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The sale was made, and the mining man must have applied himself successfully to his lesson, for the following morning, when the red car spun out of Wenatchee and up the lifting valley road, a snug steamer-trunk was stowed in the box behind, and Banks at the steering gear was traveling alone.
She put away the money and the map, and bestowed a brief scrutiny upon herself in the cabin mirror. Six months in the wild had given her a ruddy color, the glow of perfect physical condition. But her garments were tattered and sadly out of date. The wardrobe of the steamer-trunk lady had suffered in the winter's wear. She was barely presentable in the outing suit of corduroy.
He was a human guide-book which his fares opened and shut how and when they pleased. She saw Hooghly standing in the bow. A steamer-trunk, a kit-bag, a bedding-bag, and the inevitable parrot-cage, reposed at his feet. He was watching without interest or excitement the stream passing up and down the gangplank. If his master came, very well; if he did not, he would get off with the luggage.
But one steamer-trunk remained to be packed; the boat-train would leave before midnight, the steamer with the morning tide; by the morrow's noon he would be upon the high seas, within ten days in New York and among friends; and then ... The problem of that afterwards perplexed Kirkwood more than he cared to own.
P.S., May not be back for some time as friend may need us." In the wreck of their fortunes the Applebys had lost their own furniture, down to the last beloved picture. They had only a suit-case and a steamer-trunk, the highly modern steamer-trunk which Father had once bought for a vacation trip to West Skipsit and the Tubbses.
In the last two days he had been no stranger to these grey moods, and they had become harder and harder to dispel. Now, with the steamer-trunk before him gaping to receive its contents, he gave himself up whole-heartedly to gloom. Somehow the steamer-trunk, with all that it implied of partings and voyagings, seemed to emphasize the fact that he was going out alone into an empty world.
With one high spring, Lad had cleared the ground and was over the closed tonneau door and amid a ruck of luggage and rugs. The rear seat was filled by a steamer-trunk, strapped tightly in place there. And the bottom of the car was annoyingly crowded by bumpy bags and other gear.
There he and his steamer-trunk boarded Thompson's stage, and journeyed to Placer Creek, where the two of them, he and the trunk, took up their quarters in a little board-ceiled room in the Prairie Dog Hotel. The place was admirably adapted for glooming. It was a ramshackle affair of four streets and sixteen saloons. Some of the houses, and all of the saloons, had once been painted.
That is why, even as she moved up from the rooming to the boarding-house and down from the third-floor back to the second-story front, there was always under Clara Bloom's single bed the steamer-trunk scarcely unpacked, and in her heart the fear that, after all, this might not be transiency, but home. That is why, too, she paid her board by the week and used printed visiting-cards.
There must be a middle way somewhere, as there must be somewhere an unmarried man with no position, reputation, or other vanity to lose, who most keenly wants to find out what his palette is set for in this life. He will pack his steamer-trunk and get into the open to wrestle with effects that he can never reproduce. All the same his will be a superb failure.
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