Good Indian by B. M. Bower (best book club books .TXT) 📕

“I have every reason to believe that your two missing jumpers took the train for Shoshone last night,” Miss Georgie made answer to Good Indian's account of what had happened since he saw her. “Two furtive-eyed individuals answering your description bought round-trip tickets and had me flag sixteen for them. They got on, all right. I saw them. And if they got off before the next station they must have landed on their heads, because Sixteen was making up time and Shorty pulled the throttle wide open at the first yank, I should judge, from the way he jumped out of town. I've been expecting some of them to go and do their filing stunt—and if the boys have begun to devil them any, the chances are good that they'd take turns at it, anyway. They'd leave someone always on the ground, that's a cinch.

“And Saunders,” she went on rapidly, “returned safe enough. He sneaked in just before I closed the office last night, and asked for a telegram. There wasn't any, and he sneaked out again and went to bed—so Pete told me this morning. And most of the Indians have pulled out—squaws, dogs, papooses, and all—on some fishing or hunting expedition. I don't know that it has anything to do with your affairs, or would even interest you, though. And there has been no word from Peaceful, and they can't possibly get back now till the four-thirty—five.

“And that's all I can tell you, Mr. Imsen,” she finished crisply, and took up a novel with a significance which not even the dullest man could have ignored.

Good Indian stared, flushed hotly, and made for the door.

“Thank you for the information. I'm afraid this has been a lot of bother for you,” he said stiffly, gave her a ceremonious little bow, and went his way stiff-necked and frowning.

Miss Georgie leaned forward so that she could see him through the window. She watched him cross to the store, go up the three rough steps to the platform, and disappear into the yawning blackness beyond the wide-open door.

She did not open the novel and begin reading, even then. She dabbed her handkerchief at her eyes, muttered: “My Heavens, what a fool!” apropos of nothing tangible, and stared dully out at the forlorn waste of cinders with rows of shining rails running straight across it upon ties half sunken in the black desolation, and at the red abomination which was the pump-house squatting beside the dripping tank, the pump breathing asthmatically as it labored to keep the sliding water gauge from standing at the figure which meant reproach for the grimy attendant.

“What a fool—what a fool!” she repeated at the end of ten moody minutes. Then she threw the novel into a corner of the room, set her lower jaw into the square lines of stubbornness, went over to the sleeping telegraph instrument which now and then clicked and twittered in its sleep, called up Shoshone, and commanded the agent there to send down a quart freezer of ice cream, a banana cake, and all the late magazines he could find, including—especially including—the alleged “funny” ones.

“You certainly—are—the prize—fool!” she said, when she switched off the current, and she said it with vicious emphasis. Whereupon she recovered the novel, seated herself determinedly in the beribboned rocker, flipped the leaves of the book spitefully until she found one which had a corner turned down, and read a garden-party chapter much as she used to study her multiplication table when she was ten and hated arithmetic.

A freight was announced over the wire, arrived with a great wheezing and snorting, which finally settled to a rhythmic gasping of the air pump, while a few boxes of store supplies were being dumped unceremoniously upon the platform. Miss Georgie was freight agent as well as many other things, and she went out and stood bareheaded in the sun to watch the unloading.

She performed, with the unthinking precision which comes of long practice, the many little duties pertaining to her several offices, and when the wheels began once more to clank, and she had waved her hand to the fireman, the brakeman, and the conductor, and had seen the dirty flags at the rear of the swaying caboose flap out of sight around the low, sage-covered hill, she turned rather dismally to the parlor end of the office, and took up the book with her former air of grim determination. So for an hour, perhaps.

“Is Miss Georgie Howard at home?” It was Evadna standing in the doorway, her indigo eyes fixed with innocent gayety—which her mouth somehow failed to meet halfway in mirth—upon the reader.

“She is, chicken, and overjoyed at the sight of you!” Miss Georgie rose just as enthusiastically as if she had not seen Evadna slip from Huckleberry's back, fuddle the tie-rope into what looked like a knot, and step lightly upon the platform. She had kept her head down—had Miss Georgie—until the last possible second, because she was still being a fool and had permitted a page of her book to fog before her eyes. There was no fog when she pushed Evadna into the seat of honor, however, and her mouth abetted her eyes in smiling.

“Everything at the ranch is perfectly horrid,” Evadna complained pathetically, leaning back in the rocking-chair. “I'd just as soon be shut up in a graveyard. You can't IMAGINE what it's like, Georgie, since those horrible men came and camped around all over the place! All yesterday afternoon and till dark, mind you, the boys were down there shooting at everything but the men, and they began to shoot back, and Aunt Phoebe was afraid the boys would be hit, and so we all went down and—oh, it was awful! If Grant hadn't come home and stopped them, everybody would have been murdered. And you should have heard how they swore at Grant afterward! They just called him everything they could think of for making them stop. I had to sit around on the other side of the house—and even then I couldn't help hearing most of it.

“And to-day it is worse, because they just go around like a lot of dummies and won't do anything but look mean. Aunt Phoebe was so cross—CROSS, mind you!—because I burnt the jam. And some of the jumpers are missing, and nobody knows where they went—and Marie has got the toothache worse than ever, and won't go and have it pulled because it will HURT! I don't see how it can hurt much worse than it does now—she just goes around with tears running down into the flannel around her face till I could SHAKE her!” Evadna laughed—a self-pitying laugh, and rocked her small person violently. “I wish I could have an office and live in it and telegraph things to people,” she sighed, and laughed again most adorably at her own childishness. “But really and truly, it's enough to drive a person CRAZY, down at the ranch!”

“For a girl with a brand-new sweetheart—” Miss Georgie reproved quizzically, and reached for the inevitable candy box.

“A lot of good that does, when he's never there!”