“I do wish each of you every happiness in your new land—and your new unions.”
He bowed low and gave them one final grin, smoothed his mustache, and then said firmly, “Miss Kathleen O’Malley—you will need to see me for final instructions.”
He turned on his heel and was gone.
All eyes seemed to fix on Kathleen. She straightened her shoulders, lifted her chin, and followed the man from the room.
He must have expected her to do just that, for he went only a few steps beyond the door and turned to wait for her.
“This way,” he said with a nod of his head, and Kathleen obediently followed him.
They crossed the hall and entered a small room, and he motioned toward a chair and turned to lift a sheet of paper from his pocket.
“Before I hand you this,” he said, looking straight at her, “might I say that I am a tolerant man. I am staying on in Boston. I am quite willing to forget your outburst of last evening—should you have changed your mind.”
For one moment Kathleen frowned, not understanding his words. When the truth finally dawned, she rose quickly from the chair, her face flushing, her eyes flashing anger. Without one word she reached out and snatched the paper from his fingers before he had a chance to react.
“You may be sorry, you know,” he called after her as she moved from the room as quickly as her limp would allow.
Kathleen did not return to her room immediately. She had to find some privacy before she dared look at the paper she held. At last she found a chair tucked in a rather dark corner of a distant hall and dropped onto it, trying to still her anxiously beating heart.
Carefully she unfolded the bit of paper.
“Donnigan Harrison,” said the paper. “He is a late signer like yourself. Not much is known of him. I hope you will not be sorry.”
Kathleen crumpled the paper in her hand and then felt immediate remorse. Carefully she placed it on her lap and tried to smooth out the wrinkles. She would need that piece of paper. It was all she had.
“Donnigan Harrison,” she repeated. Then her eyes lit up. She wasn’t really familiar with the surname, but Donnigan did sound rather Irish. For the first time she felt some hope.
The train ride was long and stuffily hot. Kathleen had thought the boat trip had been difficult—but at least then they had enjoyed the crispness of the ocean winds. Not given the luxury of berths, they were crammed together in seats with hard straight-backs and no place to put their tired heads. The long nights were spent in restless shifting to try to find some way to relax tired bodies.
At last they reached Chicago. Kathleen may have been interested in studying the city had she not been so totally exhausted.
The man called Piedmont was on the platform when they arrived. As they stepped off the train, he rounded the women up and hustled them to a side room, much like herding cattle, and grinned at the group nervously as he called out names and passed out tickets. Kathleen had not felt particularly close to many of the women, but as she sat and watched group after group being hurried out to catch this coach or that train, she felt panic tighten her throat.
At last her own name was called along with a number of others, and she stood up and walked numbly past the man and accepted the ticket along with its instructions of where to go and how to get there.
She was more than a little relieved to look around her and find that Erma was also in the group.
But Peg was gone. As were Nona and Beatrice. There were just Erma and her and four other women whom she didn’t know well. All four were from the Continent. She wondered if they spoke English. They seemed so shy and frightened. Kathleen moved closer to Erma, drawing some assurance from the presence of her friend.
Quickly they compared sheets and found to their relief and excitement that they shared a common destination. With excited cries they threw their arms around each other and wept unashamedly. It would be so wonderful—so wonderful to know someone, to have a friend in the new, strange land.
Soon they had boarded another train and were chugging their way out of the station. Though still not given a berth, they were not so crowded. By now they were so weary that Kathleen felt they could have slept almost anywhere.
She was right. The girls from the Continent fell asleep almost as soon as they boarded the train, the oldest of the group soon snoring loudly.
Kathleen did not stay awake to see if it annoyed other passengers. She rolled up her shawl against the coolness of the window, laid her head against it, and fell asleep.
She was stiff when she awoke in the morning, but at least she felt somewhat better.
“And how long are we to be on this train?” she asked Erma.
“I’m not sure. Someone said three days.”
Kathleen winced. She was so tired of travel. Travel and heat and people and dust. It seemed that it all went together in America.
After the train came the stagecoach, which they met in a small, dusty frontier town of gray wooden buildings and gray wooden boardwalks. The sign at the post office indicated that it was Raeford. Kathleen felt that they must be going to the end of the world. She had given up craning her neck to look out the window. There were so many miles of the same thing. She did find the herds of deer and antelope and buffalo rather exciting. She had seen no such animals on the back streets of London.
But for the most part, they rode in silence. There was really very little to talk about.
When they reached a small station by the name of Sheep’s Meadows, one of the girls from the Continent was separated from them and sent in another direction on another stage. Kathleen could sense the girl’s panic. She felt her own hand go out to grasp Erma’s. She was so thankful that she would not be going off all on her own.
Later, two of the other girls were sent off in another direction. Kathleen wondered how far they would travel before they were separated again.
There were still three of them when the stage pulled into Aspen Valley. They all looked at their sheets of paper one last time. They were home.
Donnigan wished he had made arrangements for Wallis to ride along with him to town. He could have used some support. Never in his whole life had he felt so nervous—not even when he had been treed by a big grizzly or the time he had been thrown in the path of stampeding cattle. Somehow he had managed to escape those perils. It seemed there was no escaping this one.
He cast one last glance around his snug cabin. All the dishes had been washed. Even the pots. They were all stacked carefully on the shelf beside the stove. He had made his bed rather than just tossing the blankets up to cover the pillow. He had even used a scrub brush and hot soapy water on the floorboards. Things looked pretty good.
He moved from the room and closed the door firmly behind him. As he walked the dirt path toward the barn and corrals, he studied his makeshift flower garden. He had lost only one of the plants that he had brought from the meadow. But only three were still blooming. Still, it was better than nothing, he reasoned.
He would have loved to show up in town with the black. Everyone around admired the magnificent horse, and Donnigan couldn’t help but feel that the big stallion would make some kind of favorable impression.
But the black hated the harness, and Donnigan knew that he could hardly ask his new wife to climb up behind him and be toted back to the farm cowboy fashion. Then there would be all the trunks and cases that she would have with her. No, it just wouldn’t work to take the saddle horse. Donnigan hitched the team to the wagon and started off to town.