. “You guess twice.”

The clerk meditated.

“Haven’t you got your name on something about you?” he said softly.

The Inger thought. He rarely had a letter, he never carried one. He had never in his life owned a business card or an embroidered initial. Suddenly his face cleared.

“You bet!” he cried, and drew his six-shooter, which the men at the mines had given him, and levelled it through the bars.

“There’s my name on the handle,” he said. “Want I should fire, just to prove it’s mine?”

The man hesitated, glanced once about the office, looked in the Inger’s eyes, – and risked his job.

“That’ll be sufficient,” said he. “But if you’ll allow me, you’d best cover that thing up.”

“I donno,” said the Inger, reflectively, “but I’d best shoot my way down State Street. I don’t seem to get along very fast any other way.”

He had one more visit to make. This was to a railway ticket office, where he deliberately made a purchase and took away a time-card. Then he returned to the employment office.

There he faced a curious sight. The outer room was small and squalid with its bare, dirty floor, its discolored walls, the dusty, curtainless panes of its one window which looked in on a dingy court. About the edge of the room, either seated on deal benches without backs, or standing by the wall, were perhaps twenty women. They were old, they were young, they were relaxed and hopeless, or tense and strained – but the most of them were middle-aged and shabby and utterly negligible. They had not the character of the defeated or the ill or the wretched. They were simply drained of life, and were living. Occasionally an inner door opened and a man’s voice called “Next.” Few of the women talked. One or two of them slept. The window was closed and the air was intolerable.

To all this it took the Inger a moment or two to accustom his eyes. Then he saw Lory. She was sitting on her pack, on the floor, amusing a fretting baby on the knees of its mother, who dozed. In that dun place, the girl’s loveliness was startling, electric. The women felt it, and some sat staring at her.

“If I had that face – ” he caught from one.

“Come along out of this, for the Lord’s sake!” said the Inger.

They all turned toward him and toward Lory as she rose, crimsoning as they looked at her. She went to the doorway where he stood.

“I’ll lose my turn if I come now,” she said.

He held her wrist and drew her into the hall. Other women were waiting to get into the room. Well-dressed, watching men went and came.

“You come with me,” said the Inger.

“But – ” she tried to say.

“You come along with me,” he repeated. And as her troubled look questioned him:

“I’ve got two tickets to Washington,” he said. “You don’t want no job here if you get one.”

“You hadn’t ought – ” she began, breathlessly.

“I know it,” he told her. “What I’d ought to ’a’ done was to get two tickets to Whiteface and the hut. Hadn’t I?”

The baby, deserted, began to cry weakly. Lory turned back to her, stooped over her, comforted her. As he stood there, leaning in the doorway, once more there came to the Inger that curiously sharp sense of the morning on the prairie.

For a flash as he looked at those empty faces and worn figures, he knew – positively and as at first hand – what it was to be, not Lory alone now, but all the rest. Abruptly, with some great wrench of the understanding, it was almost as if momentarily he were those other wretched creatures. When Lory had brought her pack and joined him, he stood for a moment, still staring into that room.

“My God,” he said. “I wish I could do something for ’em!”

He struggled with this.

“‘Seems as if it’d help if I’d canter in and shoot every one of ’em dead,” he said.

They went out on the street again, intent on finding a place to lunch. There were two hours until the Washington train left. The Inger refusing utterly to ask anybody anything, they walked until they came to a place which, by hot flapjacks in the making in the great window, the Inger loudly recognized to be his own.

Seated at a little white oil-cloth covered table beneath which the Inger insisted on stowing the packs, the two relaxed in that moment of rest and well-being.