To all this it took the Inger a moment or two to accustom his eyes. Then he saw Lory. She was sitting on her pack, on the floor, amusing a fretting baby on the knees of its mother, who dozed. In that dun place, the girl’s loveliness was startling, electric. The women felt it, and some sat staring at her.
“If I had that face—” he caught from one.
“Come along out of this, for the Lord’s sake!” said the Inger.
They all turned toward him and toward Lory as she rose, crimsoning as they looked at her. She went to the doorway where he stood.
“I’ll lose my turn if I come now,” she said.
He held her wrist and drew her into the hall. Other women were waiting to get into the room. Well-dressed, watching men went and came.
“You come along with me,” he repeated. And as her troubled look questioned him:
“I’ve got two tickets to Washington,” he said. “You don’t want no job here if you get one.”
“You hadn’t ought—” she began, breathlessly.
“I know it,” he told her. “What I’d ought to ’a’ done was to get two tickets to Whiteface and the hut. Hadn’t I?”
The baby, deserted, began to cry weakly. Lory turned back to her, stooped over her, comforted her. As he stood there, leaning in the doorway, once more there came to the Inger that curiously sharp sense of the morning on the prairie.
For a flash as he looked at those empty faces and worn figures, he knew—positively and as at first hand—what it was to be, not Lory alone now, but all the rest. Abruptly, with some great wrench of the understanding, it was almost as if momentarily he were those other wretched creatures. When Lory had brought her pack and joined him, he stood for a moment, still staring into that room.
“My God,” he said. “I wish I could do something for ’em!”
“‘Seems as if it’d help if I’d canter in and shoot every one of ’em dead,” he said.
They went out on the street again, intent on finding a place to lunch. There were two hours until the Washington train left. The Inger refusing utterly to ask anybody anything, they walked until they came to a place which, by hot flapjacks in the making in the great window, the Inger loudly recognized to be his own.
Seated at a little white oil-cloth covered table beneath which the Inger insisted on stowing the packs, the two relaxed in that moment of rest and well-being.