Page:The Cow Jerry (1925).pdf/22

 ballast roadbed. There was a smell of jimson weed and fennel, and oil from the railroad, spiced with invigorating nip of cottonwood leaves like bitters in an insipid drink.

The sound of hammering came out of the railroad yards, where Orrin Smith, the section boss, was working his gang of terriers putting in a switch. It was a deep, whirring, musical note, that of sledge on rail as some sweating jerry labored to bend the stubborn metal for the curve of the lead, yet subdued in that summer furnace, that vacuum of heat about which nature did not appear to concern itself at all, not even with a zephyr strong enough to turn a feather in the road.

Two figures enlivened the somnolent front of the Cottonwood Hotel this drowsy hour, side by side upon one of the benches flanking the open door. Even a stranger would have known, by her bearing of authority, that the woman was the boss of that concern, and that no man was boss of her. She was that type of woman, common to small hotels and boarding houses, whose bearing seemed to say that if there was a man around the place who had been an incident of more or less interest in her life at one time, he had been reduced to the lowest possible terms, if not rubbed out altogether.

Julia Cowgill was a quick and eager woman, rather meagre of frame, and tall, with a persistent prettiness in her gaunt face, a saucy challenge in her quick-darting, wide-awake gray eyes. Gray was stealing away her black hair with its Irish wave and crinkle. She