The first time that Jason Thistledown encountered Ruth Harper, he did not learn her name and had no reason to believe he ever would.
He spied her as he and Aunt Germaine boarded the train at Helena, and she, a passenger from further east accompanied by an only slightly older chaperone, was taking a stroll along the vast station platform before the train debarked. Jason could not help but stare, and later, as the train crossed a deep gorge but an hour to the west of Helena, Aunt Germaine told him that he would have to learn to be more circumspect when be-spying young ladies in public places. “One does not gawk,” she said. “It is a sign of bad breeding. And it offends.”
“Then how come she smiled like that?” Jason had been gawking hard he figured, because although he was now looking out the window at a true spectacle of God’s handiwork—down what seemed like a mile to a fast silver river wending serpentine through tree and rock—the view was eclipsed by his memory of the girclass="underline" the light brown curls of hair that peeked out from beneath her wide hat the colour of fresh cream, her greenish-blue eyes that glanced between her soft hands and Jason’s own hungry eye, and the smooth red lips that touched up to a smile at one corner only, near a place where a tiny dark birthmark marred her otherwise unblemished cheek.
“She was being well-mannered,” said Aunt Germaine. “That was all. There is a tolerant streak in these modern young girls that sometimes expresses itself in what may seem like licentiousness. Do not take too much from it.”
Jason leaned back on his seat. He supposed he shouldn’t be thinking about young ladies now anyway. Never mind Aunt Germaine’s views; Jason’s mama always advised nothing good came of licentiousness, and she was still not dead more than two months. Any of her advice he could still remember, Jason figured he’d better heed.
He thought he might pay particular attention to what little of that advice still applied as he drew far from the homestead and Cracked Wheel. Sure, his mama knew how to strike a camp and had some wisdom that Jason could apply to that. She knew how to talk to strange fellows who might or might not want something that you didn’t want to give up.
But if she ever knew how to do up a man’s cravat, she’d never let on; if she ever said how to negotiate price for a room in a hotel for a boy and his aunt coming late and on foot, she said so too quiet for Jason to hear; and as for counting up money bigger than dimes—well, she didn’t have much to say on that ever. It was a good thing for Aunt Germaine, who was wiser in the ways of the roads and towns on the way to civilization. Yes, it was a good thing for Aunt Germaine.
“I’m going to stretch my legs,” Jason said and when Aunt Germaine asked why, he fibbed: “I’m not used to sitting so long. My feet are falling asleep.”
As he made his way down the aisle, Jason considered the odd mix of guilt and triumph now welling in his middle. His mama was right saying it: no good ever came of licentiousness.
Jason searched the train in a way that he hoped was at once thorough and nonchalant. But it was all in vain; Jason did not find Ruth Harper anywhere.
Much later, he would learn that she had spent most of the journey in her berth in the sleeper car, re-reading her favourite chapters in The Virginian, while her ostensible chaperone, Miss Louise Butler of Evanston, Illinois, napped and knitted and gazed longingly out the glass at the passing mountains.
They were in a part of the train where a boy like Jason had no reason to linger. Both times he passed through, he was hurried on his way by the glares, silences, and noisily cleared throats of his betters. He and Aunt Germaine were billeted in another car, further to the front where the beds were stacked like shelves on either side and sectioned off by thick, stale-smelling curtains. As far as Jason knew, the lovely girl with the birthmark and the little smile that stopped just beneath it had jumped off the train some time ago, and fled on foot into the Montana wilderness, never to be seen again.
It disappointed him, but not bitterly. In the course of his search Jason was able to observe a great many things about the train, the railway and the people who travelled by it.
Jason figured this would be something his mama would have approved of more than hunting a pretty smile on a locomotive. It would, after all, lead him to self-sufficiency.
Coming upon civilization as he had, all at once through the haze of grief, after spending his short life on a Montana pig farm, and with no one but a new-found aunt to guide him, Jason Thistledown was a boy in need of bearings. Nothing made that clearer to him than the fascinating, loud and stinking machinery of the Pacific Northwest steam engine and the cars it hauled. The thing’s engine made a noise like thunder that didn’t ever stop, and threw out fat clouds of black coal-soot as evil as anything Jason had ever smelled. The locomotive, as Aunt Germaine called it, scared hell out of Jason and he knew he’d have to conquer that fear (along with the fear brought on by all those strangers in their suits and skirts and high leather boots, and their peculiar expressions) if he were ever going to have a life beyond Cracked Wheel.
When he got back to Aunt Germaine, she looked right at him.
“Are your legs well-stretched?” she asked, and Jason looked away for only an instant before he told her they were, which was at least true.
The train pulled in to Sand Point two days later. They debarked, but not because that was the end of their trip. As Aunt Germaine explained it, they would next take a short line ride to a place called Bonner’s Ferry, where they would be met by a man from Eliada who would take them the rest of the way by barge and horseback, down the Kootenai River to the town.
As they debarked and waited for the short line train, Jason happened to spot Ruth Harper for the second time.
This time, he tried to be mindful of Aunt Germaine’s advice and his mama’s wisdom, and made an effort not to gawk.
It was quite an effort. Jason felt his heart thundering in his chest, and a profound quaking in his stomach, and those parts along with every other part of him seemed to be hollering: There she is! Look over there, you damn fool! Perhaps she’s smiling!
Once or twice—for an instant each time—he obeyed, glancing down the platform, under the overhang where all the passengers gathered against the cold spring rain, to be-spy her sitting on the bench next to her chaperone, reading from a book in her lap. She would stir, he imagined, feeling the heat of his look even though she didn’t look up to meet it—just smiling a little more each time.
Later, Jason would learn that he was off the mark but not entirely. For while it was true that his gaze drew notice, it was not from Ruth Harper, but Miss Louise Butler, who sat near to her friend but beyond the scope of Jason’s attention. At only his second glance, she whispered to Ruth:
“We have an admirer.”
“Do we?”
Miss Butler’s hands remained folded in her lap, but she nonetheless motioned in Jason’s direction, with progressively indelicate thrusts of her right forefinger. In spite of this, Ruth did not look up from her book. She did, however, smile a little.
“Is it one of those filthy loggers?”
“He might be. How does one tell a filthy logger from a smooth-faced young man who obviously does not know how to dress himself?”
Ruth sighed. “Is he looking now?” she asked, and when Miss Butler said he wasn’t, Ruth spared her a sidelong stare of withering significance. “Well?”
“There.” Miss Butler pointed.
“Oh,” she said, glancing quickly and then returning her eyes to her book. Her smile was noticeably wider this time than the last.
“Him.”