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F THE general public knew what was going on under the skins of a good many prim looking school-teachers it might be considerably surprised. I suppose the masculine part of the public does not think of us at all; it knows we are earning our living in a profession from which we are supposed to have crowded the men, but from which the men could easily enough crowd us if they would accept the salaries given us. The feminine public that is married perhaps bestows a ﬂeeting thought of pity upon us because we have not husband and children; concluding, however, with the comfortable reﬂection: “At least they have a full life, plenty of congenial work and children to love.”

Yes—other people’s children, whose love we have to win in the intervals between pounding knowledge into inhospitable heads and policing! It's a wearing life and not a free one. The spirit is a bit cramped and starved; and yet it is in the spirit that we must ﬁnd our compensations.

I grew up in a New England town where the young men were going away and the young women were staying home—to teach school. In church, at sociables and parties, you could look around and see a number of settled married men of all ages, from thirty up, and a number of callow

want hers to change as mine had. For me, smooth hair, not a pompadour; a responsible teacher-expression instead of a smile; a stiﬂ collar and prim black bow instead of a jabot-—ah! no; why couldn’t one in a family be enough!

Yet at thirty-ﬁve I was still a New England school

professional air that I hated in myself. Then our mother died. Unable to endure the old associations, we sold the

house; and when our debts were paid we had a thousand

dollars each. I began to think about my case. I couldn’t save more than a hundred dollars a year, for yearly I had to pay a doctor or a masseuse. When I was sixty-ﬁve I should have in all four thousand dollars, on which I might genteelly starve for another twenty years—unless prices went still higher! Perhaps my Mayﬂower blood came to my assistance. Puritan women had sailed over three thousand miles of

teacher;

Lucy was twenty-ﬁve and was taking on that

the car were.

Wanting some society en route, she had

selected me; and I was glad enough later on that she had.

It may be forgiven to a schoolma'am that I ﬁrst felt Mrs. Jensen to be “different” because her speech was rather colloquial. But, in fairness to my own powers of growth, let me add that I forgot such superﬁcialities when we had stopped talking of the weather and whence we had come. Some one in the car made her think of a woman she used to know. “Her husband,” she said, “was a mining engineer, like mine.

We were together in New Mexico, where our men

were drilling a tunnel. We had lots of trouble with fellows who said that the mineowners had jumped their claims. One of them put some lead in Mr. Jensen’s foreman and said he was coming up to put a bullet in Mr. Jensen. Of course all my husband could do was go looking for him in all the saloons in town and pull his gun on him ﬁrst. Mr.

sea, under the protection of their men, indeed; but, once arrived, they had themselves done the work of men.

Jensen and my friend's husband were both threatened a

Times had changed; I had no man, but I had a thousand dollars and I could get on a Pullman and travel across three thousand miles of land—to the West. I took a

thing but the ﬁrst to draw if he had to; and I think she might have trusted her husband, too, don’t you?”

year’s leave of absence—for what woman ever made any

Hetty Martin and Her Troubles

boys of all ages, from eighteen down; and, all around these, billows of girls and women. West—that’s where the

And always they went away

plan without leaving for herself a path of retreat? Then I set forth on the day in September when Lucy took my place in the sixth grade of the grammar school. She hoped I would come back to her in three months; I vowed she should come to me within twelve. Since I have been in the West fully a dozen women have come from my old home, or near it, to start their new lives with me as the vantage-point; but I was the ﬁrst pioneer and I had no woman to go to. One of my former students, Johnny Clayton, a man now of twenty-six, had settled in

again, leaving lavish presents behind them; and leaving

Idaho; and, without warning him, I was going to where

to me, at least, impressions of :1 larger life than could come

he was, to use him as a lever to something or other, I

to a New England spinster.

didn’t care what, so long as it was not school-teaching and

young men went; and sometimes they came back with a spacious manner and looked quizzically at the Episcopal

church and the high school, and heard our tragedies of wornout and mortgaged land, and expressed amazement at the number of old men and women who sunned them

selves in the doorways. They told us stories of cattle and sheep, trails and wide stretches of prairie, ranches and

mines and lawless men.

OR I felt I was foredoomed to be a spinster. When my

so long as it was something with a chance in it of real progress. We had regarded the young men who returned to us for a little space as, after all, alien to reality—like stories,

father died I was eighteen, with my mother and eight

interesting, but rather too strong for a normal diet.

The Old Maid Migrates

year-old Lucy to take care of; for he left us nothing but the house we lived in. I simply began teaching a little sooner than I ordinarily should have, at forty dollars a

So

my ﬁrst actual contact with the Western spirit came to me on my ﬁrst day outward, after I had taken stock of the few passengers who I felt would get oﬁ' at Pittsburgh or month. The years passed; I moved from school to school‘ Chicago, or—at the farthest—Denver. A woman, who and at thirty was teaching in my home town at sixty-ﬁve had escaped my observation because she had been shut up dollars a month; and Lucy was beginning as I had in the in the drawing room, opened her door and stood more or country, at forty dollars. less frankly surveying the rest of us. I knew immediately I don’t remember just what started my revolt, but it that she must have Scandinavian ancestors not far behind was probably connected with Lucy. Perhaps she sighed her; only thus could have come those clear, calm, blue as she looked at some pretty, youthful summer visitor in eyes, strong hair and magniﬁcent body. She must have church, with money enough for all sorts of gayety. I been ﬁve feet nine in height and she was broad to corre had schooled myself to starve my desires, to consider it spond. She came down the length of the sleeping car with a cause for gratitude that I could buy neat-looking clothes, a walk that had surely never been fostered on the neat, could supply my mother with a few modest luxuries and hard pavements of a New England town. could save a few dollars each year. But when I put my I found out afterward that Mrs. Jensen had made up her face beside Lucy’s, as she stood before her mirror, I didn't mind that I was not a sheep and that the other women in

lot after that, but I never knew my husband to be any

RUST her husband! I had generally heard that expres sion of a man whose wife had gone to Europe, to educate the children, and left him alone to be absorbed in

his work and presumably indifferent to the wiles of women who stood ready to solace him.

“She couldn’t stand it,” continued Mrs. Jensen. “One day, when we had brought in a lot of niggers to work and the white men had posted notices ordering them to get out

within twenty-four hours or stay as dead niggers, and when my husband had torn down the notices and told the niggers he'd shoot them if they went, then my friend did some tall knocking; and the upshot was that her husband had to pull out and go to a place she considered safe. I'd not like to have it on my soul that I had broken Mr. Jensen's nerve. I can't understand some wo1nen~can you?” I certainly wanted to understand her and I listened eagerly to all she said about the West. “ My husband wrote me a few days ago,” she remarked on one occasion, “that a woman I know is in some trouble up where we’re going. You’d like to meet her. Her name’s Hetty Martin, and she used to be the cattle queen of her state. I met her in St. Louis, where she’d brought in a thousand horses she'd raised herself.” I could not have listened more attentively if I had real ized then how closely I was going to be associated with Hetty Martin. “Hetty’s a type of the old West that’s passing,” said Mrs. Jensen regretfully. “Her father, Rufe Martin, set tled in Idaho, I guess, seventy years ago; and he and his brothers took homesteads and squatters’ claims and started raising cattle and horses. He had a couple of sons, but they were no good compared to Hetty. She grew