So Pete walked slowly, his grizzled head bent against the blast as he struggled between the metals, listening. At a sudden shrieking roar he moved deliberately to one side, his back resting against a bank of snow left by the giant circular plough whose progress, on the previous day, had been that of a slow but irresistible avalanche. A crashing whistle tore the air and the wind of the rushing train pulled at his clothes and swirled sharp flakes into his eyes. Yet he dimly saw something white flutter down to his feet and he picked it up. It chanced to be a paper tossed out by some careless hand, a rather disreputable sheet printed some thousand miles away, one of the things that lie like scabs on the outer hide of civilization. It was much too dark and cold for him to think of removing a mitten and searching for the glasses in his coat pocket. But the respect is great, in waste places, for the printed word. There news of the great outside world trickles in slowly, and he carefully stuffed the thing between two of the big horn buttons of his red-striped mackinaw.
There were but a few minutes more of toil for him. At last he passed over the bridge, in a flurry of swirling ice-crystals, and finally made his way into McGurn’s store, which is across the way from the railway depot.
“Cold night,” he announced, stamping his feet near the door.
“Follansbee he says they report fifty below at White River,” a man sitting by the stove informed him.
Coogan nodded and approached the counter.
“Give me a plug, Miss Sophy,” he told the girl who sat at a rough counter, adding figures. “The wind’s gettin’ real sharp and I got the nose most friz off’n my face.”
The girl rose, with a yawn, and handed him the tobacco. She swept his ten-cent piece in a drawer and sat down again. One of the men lounging about the great white-topped stove in the middle of the room pointed to Coogan’s coat.
“Ye’re that careless, Pete,” he said. “I ’low that’s a bundle o’ thousand dollar bills as is droppin’ off’n yer coat.”
The old section foreman looked down.
“Oh! I’d most forgot. This here’s some kind o’ paper I picked up on the track. Beats anything how passengers chucks things off. Mike Smith ’most got killed last week with an empty bottle. Lucky he had his big muskrat cap on. May be ye’d like to see it, Miss Sophy? Guess my old woman wouldn’t have no use for it as it don’t seem to have any picters in it.”
He was about to place it on the counter when one of the men took it from his hand and held it under the hanging oil lamp.
“Why!” he chuckled, somewhat raspingly. “It’s just what Sophy needs real bad. Ye wants ter study that real careful, Sophy. It’ll show ye as there’s just as good fish in the sea as was ever took out of it.”
The girl leaned far out over the counter and snatched the paper away from him.
“Yes, there’s just as good fish as that there Ennis lad,” repeated the man.
A single glance had acquainted Sophy with the title. It was the Matrimonial Journal. She flung it down to her feet, angrily.
“You get out of here with your Ennis!” she cried. “I wouldn’t–wouldn’t marry him if he was the last man on earth. I–I just despise him!”
“And that’s real lucky for ye,” snickered the man. “I heard him say–lemme see–yes, ’bout three-four days ago, as he wasn’t nowise partial ter carrots. It’s a wegetable as he couldn’t never bear the sight of.”
The girl’s hand went up to her fine head of auburn hair and a deep red rose from her cheeks to its roots. Her narrow lips became a mere slit in her face and her steely eyes flashed.
“And–and he’s the kind as thinks himself a gentleman!” she hissed out. “Get out o’ here, all of ye! There ain’t a man in Carcajou as I’d wipe my boots on. Clear out o’ here, I tell ye!”
The three men left, Pete silently and disapprovingly, the other two guffawing.
“I don’t believe as how that lad Ennis ever said anything o’ the kind,” declared the foreman. “He’s a fine bye, he is, and it ain’t like him.”
“Of course he didn’t,” the village joker assured him. “But ’twas too much of a chance ter get a rise out er Sophy for me to lose it. Ain’t she the hot-tempered thing? Just the same she wuz dead sot on gettin’ him, we all know that, an’ she’s mad clear through.”
“Well, I don’t see as yer got any call ter rile the gal, just the same,” ventured Pete. “Like enough she can’t help herself, she can’t, and just because she got a temper like a sorrel mare ain’t no good reason ter be hurtin’ her feelin’s.”
But the other two chuckled again and started towards the big boarding-house, whose ceilings and walls were beautifully covered with stamped metal plates guaranteed to last for ever and sell for old iron afterwards. Its corrugated iron roof, to most of Carcajou’s population, represented the very last word in architectural glory.
Within the store Miss Sophy was biting her nails, excitedly, and felt all the fury of the woman scorned.
CHAPTER II
What Happened to a Telegram
Customers were rare on such terribly cold nights. For a long time Sophy McGurn held her chin in the palm of her hand, staring about her from time to time, without seeing anything but the visions her anger evolved. Presently, however, she took up the small bag of mail and sorted out a few letters and papers, placing them in the individual boxes. But while she worked the heightened color of her face remained and her teeth often closed upon her lower lip. There was a postal card addressed to Hugo Ennis. She turned it over, curiously, but it proved to be an advertisement of some sort of machinery and she threw it from her, impatiently.
“Supper’s ready, Sophy,” cried a shrill voice. “Train’s in and father’ll be here in a minute. Get the table fixed.”
“I’m coming,” she answered.
For a minute she busied herself putting down plates and knives and forks. She heard her father coming in. He had been away on some business at the next station. She heard him kicking off his heavy felt shoes and he came into the room in his stocking-feet.
“Hello, Ma! Hello, Sophy! Guess ye’ve been settin’ too close to the hot stove, ain’t ye? Yer face is red as a beet.”
“My face is all right!” she exclaimed, angrily. “Them as don’t like it can look the other way!”
Her mother, a quiet old soul, looked at her in silence and dished out the broiled ham and potatoes. The old gentleman snickered but forebore to add more fuel to the fire. He was a prudent man with a keen appreciation of peace. They sat down. Under a chair the old cat was playing with her lone kitten, sole remnant of a large litter. An aggressive clock with a boldly painted frame was beating loudly. Beneath the floor the oft-repeated gnawing of a mouse or rat went on, distractingly. From the other side of the road, in spite of double-windows and closed doors, came the wail of an ill-treated violin.
“One of these days I’m goin’ over to Carreau’s an’ smash that fiddle,” suddenly asserted Sophy, truculently. “It’s gettin’ on my nerves. Talk o’ cats screechin’!”
“I wouldn’t do that, Sophy,” advised her mother, patiently. “Not but what it’s mighty tryin’, sometimes, for Cyrille he don’t ever get further’n them two first bars of ‘The Campbells are comin’.’”
Sophy sniffed and poured herself