Chapter 13

The Post Mistress at the station tapped her thimble on the window-pane at the chickens floundering in the flower-bed outside.

They turned, looked at her, then, rising, staggered off with a ruffled and uppish air, due partly to their indignation and partly to the fact that the wind blew their feathers straight up, and a trifle forward over their heads.

"It's bad enough," she said, "to try and raise flowers in Kansas, fighting the wind, without having to fight the chickens. It's a fight for existence all the way round, this living in Kansas."

Her companion was a man with iron-gray hair, a professor of an Eastern college who had come West, planted what money he had in real estate and lost it. He, however, still retained part of the real estate.

He frequently lounged about the office for an hour or two during the day, waiting for the mail, good enough company except that he occasionally interfered with the reading of the postal cards.

He looked up from a New York newspaper, three days old.

"Pioneer people," he observed laconically, "must expect to fight everything from real estate agents to buffaloes."

The Post Mistress laid down her sewing. Her official duties were not arduous. They left her between trains ample time to attend to those of her household, sewing and all, also to embroider upon bits of gossip caught here and there in regard to her scattered neighbors whose lights of nights were like so many stars dotting the horizon.

She looked out the window to where a tall lank farmer was tying a mule to the hitching post. Over the high wheel of the old blue cart he turned big hollow eyes her way.

"I hope he won't come before the train gets in," she sighed. "There ain't no letter for him, I hope he won't come. Sometimes I feel like I just can't tell him there ain't no letter for him."

"Who is it?" asked the Professor.

"Seth Lawson," she answered.

The Professor elevated his eyebrows.

"The man who owns the ground on which they are to build the Magic City?" he asked laughingly.

"It may happen," declared the Post Mistress tartly. "Anything is liable to happen in Kansas, the things you least expect."

"Everything in the way of cyclones, you mean," put in the Professor.

"Cyclones and everything else," affirmed the Post Mistress. "No matter what it is, Kansas goes other States one better. She raises the tallest corn--they have to climb stepladders to reach the ears--and the biggest watermelons in the world."

"When she raises any at all," the Professor inserted.

"They say," began the Post Mistress, "that in the Eastern part of the State, where they are beginning to be civilized, when a farmer plants his watermelon seed, he hitches up his fastest team and drives into the next county for the watermelon, it grows so fast. Even then, unless he has a pretty fast team somebody else gets it. If you find one on your claim, you know, it's yours."

"I've heard that story," the Professor politely reminded her.

"They do say," remembered the Post Mistress, "that the Indians tell that yarn, that a cyclone never came to Seth's ranch. It may be a fool notion and it may not.... Look at him," leaning forward and gazing out the window. "See how gaunt and haggard and wistful he looks. I don't believe he gets enough to eat. There ain't a sadder sight on these prairies than Seth Lawson. How many months has she been away from him now? May, June, July, August, September, November," counting on her fingers. "Seven months and one little letter from her to say she got home safe. A dozen from him to her. More. You could almost see the love and sadness through the envelope. And none from her in answer.

"Look at him now. Walkin' up and down, up and down, to pass away the time till the train comes. Waitin' for a letter. It won't come. It never will come. And him waitin' and waitin'. He'd as well wait for the dead to come to life or for that wife of his to leave her Kentucky home she's so much fonder of than she is of him or the baby or anything else in the world, to come back to him. What sort of woman can she be anyway to leave a little nursing baby?"

"Some cats leave their kittens before their eyes are open," the Professor said.

"But a woman isn't a cat," objected the Post Mistress. "At least she oughtn't to be. Do you know I've always said the worst woman was too good for the best man, but that woman has made me change my mind. She's gone for good. She don't have to stand the wind any longer or the sleet or the rain. She's gone for good. Then why couldn't she write him a little letter to keep the heart warm in him. What harm would that do her. How much time would it take?

"It don't seem so bad somehow for a woman to have the heartache. She's used to it, mostly. Some women ain't happy unless they do have it. Heartaches and tears make up their lives, they furnish excitement. But a man is different. You see a man holding a baby in long clothes. It's awkward, ain't it? Somehow it don't seem natural. If you have got any sort of mother's heart in your bosom, you want to go and take it out of his arms and cuddle it.

"It's the same with a man with the heartache. You want to go and take it away from him, even if you have to keep it yourself. It don't seem right for him to have it no more than it seems right for him to have to take care of a child.

"That man's got both. The little baby and the heartache. But what can you do for him? There's nothing goin' to cure him but a letter from her, and you can't get that. If ever a man deserved a good wife it's that man, Seth, and what did he get? A Southern woman!"

"Those Southern women make good wives," asserted the Professor, "if you give them plenty of servants and money. None better."

"Good fair-weather wives," nodded the Post Mistress, "but look out for storms. That's when they desert."

"It's a sweeping assertion," mused the Professor, "and not quite fair. It is impossible to judge them all by this weak creature, Celia Lawson. Many a woman in Kentucky braved dangers, cold, hunger and wild animals, living in log huts as these women live in their dugouts, before that State was settled and civilized."

"Some won't give in that it is civilized," objected the Post Mistress, "they're so given down there to killin' people."

"The only difference," went on the Professor, "was in the animals. They had bears. We have buffaloes. But sometimes you come across a woman who isn't cut out for a pioneer woman, and all the training in the world won't make her one. It's the way with Seth's wife."

"She's not only weak and incapable," vowed the Post Mistress, "but soulless and heartless."

"How these women love each other," the Professor commented.

"'Tain't that," flared the Post Mistress. "I'm as good a friend to a woman as another woman can be...."

"Just so," the Professor smiled.

"It's my theory," frowned the Post Mistress, "that women should stand by women and men by men...."

"Your Theory," mused the Professor.

"And I practice it," declared the Post Mistress. "Only in this case I can't. Nobody could. What sort of woman is she, anyway? I can't understand her. She's rid of him and the child and the wind and the weather. She's back there where they say it's cool in the summer-time and warm in the winter, where the cold blasts don't blow, and the hot winds don't blister, and still she can't take time to sit down and write a little note to the father of her child."

She looked away from the window and Seth to the Professor, who wondered why it was he had never before observed the beauty of her humid eyes.

"I can't bear to see him walking up and down," she complained, "waitin' and waitin'. It disgusts you with woman-kind."

The wind blew the shutter to with a bang. It flung it open again. Some twigs of a tree outside tapped at the pane. A whistle sounded.

Seth turned glad eyes in the direction of the sound. The train!

There was the usual bustle. A man brought in a bag of letters, flung it down, sped out and made a flying leap for the train, which was beginning to move on. The Post Mistress busied herself with distributing the mail and Seth walked back and forth, waiting.

Presently he came in at the door, stood at the grated window back of which she sorted out the letters and then went out again.

After a time he drove slowly by the house in the high blue cart.

"Was there anything for him?" asked the Professor.

The Post Mistress looked after the cart receding into a cloud of dust blown up by the wind and brushed her fingers across her eyes.

"There was nothing for him," she said.