Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/338



The long mixed train crawling into the stockyards at Omaha, with its ice-encased wheels, its fringe of icicles pendant from the eaves, and snow from the windswept plains of western Nebraska piled on the roofs, looked like an Arctic Special,

Kate stood on the rear platform of the swaying caboose looking with wearied unkindled eyes at the myriad lights of the first city she had ever seen. Those eyes were dark- circled with fatigue, her face streaked with soft coal soot, while the wrinkled riding skirt in which she had slept was soiled and torn. Her fleece-lined canvas coat was buttoned to the throat, and she leaned negligently against the rail, watching from under the broad brim of her Stetson the twinkling lights increase.

It had been Kate's intention when she left Prouty to catch a fast passenger train and meet her sheep at a feeding station a few miles outside of Omaha, but the violence of the storm had changed her plans and she had remained to spend many tedious hours waiting on side-tracks, and this, together with the work of unloading to feed and water, and insufficient sleep, had brought her as near exhaustion as she ever had found herself.

There was no eagerness in the sheep woman's face, only the impersonal curiosity of a spectator at a display in which he had no part. She accepted as a matter of course the fact that she would be here, as she was at home, an outsider, an alien.