The conductor went on counting transfers.
“Say—” the Inger went on, slightly louder, and the man glanced up imperturbably.
“I says I’d leave you off, didn’t I?” he demanded. “It’s ten mile yet.”
Ten miles! The Inger stood by Lory and looked at the streets. Amazing piles of dirty masonry, highways of dirty stone, processions of carts, armies of people.
“He lied,” he thought. “They couldn’t keep it up for ten miles.”
When at last the two were set down, it was on one of those vast, treeless stretches outside Chicago, where completed sidewalks cut the uncompleted lengths of sand and coarse grass, and where an occasional house stands out like a fungus—as quickly evolved as a fungus, too, and almost as parti-colored. But these open spaces the two hailed in thanksgiving.
The Inger dropped his pack and stretched mightily.
“What’d they want to go and muss up the earth for?” he said. “It’s good enough for me, naked.”
The girl footed beside him, looking everywhere in wonder. Her scarlet handkerchief cap had slipped sidewise on her hair which was loosened and fallen on her neck. Her dress, of some rough brown, was scant and short, and it was tight on her full arms and bosom, beneath a little blue knit shawl that had been her mother’s. But she was as lovely here as ever she had been in the desert and on Whiteface. And as soon as they were alone, the Inger always fell silent, with the perpetual sense of trying to understand.
The days on the train had not left them as their meeting had found them. There had been hours, side by side, drawing over the burning yellow and rose of their desert; and over the flat emptiness and fulness of Kansas; nights on the rear platform, close to the rail, so that the overhead lights should not extinguish the stars; hours when the train waited for a bridge to be mended, and they had walked on the prairie, and secretly had been homesick for the friendly huddling shapes against the horizons. To the Inger, with the Flag-pole for his background, the luxury of a Pullman had occurred no more than to Lory. It was a way for some folk to ride, as diamonds were for certain folk to buy. But as for them, they had sat in the day-coach, and at night had laid their heads on their packs, as simply as they had eaten the remains of their lunch, and of food snatched at station counters.