A Bookful of Girls
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“Brrrr, brrrrrrrrrr,” quoth Mufty, again.
“O Mufty, what a darling you are, to approve! And there isn’t really any one’s opinion that I care more about!”
She got up and went to the window, while Mufty, not to be dislodged, hastily established himself across her shoulder, his fore paws well down her back, his tail contentedly waving before her eyes. The picture which he thus turned his back upon was a wintry one.
“Cold morning, isn’t it, Mufty?” said Polly. “No kind of a climate for a delicate person.”
“Brrrr, brrrrrr!” Mufty was digging a claw into her shoulder to adjust himself more comfortably.
“Ow!” cried Polly. Then, lifting him down: “Mufty, you’re a very intelligent cat, and I haven’t a doubt that your judgment is as penetrating as your claws. All the same, I guess you’d better get down and come with me and help Susan get the breakfast. Don’t you hear her shaking down the kitchen stove?”
Whereupon Mufty, finding himself dropped upon the coldly unsympathetic ingrain carpet, desisted from further encouraging remarks.
Polly was a schoolgirl still, though she was nearing the dignity of graduation. She had no special taste for study, but she cherished the Yankee reverence for education, and although it was not quite clear to her how Latin declensions and algebraic symbols were to help her in after-life, she committed them to memory with a very good grace, and enjoyed all the satisfaction of work for work’s sake.
It happened, therefore, that the pursuit of learning interfered for several hours with the far more important object which she had at heart to-day; and it was not until two o’clock that she found herself at liberty to do what every nerve and fibre of her young organism was straining to accomplish.
“I’m not going right home,” she said to Dan; “I’ve got an errand to do.”
“Polly’s got an idea,” Dan said to himself, struck with the eagerness in her face, and the haste with which she walked away. “What a girl she is for ideas, any way!” and he trudged along the snowy road with the other boys, getting rather out of breath in the effort to keep up with them.
Polly, meanwhile, stepped swiftly on her way. She was thinking of Dan. He at least was a natural student and had always led his class. She was not only fond of Dan, but proud of him, too. He was a handsome boy, with those clear, dark eyes of his in which a less partial observer than Polly might have read the promise of fine things.
“Yes,” Polly said to herself, as she sped along the road that glittering winter’s day: “Dan isn’t just an ordinary boy. He’s an unusual boy. Why, the world couldn’t afford to lose Dan!” and she looked into the faces of the passers-by, as if to challenge their acquiescence in this bold statement.
Whether Dan was all that Polly thought him, only the future could prove, – that future that Polly was about to secure to him. If she idealised him a bit, why, all the better for Dan, and all the better for Polly, too. One thing is sure, that no one who could have looked into the sister’s heart that winter’s day would have doubted her for an instant when she said to herself:
“He sha’n’t die! I won’t let him die! But, oh! how I wish that cough were mine!”
From her interview with the doctor, Polly brought away with her only one word, “Colorado”; and with that word shining like a great snowy peak in her imagination, she took another swift walk to a farmhouse on the outskirts of the village, where dwelt a man whose son had gone to Colorado three years ago.
“Great place!” he told her; “Great place, Colorado! Mile up in the air! Prairie-dogs and Rocky Mountains! Big cattle ranches that could put all Fieldham in their vest pockets! Cold as thunder, hot as thunder! Blizzards and cyclones and water-spouts! Wind! Blow you right out of your boots! Cures sick folks? Oh, yes. Better than all the doctors. Braces ’em right up – stands ’em on their legs! Nothing like it, so Bill says. Costs a sight to get out there; oh, yes! Fifty dollars and fifteen cents! Queer about that fifteen cents. Seems as though they might ha’ throwed that in on such a long trip’s that; but them railroads ain’t got no insides any way; and when you once git out there, why, there you are!”
The philosophy of that last remark appealed particularly to Polly. “When you once git out there, why, there you are!” Somehow it seemed to make everything perfectly simple and easy. Blizzards and cyclones? Yes, to be sure. But then it was the air that you went out for, Polly reasoned, that was what was going to cure you; and perhaps the more you got of it the quicker you would get cured. And Polly hurried home from her last visit, flushed and eager for the fray. She found her uncle in the barn putting up his horses.
Mr. Seth Lapham was a good man; there could be no doubt about that. Nothing but a sincere and very efficient conscience could have so tempered his natural penuriousness as to cause him to receive into his family a mere sister-in-law’s children and allow them to “want for nothing”; that, too, at a time when his own children, John and Martha, were still a bill of expense to him, before their respective marriages. For many years, Uncle Seth had conscientiously, if not lavishly, fed and clothed the little orphans, whose entire patrimony in the Savings Bank scarcely yielded interest enough to pay for their boots and shoes; but it remained for the present crisis to prove him as open-minded as he was conscientious. For, no sooner had Polly finished the rapid exposition of her great plan – how they were to draw the money from the bank to pay for their tickets and start them in their new life, and how they were to earn their own living when once they got started – than he was ready to admit the reasonableness of it.
“And when you once get out there, why, there you are!” Polly declared, in her most convincing tone.
As she stood before him, flushed and breathless, prepared to do battle for Dan to the very last extremity, her uncle gave old Dick a slap that sent him tramping into his stall, and then said, with the drawling accent peculiar to him:
“Well, Polly, you’re a pretty sensible girl. If the doctor says so, I guess it’s wuth trying.”
Then Polly, who had so courageously braced herself for the contest, experienced an overwhelming revulsion of feeling, and a great wave of gratitude and compunction swept over her. To Uncle Seth’s speechless astonishment she flung her arms around his big neck, and, with some thing very like a sob, she cried:
“Oh, Uncle Seth, I never loved you half enough!”
Uncle Seth bore it very well, all things considered. He got pretty red in the face, but happily a full grizzly beard kept the secret of his blushes.
“Why, Polly!” he said, pounding away on her shoulder in an attempt to be consolatory; “you’ve always ben a good girl; not a mite of trouble, not a mite!”
They walked up to the house, Polly holding the rough, hairy hand as tightly as if it had been a solid chunk of gold. Before the short walk to the kitchen door was finished they had become sworn conspirators, and Uncle Seth was so entirely in the spirit of the piece that he held Polly back a minute to say, in a sepulchral whisper,
“Just you leave your Aunt Lucia to me. I’ll fix her.”
Polly never knew all the pains Uncle Seth was at to “fix” Aunt Lucia, but by hook or crook the “fixing” was accomplished, and Aunt Lucia had given a mournful consent.
“I shouldn’t feel it right,” she declared, “to let you suppose I thought there was any hope of its curing Dan. That boy’s doomed, if ever a boy was, and I don’t know how you’ll ever manage with the funeral and all, way out there in Colorado, far from kith and kin. But your Uncle Seth says you’d better try it, and I ain’t one to oppose just for the sake of opposin’. I’ve been through too much for that. Only I warn you; mind, you don’t forget I warned you.”
Polly listened to Aunt Lucia’s lugubrious views with scarcely a twinge of alarm, and in five minutes she had plunged into preparations for the journey.
As for Dan, the mere thought of Colorado seemed to revive him. “Larks” of any description had always been very much to his taste, but the unending “lark” of an escape into the big world with Polly filled him with a fairly riotous joy.
And so it happened that by the time the March thaws were setting in and the March winds were getting ready for their boisterous attack, Polly and Dan had slipped away, and were travelling as fast as steam could carry them toward the high, health-giving region of the Rocky Mountains.
“A harebrained venture as ever was!” Miss Louisa Bailey declared when she heard of it. “I don’t see what Mr. and Mrs. Lapham were thinking of, to countenance such a step!”
The monthly sewing-circle had come round again, and Mrs. Lapham, whose turn it was to look after the supper, had stepped out of the room for a moment.
“Well, I don’t know but it’s about as well,” the Widow Criswell rejoined, sighing profoundly. She was more out of spirits than usual to-day, for circumstances, otherwise known as Mrs. Royce, the president of the sewing-circle, had forced into her hands a baby’s pinafore, the cheerful suggestiveness of which could only serve to deepen her gloom. “The boy’s doomed, wherever he is, and Sister Lapham never had any real taste for sick-nursing. She’s spared a sight o’ trouble and expense.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Henry Dodge, winding a needleful of No. 20 thread off the spool, with the hissing sound familiar to the ears of the seamstress, and breaking it off with a snap, “I think it’s the very best thing that could have been done. The minute I saw that girl’s face last sewing-circle, I knew she’d make out to save that boy. Mark my words, he’ll outlive us all yet! I declare, I always did like Polly Fitch. She reminds me of myself when I was a girl!”
CHAPTER II
WESTWARD HO!
“Pike’s Peak or Bust!” was the chosen motto of those early pilgrims who, thirty-odd years ago, crossed the continent in a “prairie schooner,” escorted by a cavalry guard to keep Indian marauders at a respectful distance; and “Pike’s Peak or Bust!” was the motto chosen by Polly and Dan, our two young modern pilgrims, as they journeyed with greater ease, but with no less courage and venturesomeness, across the two thousand miles intervening between quiet Fieldham and their goal.
“Pike’s Peak or Bust!” No one looking into the bright young faces turned so bravely westward ho! could have had any doubt as to which of the two alternatives hinted at in that picturesque motto would be fulfilled for them. On they journeyed, on and on, past populous cities, across great rivers, over vast plains brown with last year’s stubble or white with newly fallen snow, till at last there came a morning when they awoke in the tingling dawn, and, looking forth across miles of shadowy prairie, beheld a great white dome cut clear against a sapphire sky. On the train rushed, on and on, straight toward that snowy dome, and, as they drew nearer, other mountains began to define themselves on either side the central peak, and presently a town revealed itself, and they knew that it could be no other than Colorado Springs, sleeping there at the foot of the great range, all unconscious of the two young pilgrims, coming so confidingly to seek their fortunes within its borders.
Their first spring and summer were a very happy time, of which Polly and Dan could relate a hundred noteworthy incidents. They rented a tiny cottage of three rooms in the unfashionable part of the town where rents were low. Here was a bit of ground all about, and a narrow porch that looked straight into the face of the splendid old Peak; and here they lived the merriest of lives on the smallest and most precarious of incomes; for they were determined to infringe as little as possible upon the slender capital, snugly stowed away in a Colorado bank.
Dan soon found employment in a livery-stable at fifty cents a day. His chief business was the agreeable one of delivering “teams” and saddle-horses to pleasure-seekers at the north end of the town, riding back to the stable again on a “led horse” provided for the purpose. If not a very ambitious calling, it was, at least, exceedingly good fun, and it also had the merit of conforming to the doctor’s directions. “Don’t let him get behind a counter or into any stuffy back-office,” the doctor had said to Polly. “Whatever he does, let it keep him in the open air as much as possible.” Had the very obvious wisdom of this advice required demonstration, Dan’s rapid improvement would have been sufficient.
They did not shock the sensibilities of the sewing-circle by writing home exactly what the employment was that Dan had found, while, for themselves, Polly had her own little ways of embellishing the somewhat prosaic situation. She dubbed the young stable-boy Hercules, and always spoke of the establishment he served as “The Augæans.” Nor did her invention fail when, a month or two later, Dan got a place at somewhat higher wages as druggist’s messenger; for then he was promptly informed that his name was Mercury, and that there were wings on his heels, though he could not himself see them, by reason of their being turned back, and visible only when his feet were in rapid motion!
Meanwhile, Polly, too, was doing her part, though it had not yet proved very lucrative. When they first took the house, Dan painted a sign for her, bearing the following announcement:
Fine Needlework and Embroidery to OrderBut the spring and summer went by, and autumn came, and still the sign which had ornamented their house-front for so many months had as yet attracted the notice of only the impecunious class of customers their immediate neighbourhood afforded. Polly had gratefully taken coarse work at low prices, but she still hoped for better things. The street where their tiny cottage stood, though at the wrong end of the town, was a thoroughfare for pleasure parties driving to the great cañons, and Polly never saw the approach of a pretty turnout without a thrill of hope that the occupants might be attracted by her sign. She knew herself to be a quick and skilful needlewoman, and she thought that if only she might once get started in well-paid work, Dan, who was growing stronger every day, might go on with his education at the Colorado College Preparatory School. She had found out all about the college, of which she had formed a very high opinion, and she told herself proudly that Dan had such a good mind that he would not need to study too hard.
One evening in September they were clearing the supper table, preparatory to washing up the dishes, which ceremony was one of the numerous “larks” by which brother and sister found life diversified and enlivened.
“Mercury, I have an idea!” Polly suddenly cried.
“Never saw the time you hadn’t, Polly.”
“But this is a great idea, a really great one, because it includes all the little ones, like Milton’s universe in the crescent moon; don’t you remember?”
“My goody, Polly! But it must be a corker!” – and Dan was all attention.
Now Polly, it is needless to repeat, was a young person of ideas; that was her strong point, and Dan at least considered her a marvel of ingenuity and invention. Their tiny sitting-room, where Dan slept, was a witness to her taste and originality. There were picturesque shelves which Dan had made in accordance with her directions; there were cheesecloth window-curtains, with rustic boughs in place of poles; there were barrels standing bottom upward for tables, draped with ancient “duds” – a changeable-silk skirt of her mother’s over one, a moth-eaten camel’s-hair shawl over another. The crack in the only mirror which a munificent landlord had provided was concealed by a kinikinick vine; a piece of Turkey-red at five cents a yard, their one bit of extravagance, converted Dan’s cot-bed into a canopy of state. And having heard Dan chant the praises of her “ideas” with gratifying persistence for a month past, Polly had begun to wonder whether they might not be turned to account.
“What’s the latest idea, Polly?” Dan asked, seizing a dripping handful of what they were pleased to call their “family plate.”
“Well, Dan, I want you to paint something more on my sign. Only two words; it won’t take you long.”
“What two words?”
“Also Ideas!”
Dan reflected a moment, and then he proceeded to dance a jig of delight, wildly waving his dish-cloth about Polly’s head.
“Polly, you beat the world!” he cried.
A house-painter lived next door, from whom Dan borrowed paint and brushes, and before they slept the old sign was further decorated with two magic words done in brilliant scarlet. The inscription now read:
Fine Needlework and Embroidery to OrderAlso IdeasThere was something positively dazzling about those two words in flaming scarlet, and Polly and Dan stepped out twice in the course of their early breakfast to have a look at them.
“Don’t you feel scared, Polly?” asked Dan, as he left her at her dish-washing.
“Scared? Not I!” and she walked down the path with him, drying her hands on a dish-towel.
It was a delicious morning in late September; the air dry and sparkling as a jewel, the mountains baring their shoulders to the morning sun. The Peak had already a dash of winter on his crown, but the barren slope of rock below looked like an impregnable fortress. Polly and Dan were never tired of wondering at the changing moods that played so gloriously upon that steadfast front.
“Seems as if they must almost see him from Fieldham this morning, he’s so bright,” said Polly.
“That’s so,” Dan agreed. “I say, Polly, isn’t he enjoying himself, though?”
“Course he is!” Polly answered. “Isn’t everybody?”
Then Polly went back to her splashing water and flopping dish-towels, and was busy for an hour about the house. By and bye she sat herself down in the little porch and proceeded to put good honest stitches into a child’s frock, for the making of which she was to receive twenty-five cents. Not very good pay for a day’s work, but “twenty-five-hundred-million per cent. better than nothing,” as she had assured the doubtful Dan.
Life looked very different to her since those two bright words had been added to the sign. Not that it had looked otherwise than pleasant before; but there was so little originality in the idea of doing needlework that it had scarcely merited success, while this, – of course it must succeed!
In truth, she had sat there hardly an hour, when she distinctly heard the occupant of a yellow buckboard read the sign, and then turn to her companion with a word of comment. Polly had always had an idea that one of those yellow buckboards would be the making of her fortune yet. The one in question was drawn by a pretty pair of ponies, and two young girls were in possession of it.
“I have an idea they’ll notice it again, when they come back this way,” Polly surmised. “But if they’re going up the cañon they won’t come back till just as I’m getting dinner.”
And, sure enough, the mutton stew was just beginning to simmer, when there came a rap at the door.
The front door opened directly into the little sitting-room, and was never closed in pleasant weather. As Polly emerged from the kitchen, her face very red from hobnobbing with the stove, she found one of the girls of the yellow buckboard standing in the doorway.
“Good morning, Miss–”
“Fitch. My name is Polly Fitch.”
“What a jolly name!” the visitor exclaimed. “I think you must be the one with ideas.”
“Yes,” said Polly, “Do you want one? Come in and take a seat.”
“I do want an idea most dreadfully,” the young lady rejoined, taking the proffered chair. “I want something for a booby prize for a backgammon tournament. I don’t suppose anybody ever heard of a backgammon tournament before, but it’s going to be great fun. We are doing it to take the conceit out of a young man we know, who declares that there’s nothing in backgammon that he didn’t learn the first time he played it with his grandfather.”
“And you want a booby prize?” Polly looked thoughtful for the space of sixteen seconds. Then she cried; “Oh, I have an idea! Get somebody to whittle you a couple of wooden dice; then paint them white and mark them with black sixes on each of the six sides of each die. You could call it ‘a booby pair-o’-dice’ if you don’t object to puns!”
“What a good idea! It’s simply perfect! I wonder whom I could get to do it for me?”
“Why, Dan could do it with his jackknife, just as well as not. If you’ll come to-morrow morning you shall have them.”
Accordingly, the next morning, the young lady appeared, and was enchanted with her prize.
“And how much will they be?” she asked.
“Well, I had thought of charging twenty-five cents for an idea, and the dice didn’t cost us anything and only took a few minutes to make.”
“Supposing we call it a dollar. Would that be fair?”
“I don’t believe they are worth a dollar.”
“Yes, they are; I should be ashamed to take them for less. What a splendid idea that was of yours, to put out that sign!”
“I should think it was, if I could get any more customers like you!”
“I’ll send them to you, – never you fear!”
Miss Beatrice Compton returned to her buckboard a captive to Polly.
“She’s the sweetest thing,” she told her mother, who chanced to be her passenger on this occasion. “She’s got eyes and hair exactly of a colour, a sort of reddish brown, and her eyes twinkle at you in the dearest way, and she wears her hair in the quaintest pug, just in the right place on her head, sort of up in the air; and she’s a lady, too; anybody can see that. I wonder who ‘Dan’ is; you don’t suppose she’s married, do you?”
“You can’t tell,” Mrs. Compton replied. “Persons in that walk of life marry very young.”
“But, Mamma, she isn’t a ‘person,’ and she doesn’t belong to ‘that walk of life.’ She’s a lady.”
Miss Beatrice was as good as her word, and three days had not passed when a horseman stopped before the little cottage, sprang from his horse, and looked about for a place to tie; there was no hitching-post near by. Polly was sitting in the porch making buttonholes.
“If you were coming in here, you’d better lead him right up the walk,” she said, “and tie him to the porch-post.”
“That’s a good idea!” the young man replied, promptly acting upon the advice. “You are Miss Polly Fitch, are you not?”
“Yes.”
“I knew you the minute I saw you, because Miss Compton described you to me.” This was meant to be very flattering, but Polly, who seldom missed a point, was quite unconscious that one had been made.
“Have you come for an idea?” she asked, quite innocently, and Mr. Reginald Axton, who was rather sensitive, wondered whether she “meant anything.” On second thoughts he concluded that she did not, and he began again:
“I got that booby prize you made.”
“Did you?” cried Polly, with animation. “Oh, I wonder whether you were the one – ” she paused.
“The one that what?” he asked hastily.
“The one that thought there wasn’t anything in the game.”
“Well, yes, I was. And the others had all the luck, and so of course I got beaten.”
“Of course!” said Polly, with a twinkle of delight.
“I see you’re on their side, but all the same I want you to help me to pay them back. You see I wanted to do something about it, and I thought of sending Miss Compton some flowers with a verse, and I thought perhaps you could do the verse.”
“Did you expect me to furnish the idea, too?”
“Why, of course! That’s why I came to you. I thought, if you were so awfully bright, perhaps you could make verses.”
Polly looked thoughtful.
“I should charge you quite a lot for it,” she said, – “much as a dollar perhaps; for you know writing verses is quite an accomplishment.”
“I’ll pay a dollar a line for it! I know a fellow that gets more than that from the magazines. And I’m sure that it will be good if you do it.”
“My gracious! that’s great pay!” cried Polly, with sparkling eyes, ignoring the compliment, but enchanted to hear what a price verses brought. “I’ll send it to you by mail.”
“No, I guess I’ll look in every once in a while and see how you’re getting on!”
“Dear me!” said Polly, “you don’t expect me to spend a week over it, do you? That isn’t why you offered such high pay?”