Page:West of Dodge (1926).pdf/129

 plenty of ventilation. Broken arms, minor cases of all kinds not serious enough to send down to Topeka to the company hospital. They'll get on better here where they can talk with the jerries in their own language, the language of the track—it's entirely unknown to me in wide stretches—and sit under the trees and read Mary's books. She lets them out free to the cripples—crips, they call them, down at the train."

"Mary; that's the red-headed one, isn't it?"

Elizabeth spoke with a respectable indifference, in the way the ladies have when they want us to understand that the thing under comment does not concern them in the least. Which is nothing short of confessing their great interest in it, in the cold masking of which nobody is deceived.

"Yes, Mary is the red-headed one. She's got the queerest collection of books ever assembled on a shelf. She's got Robinson Crusoe and the Roman Catholic catechism; a great deal of Laura Jean Libby and the poems of Robert Burns. She's got the sometime biennial report of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture, and several of those uplifting tales by Mr. Alger of orphan youths who begin in grocery stores at fifty cents a week and end in large houses and long black coats, genial capitalists without a drop of rancor in their benignant breasts. You'd be surprised how these old tarriers like that kind of stuff. The boarding-train literary standard may be humble, but the appetite is strong."

"I've been wondering what you are going to do when they move the railroaders away from here. They never stay long in one place, you know. Are you going with them?"