A Bookful Of Girls Part 13

Mr. Seth Lapham was a good man; there could be no doubt about that.

Nothing but a sincere and very efficient conscience could have so tempered his natural penuriousness as to cause him to receive into his family a mere sister-in-law's children and allow them to "want for nothing"; that, too, at a time when his own children, John and Martha, were still a bill of expense to him, before their respective marriages. For many years, Uncle Seth had conscientiously, if not lavishly, fed and clothed the little orphans, whose entire patrimony in the Savings Bank scarcely yielded interest enough to pay for their boots and shoes; but it remained for the present crisis to prove him as open-minded as he was conscientious. For, no sooner had Polly finished the rapid exposition of her great plan--how they were to draw the money from the bank to pay for their tickets and start them in their new life, and how they were to earn their own living when once they got started--than he was ready to admit the reasonableness of it.

"And when you once get out there, why, there you are!" Polly declared, in her most convincing tone.

As she stood before him, flushed and breathless, prepared to do battle for Dan to the very last extremity, her uncle gave old d.i.c.k a slap that sent him tramping into his stall, and then said, with the drawling accent peculiar to him:

"Well, Polly, you're a pretty sensible girl. If the doctor says so, I guess it's wuth trying."

Then Polly, who had so courageously braced herself for the contest, experienced an overwhelming revulsion of feeling, and a great wave of grat.i.tude and compunction swept over her. To Uncle Seth's speechless astonishment she flung her arms around his big neck, and, with some thing very like a sob, she cried:

"Oh, Uncle Seth, I never loved you half enough!"

Uncle Seth bore it very well, all things considered. He got pretty red in the face, but happily a full grizzly beard kept the secret of his blushes.

"Why, Polly!" he said, pounding away on her shoulder in an attempt to be consolatory; "you've always ben a good girl; not a mite of trouble, not a mite!"

They walked up to the house, Polly holding the rough, hairy hand as tightly as if it had been a solid chunk of gold. Before the short walk to the kitchen door was finished they had become sworn conspirators, and Uncle Seth was so entirely in the spirit of the piece that he held Polly back a minute to say, in a sepulchral whisper,

"Just you leave your Aunt Lucia to me. I'll fix her."

Polly never knew all the pains Uncle Seth was at to "fix" Aunt Lucia, but by hook or crook the "fixing" was accomplished, and Aunt Lucia had given a mournful consent.

"I shouldn't feel it right," she declared, "to let you suppose I thought there was any hope of its curing Dan. That boy's doomed, if ever a boy was, and I don't know how you'll ever manage with the funeral and all, way out there in Colorado, far from kith and kin. But your Uncle Seth says you'd better try it, and I ain't one to oppose just for the sake of opposin'. I've been through too much for that.

Only I warn you; mind, you don't forget I warned you."

Polly listened to Aunt Lucia's lugubrious views with scarcely a twinge of alarm, and in five minutes she had plunged into preparations for the journey.

As for Dan, the mere thought of Colorado seemed to revive him. "Larks"

of any description had always been very much to his taste, but the unending "lark" of an escape into the big world with Polly filled him with a fairly riotous joy.

And so it happened that by the time the March thaws were setting in and the March winds were getting ready for their boisterous attack, Polly and Dan had slipped away, and were travelling as fast as steam could carry them toward the high, health-giving region of the Rocky Mountains.

"A harebrained venture as ever was!" Miss Louisa Bailey declared when she heard of it. "I don't see what Mr. and Mrs. Lapham were thinking of, to countenance such a step!"

The monthly sewing-circle had come round again, and Mrs. Lapham, whose turn it was to look after the supper, had stepped out of the room for a moment.

"Well, I don't know but it's about as well," the Widow Criswell rejoined, sighing profoundly. She was more out of spirits than usual to-day, for circ.u.mstances, otherwise known as Mrs. Royce, the president of the sewing-circle, had forced into her hands a baby's pinafore, the cheerful suggestiveness of which could only serve to deepen her gloom. "The boy's doomed, wherever he is, and Sister Lapham never had any real taste for sick-nursing. She's spared a sight o' trouble and expense."

"_Well_," said Mrs. Henry Dodge, winding a needleful of No. 20 thread off the spool, with the hissing sound familiar to the ears of the seamstress, and breaking it off with a snap, "_I_ think it's the very _best_ thing that could have been _done_. The minute I _saw_ that girl's face last sewing-circle, I _knew_ she'd make out to _save that boy_. Mark my words, he'll outlive us all _yet!_ I declare, I always _did_ like Polly Fitch. She reminds me of _myself_ when _I_ was a girl!"

CHAPTER II

WESTWARD HO!

"Pike's Peak or Bust!" was the chosen motto of those early pilgrims who, thirty-odd years ago, crossed the continent in a "prairie schooner," escorted by a cavalry guard to keep Indian marauders at a respectful distance; and "Pike's Peak or Bust!" was the motto chosen by Polly and Dan, our two young modern pilgrims, as they journeyed with greater ease, but with no less courage and venturesomeness, across the two thousand miles intervening between quiet Fieldham and their goal.

"Pike's Peak or Bust!" No one looking into the bright young faces turned so bravely westward ho! could have had any doubt as to which of the two alternatives hinted at in that picturesque motto would be fulfilled for them. On they journeyed, on and on, past populous cities, across great rivers, over vast plains brown with last year's stubble or white with newly fallen snow, till at last there came a morning when they awoke in the tingling dawn, and, looking forth across miles of shadowy prairie, beheld a great white dome cut clear against a sapphire sky. On the train rushed, on and on, straight toward that snowy dome, and, as they drew nearer, other mountains began to define themselves on either side the central peak, and presently a town revealed itself, and they knew that it could be no other than Colorado Springs, sleeping there at the foot of the great range, all unconscious of the two young pilgrims, coming so confidingly to seek their fortunes within its borders.

Their first spring and summer were a very happy time, of which Polly and Dan could relate a hundred noteworthy incidents. They rented a tiny cottage of three rooms in the unfas.h.i.+onable part of the town where rents were low. Here was a bit of ground all about, and a narrow porch that looked straight into the face of the splendid old Peak; and here they lived the merriest of lives on the smallest and most precarious of incomes; for they were determined to infringe as little as possible upon the slender capital, snugly stowed away in a Colorado bank.

Dan soon found employment in a livery-stable at fifty cents a day. His chief business was the agreeable one of delivering "teams" and saddle-horses to pleasure-seekers at the north end of the town, riding back to the stable again on a "led horse" provided for the purpose. If not a very ambitious calling, it was, at least, exceedingly good fun, and it also had the merit of conforming to the doctor's directions.

"Don't let him get behind a counter or into any stuffy back-office,"

the doctor had said to Polly. "Whatever he does, let it keep him in the open air as much as possible." Had the very obvious wisdom of this advice required demonstration, Dan's rapid improvement would have been sufficient.

They did not shock the sensibilities of the sewing-circle by writing home exactly what the employment was that Dan had found, while, for themselves, Polly had her own little ways of embellis.h.i.+ng the somewhat prosaic situation. She dubbed the young stable-boy Hercules, and always spoke of the establishment he served as "The Augaeans." Nor did her invention fail when, a month or two later, Dan got a place at somewhat higher wages as druggist's messenger; for then he was promptly informed that his name was Mercury, and that there were wings on his heels, though he could not himself see them, by reason of their being turned back, and visible only when his feet were in rapid motion!

Meanwhile, Polly, too, was doing her part, though it had not yet proved very lucrative. When they first took the house, Dan painted a sign for her, bearing the following announcement:

FINE NEEDLEWORK AND EMBROIDERY TO ORDER.

But the spring and summer went by, and autumn came, and still the sign which had ornamented their house-front for so many months had as yet attracted the notice of only the impecunious cla.s.s of customers their immediate neighbourhood afforded. Polly had gratefully taken coa.r.s.e work at low prices, but she still hoped for better things. The street where their tiny cottage stood, though at the wrong end of the town, was a thoroughfare for pleasure parties driving to the great canons, and Polly never saw the approach of a pretty turnout without a thrill of hope that the occupants might be attracted by her sign. She knew herself to be a quick and skilful needlewoman, and she thought that if only she might once get started in well-paid work, Dan, who was growing stronger every day, might go on with his education at the Colorado College Preparatory School. She had found out all about the college, of which she had formed a very high opinion, and she told herself proudly that Dan had such a good mind that he would not need to study too hard.

One evening in September they were clearing the supper table, preparatory to was.h.i.+ng up the dishes, which ceremony was one of the numerous "larks" by which brother and sister found life diversified and enlivened.

"Mercury, I have an idea!" Polly suddenly cried.

"Never saw the time you hadn't, Polly."

"But this is a great idea, a really great one, because it includes all the little ones, like Milton's universe in the crescent moon; don't you remember?"

"My goody, Polly! But it must be a corker!"--and Dan was all attention.

Now Polly, it is needless to repeat, was a young person of ideas; that was her strong point, and Dan at least considered her a marvel of ingenuity and invention. Their tiny sitting-room, where Dan slept, was a witness to her taste and originality. There were picturesque shelves which Dan had made in accordance with her directions; there were cheesecloth window-curtains, with rustic boughs in place of poles; there were barrels standing bottom upward for tables, draped with ancient "duds"--a changeable-silk skirt of her mother's over one, a moth-eaten camel's-hair shawl over another. The crack in the only mirror which a munificent landlord had provided was concealed by a kinikinick vine; a piece of Turkey-red at five cents a yard, their one bit of extravagance, converted Dan's cot-bed into a canopy of state.

And having heard Dan chant the praises of her "ideas" with gratifying persistence for a month past, Polly had begun to wonder whether they might not be turned to account.

"What's the latest idea, Polly?" Dan asked, seizing a dripping handful of what they were pleased to call their "family plate."

"Well, Dan, I want you to paint something more on my sign. Only two words; it won't take you long."

"What two words?"

"_Also Ideas!_"

Dan reflected a moment, and then he proceeded to dance a jig of delight, wildly waving his dish-cloth about Polly's head.

"Polly, you beat the world!" he cried.

A house-painter lived next door, from whom Dan borrowed paint and brushes, and before they slept the old sign was further decorated with two magic words done in brilliant scarlet. The inscription now read:

FINE NEEDLEWORK AND EMBROIDERY TO ORDER.

ALSO IDEAS

There was something positively dazzling about those two words in flaming scarlet, and Polly and Dan stepped out twice in the course of their early breakfast to have a look at them.

"Don't you feel scared, Polly?" asked Dan, as he left her at her dish-was.h.i.+ng.