Page:Lost Ecstasy (1927).pdf/112

 Tom was smart enough to outwit Allison, that was his business. His ticket was all right.

The long journey continued, broken only by the stops every twenty-eight hours, when the cattle were taken out of the cars and at the pens beside the track were watered and given hay. Meal time was a casual matter of way stations and the end: of the division.

There the crews changed, and the cabooses and engines. But the interminable game of stud poker with a pack of swollen filthy cards went on. Sometimes the conductor took a hand, again the brakeman would descend his ladder from the cupola above, or the forward brakeman would wander back over the tops of the swaying cars and sit in for a while.

Tom was happy, after a fashion. He was physically comfortable, rested, and warm. In the morning he bathed with water from the open butt marked "Wash water" and he had managed to buy some underclothes and socks. His injury was healing, too. He looked neither ahead nor behind. Clare was as though she had never existed. He meant to come back from Chicago, of course; where else could he go? But he anticipated no serious trouble from Allison, or did not care to think about it if he did.

Now and then he thought of Kay, but there was heartache there, and he tried to forget her.

Occasionally he would look up from the game to glance out the window. As the bare treeless plains began to rise into the wooded hills of Iowa and Wisconsin he was conscious of beauty he was unable to express.

"That's sure pretty," he would say.

"Prettiest country in America," the brakeman might observe. "Look at them hills. Trees right to the top."

"Hills? You call them hills? You come out our way and let me show you something!"

But the towns began to daunt him, as they grew in size; the lines of automobiles drawn up, the well-dressed swiftmoving people; and cowboy fashion both he and Bill expressed their discomfiture in jeers. "Look at him, Tom! I'll bet they'd pay a bounty on him back home."

"No! Not enough hair on his hide."