CHAPTER VI
ACROSS THE CONTINENT
It was not as though Helen Morrell had never been in a train before. Eight times she had gone back and forth to Denver, and she had always ridden in the best style. So sleepers, chair cars, private compartments, and observation coaches were no novelty to her.
She had discussed the matter with her friend, the Elberon station agent, and had bought her ticket through to New York, with a berth section to herself. It cost a good bit of money, but Helen knew no better way to spend some of that thousand dollars that Big Hen had given to her.
Her small trunk was put in the baggage car, and all she carried was a hand-satchel with toilet articles and kimono; and in it likewise was her father’s big wallet stuffed with the yellow-backed notes – all crisp and new – that Big Hen Billings had brought to her from the bank.
When she was comfortably seated in her particular section, and the porter had seen that her footstool was right, and had hovered about her with offers of other assistance until she had put a silver dollar into his itching palm, Helen first stared about her frankly at the other occupants of the car.
Nobody paid much attention to the countrified girl who had come aboard at the way-station. The Transcontinental’s cars are always well filled. There were family parties, and single tourists, with part of a grand opera troupe, and traveling men of the better class.
Helen would have been glad to join one of the family groups. In one there were two girls and a boy beside the parents and a lady who must have been the governess. One of the girls, and the boy, were quite as old as Helen. They were all so well behaved, and polite to each other, yet jolly and companionable, that Helen knew she could have liked them immensely.
But there was nobody to introduce the lonely girl to them, nor to any others of her fellow travelers. The conductor, even, did not take much interest in the girl in brown.
She began to realize that what was the height of fashion in Elberon was several seasons behind the style in larger communities. There was not a pretty or attractive thing about Helen’s dress; and even a very pretty girl will seem a frump in an out-of-style and unbecoming frock.
It might have been better for the girl from Sunset Ranch if she had worn on the train the very riding habit she had in her trunk. At least, it would have become her and she would have felt natural in it.
She knew now – when she had seen the hats of her fellow passengers – that her own was an atrocity. And, then, Helen had “put her hair up,” which was something she had not been used to doing. Without practice, or some example to work by, how could this unsophisticated young girl have produced a specimen of modern hair-dressing fit to be seen?
Even Dudley Stone could not have thought Helen Morrell pretty as she looked now. And when she gazed in the glass herself, the girl from Sunset Ranch was more than a little disgusted.
“I know I’m a fright. I’ve got ‘such a muchness’ of hair and it’s so sunburned, and all! What those girls I’m going to see will say to me, I don’t know. But if they’re good-natured they’ll soon show me how to handle this mop – and of course I can buy any quantity of pretty frocks when I get to New York.”
So she only looked at the other people on the train and made no acquaintances at all that first day. She slept soundly at night while the Transcontinental raced on over the undulating plains on which the stars shone so peacefully. Each roll of the drumming wheels was carrying her nearer and nearer to that new world of which she knew so little, but from which she hoped so much.
She dreamed that she had reached her goal – Uncle Starkweather’s house. Aunt Eunice met her. She had never even seen a photograph of her aunt; but the lady who gathered her so closely into her arms and kissed her so tenderly, looked just as Helen’s own mother had looked.
She awoke crying, and hugging the tiny pillow which the Pullman Company furnishes its patrons as a sample – the real pillow never materializes.
But to the healthy girl from the wide reaches of the Montana range, the berth was quite comfortable enough. She had slept on the open ground many a night, rolled only in a blanket and without any pillow at all. So she arose fresher than most of her fellow-passengers.
One man – whom she had noticed the evening before – was adjusting a wig behind the curtain of his section. He looked when he was completely dressed rather a well-preserved person; and Helen was impressed with the thought that he must still feel young to wish to appear so juvenile.
Even with his wig adjusted – a very curly brown affair – the man looked, however, to be upward of sixty. There were many fine wrinkles about his eyes and deep lines graven in his cheeks.
His section was just behind that of the girl from Sunset Ranch, on the other side of the car. After returning from the breakfast table this first morning Helen thought she would better take a little more money out of the wallet to put in her purse for emergencies on the train. So she opened the locked bag and dragged out the well-stuffed wallet from underneath her other possessions.
The roll of yellow-backed notes was a large one. Helen, lacking more interesting occupation, unfolded the crisp banknotes and counted them to make sure of her balance. As she sat in her seat she thought nobody could observe her.
Then she withdrew what she thought she might need, and put the remainder of the money back into the old wallet, snapped the strong elastic about it, and slid it down to the bottom of the bag again.
The key of the bag she carried on the chain with her locket, which locket contained the miniatures of her mother and father. Key and locket she hid in the bosom of her dress.
She looked up suddenly. There was the fatherly-looking old person almost bending over her chair back. For an instant the girl was very much startled. The old man’s eyes were wonderfully keen and twinkling, and there was an expression in them which Helen at first did not understand.
“If you have finished with that magazine, my dear, I’ll exchange it for one of mine,” said the old gentleman coolly. “What! did I frighten you?”
“Not exactly, sir,” returned Helen, watching him curiously. “But I was startled.”
“Beg pardon. You do not look like a young person who would be easily frightened,” he said, laughing. “You are traveling alone?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Far?”
“To New York, sir,” said Helen.
“Ah! a long way for a girl to go by herself – even a self-possessed one like you,” said the fatherly old fellow. “I hope you have friends to meet you there?”
“Relatives.”
“You have never been there, I take it?”
“I have never been farther east than Denver before,” she replied.
“Indeed! And so you have not met the relatives you are going to?” he suggested, shrewdly.
“You are right, sir.”
“But, of course, they will not fail to meet you?”
“I telegraphed to them. I expect to get a reply somewhere on the way.”
“Then you are well provided for,” said the old gentleman, kindly. “Yet, if you should need any assistance – of any kind – do not fail to call upon me. I am going through to New York, too.”
He went back to his seat after making the exchange of magazines, and did not force his attentions upon her further. He was, however, almost the only person who spoke to her all the way across the continent.
Frequently they ate together at the same table, both being alone. He bought newspapers and magazines and exchanged with her. He never became personal and asked her questions again, nor did Helen learn his name; but in little ways which were not really objectionable, he showed that he took an interest in her. There remained, however, the belief in Helen’s mind that