The Deserter | Page 9

sore a trial to its possessor and yet so inestimable a comfort to social
rivals; but her features were handsome, her teeth fine, her dress,
bearing, and demeanor those of a woman of birth and breeding, and yet
one who might have resented the intimation that she was not strikingly
handsome. She looked like a woman with a will of her own; her head
was high, her step was firm; it was of just such a walk as hers that
Virgil wrote his "vera incessu patuit dea," and she made the young man
in the section by himself think of that very passage as he glanced at her
from under his heavy, bushy eyebrows. She looked, moreover, like a
woman with a capacity for influencing people contrary to their will and
judgment, and with a decided fondness for the exercise of that
unpopular function. There was the air of grande dame about her,
despite the simplicity of her dress, which, though of rich material, was
severely plain. She wore no jewelry. Her hands were snugly gloved,
and undisfigured by the distortions of any ring except the marriage
circlet. Her manner attested her a person of consequence in her social
circle and one who realized the fact. She had repelled, though without
rudeness or discourtesy, the garrulous efforts of the motherly knitter to
be sociable. She had promptly inspired the small, candy-crusted
explorer with such awe that he had refrained from further visits after
his first confiding attempt to poke a sticky finger through the baby's
velvety cheek. She had spared little scorn in her rejection of the
bourgeois advances of the commercial traveller with the languishing
eyes of Israel: he confided to his comrades, in relating the incident, that
she was smart enough to see that it wasn't her he was hankering to
know, but the pretty sister by her side; and when challenged to prove
that they were sisters,--a statement which aroused the scepticism of his
shrewd associates,--he had replied, substantially,--
"How do I know? 'Cause I saw their pass before you was up this
morning, cully. It's for Mrs. Captain Rayner and sister, and they're
going out here to Fort Warrener. That's how I know." And the porter of
the car had confirmed the statement in the sanctity of the
smoking-room.

And yet--such is the uncertainty of feminine temperament--Mrs.
Rayner was no more incensed at the commercial "gent" because he had
obtruded his attentions than she was at the young man reading in his
own section because he had refrained. Nearly twenty-four hours had
elapsed since they crossed the Missouri, and in all that time not once
had she detected in him a glance that betrayed the faintest interest in
her, or--still more remarkable--in the unquestionably lovely girl at her
side. Intrusiveness she might resent, but indifference she would and did.
Who was this youth, she wondered, who not once had so much as
stolen a look at the sweet, bonny face of her maiden sister? Surely 'twas
a face any man would love to gaze upon,--so fair, so exquisite in
contour and feature, so pearly in complexion, so lovely in the deep,
dark brown of its shaded eyes.
The bold glances of the four card-players she had defiantly returned,
and vanquished. Those men, like the travelling gents, were creatures of
coarser mould; but her experienced eye told her the solitary occupant of
the opposite section was a gentleman. The clear cut of his pale features,
the white, slender hand and shapely foot, the style and finish of his
quiet travelling-dress, the soft modulation and refined tone of his voice
on the one occasion when she heard him reply to some importunity of
the train-boy with his endless round of equally questionable figs and
fiction, the book he was reading,--a volume of Emerson,--all combined
to speak of a culture and position equal to her own. She had been over
the trans-continental railways often enough to know that it was
permissible for gentlemen to render their fellow-passengers some slight
attention which would lead to mutual introductions if desirable; and
this man refused to see that the opportunity was open to him.
True, when first she took her survey of those who were to be her
fellow-travellers at the "transfer" on the Missouri, she decided that here
was one against whom it would be necessary to guard the approaches.
She had good and sufficient reasons for wanting no young man as
attractive in appearance as this one making himself interesting to pretty
Nellie on their journey. She had already decided what Nellie's future
was to be. Never, indeed, would she have taken her to the gay frontier
station whither she was now en route, had not that future been already

settled to her satisfaction. Nellie Travers, barely out of school, was
betrothed,