Heart's Kindred

The Inger pocketed his revolver, and smiled – the slow, indolent, adorable smile which had made all Inch and the men at the mines his friends.

“If you feel that way about it, my friend – ” he said, and leaned forward and added something, his hand outstretched.

The man nodded, shook the hand, and went to his ticket rack. The Inger wrote out a message to his father, instructing him to pay to the agent a sum which he named; and to his bank he scribbled and posted a brief note. Then as the train pulled in, he turned back to where Lory waited.

“It’s all right,” he told her. “Everything’s all right,” he added jubilantly. “Come on!”

Beside the train she would have taken his hand, but he followed her. “I’m coming in,” he said brusquely, and in the coach sat down beside her in her seat.

Then she turned to him, and in her voice were the tremor and the breathlessness which had been there for an instant when, in the morning, she had tried to say her thanks:

“I wish’t I could thank you,” she said. “I wish’t I could!”

He met her eyes, and he longed inexpressibly for a way of speech which should say the thing that he meant to try to say.

“You know, don’t you,” he asked awkwardly, “that I’d do anything to make up – ”

“Don’t,” she begged. “I know. Don’t you think I don’t know.”

With this his courage mounted.

“Tell me,” he burst out. “Will you tell me? Am I different – ain’t I different – from the way you thought?”

It was blind enough, but she seemed to understand.

“You’ve treated me whiter to-day than I’ve ever been treated,” she said, very low. “Now good-bye!”

The Inger sat silent, but in his face came light, as if back upon him were that which she had kindled there in the hut, by her trust in him, and as if it were not again to darken. The train began to move, and he sat there and did not heed it.

“Good-bye – oh, good-bye!” she said. “We’re going!”

“Yes,” he said, “we’re going! I donno what you’ll say – I got me a ticket too.”

V

It was black dawn when Lory and the Inger reached Chicago. Not the gray dawn that he had sometimes known slipping down the sides of the cañons; not the red dawn that had drawn him to his hut door to face upward to the flaming sky, and had sent him naked and joyous, into the pool of the mountain stream; and not the occasional white dawn, which had left him silent on his shelf of Whiteface, staring at the flare of silver in the east, and afterward letting fall into his skillet bacon and dripping – but without thinking of bacon and dripping at all.

There in the railway sheds this Chicago dawn had no red, no white, no gray. It was merely a thinning of the dark, so that the station lamps began to be unnecessary. In this strange chill air of day, the men and women dropped from the Overland, and streamed steadfastly away, each in an incredible faith of destination. And from invisible sources there came those creeping gases which are slaves to man, but fasten upon his throat like hands, and press and twist, and take their toll of him.

Lory looked up at the Inger questioningly:

“Had it ought to be like this,” she asked, “or is something happening?”

“Seems as if something must be happening,” he answered.

They went into the street, and the Inger took from her the slip of paper on which was written her aunt’s address. He held it out to the first man he saw, to the second, to the third, and each one answered him with much pointing, in a broken tongue which was indistinguishable, and hurried on. Lory looked at the stream of absorbed, leaden faces of those tramping to their work, heard their speech as they passed, and turned a startled face to the Inger:

“I never thought of it,” she said. “Mebbe they don’t talk American, East?”

“They won’t stop for us,” said the Inger. “That’s all.”

From one or two others they caught “South,” “Kedzie,” “Indiana Avenue.” Some frankly shook their heads with “From th’ old country.” No officer was in sight, and it occurred to neither of them to look for one. They merely instinctively threw themselves on the stream of those others whom they took to be like themselves.

Abruptly the Inger set down his pack in the middle of the walk, and advanced upon the first man whom he saw. On both shoulders of this one he brought down his hands with the grasp of a Titan. Also he shook him slightly:

“You tell me how to get to where I’m goin’ or I’ll lamm the lights out of you!” he roared.

The man – a young timekeeper whose work took him out earlier, so to speak, than his station – regarded the Inger in alarm.

“Lord Heavens,” the young timekeeper said, “how do I know where you’re goin’?”

Still grasping him with one hand, the Inger opened the other and shook Lory’s paper in the man’s face.

“That’s where,” he said. “Now do you know?”

The man looked right and left and took the paper, on which the Inger’s fingers did not loosen.

“Well, get on an Indiana Avenue car and transfer,” he said. “Anybody could tell you that.”

“Where?” yelled the Inger. “Where is that car?”

A crowd was gathering, and the clerk inclined to jest by way of discounting that disconcerting clutch on his shoulder.

“Depends on which one you catch – ” he was beginning, but the Inger, with his one hand, shook him deliberately and mightily:

“Where?” he said. “And none of your lip about north or south! Point your finger. Where?”

It was at that minute that the young timekeeper caught sight of Lory. She had pressed forward, and she stood with the Inger’s pack on the ground at her feet, and her own on her shoulder. She was, of course, still hatless, but she had knotted upon her head a scarlet handkerchief; and in that dull air, her hair and face, under their cap of color, bloomed exquisitely. The man, having stared at her for a moment, and at that strange luggage of theirs, took out his watch:

“Come along,” he said curtly. “I’ll put you on your car.”

The Inger searched his face. “No tricks?” he demanded. Then, swiftly, he released his hold. “Obliged to ye,” he said, and picked up his pack and followed.

They slipped on the black stones, breasted the mass waiting to board the same car, and somehow found a foothold. Already there was no seat. The patient crowd herded in the aisles. Elated with the success of his method, the Inger looked round at the seated men, screened by newspapers, then reached out to the nearest one, slipped his hand in his collar, and jerked him to his feet.

The man whirled on him in amazement and then in a wrath which reddened his face to fever. But for a breath he hesitated before the sheer bulk of the Inger.

“You’ll be locked up by dark,” he said only, “I don’t need to get you.”

He treated himself to a deliberate, luxurious look at Lory, leaned negligently against the shoulder of the man seated nearest, and went back to his newspaper.

It seemed incredible that one should ride for an hour on a street car to get anywhere. At the end of ten minutes the Inger had gone back to the platform and:

“Say,” he said. “We wasn’t goin’ in the country, you know.”

The conductor went on counting transfers.

“Say – ” the Inger went on, slightly louder, and the man glanced up imperturbably.