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Page 80
My Lincoln chapter closed abruptly. I went home to my grandparents for a
few weeks, and afterward visited my relatives in Virginia until I joined
Cleric in Boston. I was then nineteen years old.
BOOK IV
The Pioneer Woman's Story
I
TWO YEARS AFTER I left Lincoln, I completed my academic course at Harvard.
Before I entered the Law School I went home for the summer vacation. On
the night of my arrival, Mrs. Harling and Frances and Sally came over to
greet me. Everything seemed just as it used to be. My grandparents looked
very little older. Frances Harling was married now, and she and her
husband managed the Harling interests in Black Hawk. When we gathered in
grandmother's parlour, I could hardly believe that I had been away at all.
One subject, however, we avoided all evening.
When I was walking home with Frances, after we had left Mrs. Harling at her
gate, she said simply, `You know, of course, about poor Antonia.'
Poor Antonia! Everyone would be saying that now, I thought bitterly. I
replied that grandmother had written me how Antonia went away to marry
Larry Donovan at some place where he was working; that he had deserted her,
and that there was now a baby. This was all I knew.
`He never married her,' Frances said. `I haven't seen her since she came
back. She lives at home, on the farm, and almost never comes to town. She
brought the baby in to show it to mama once. I'm afraid she's settled down
to be Ambrosch's drudge for good.'
I tried to shut Antonia out of my mind. I was bitterly disappointed in
her. I could not forgive her for becoming an object of pity, while Lena
Lingard, for whom people had always foretold trouble, was now the leading
dressmaker of Lincoln, much respected in Black Hawk. Lena gave her heart
away when she felt like it, but she kept her head for her business and had
got on in the world.
Just then it was the fashion to speak indulgently of Lena and severely of
Tiny Soderball, who had quietly gone West to try her fortune the year
before. A Black Hawk boy, just back from Seattle, brought the news that
Tiny had not gone to the coast on a venture, as she had allowed people to
think, but with very definite plans. One of the roving promoters that used
to stop at Mrs. Gardener's hotel owned idle property along the waterfront
in Seattle, and he had offered to set Tiny up in business in one of his
empty buildings. She was now conducting a sailors' lodging-house. This,
everyone said, would be the end of Tiny. Even if she had begun by running
a decent place, she couldn't keep it up; all sailors' boarding-houses were
alike.
When I thought about it, I discovered that I had never known Tiny as well
as I knew the other girls. I remembered her tripping briskly about the
dining-room on her high heels, carrying a big trayful of dishes, glancing
rather pertly at the spruce travelling men, and contemptuously at the
scrubby ones-- who were so afraid of her that they didn't dare to ask for
two kinds of pie. Now it occurred to me that perhaps the sailors, too,
might be afraid of Tiny. How astonished we should have been, as we sat
talking about her on Frances Harling's front porch, if we could have known
what her future was really to be! Of all the girls and boys who grew up
together in Black Hawk, Tiny Soderball was to lead the most adventurous
life and to achieve the most solid worldly success.
This is what actually happened to Tiny: While she was running her
lodging-house in Seattle, gold was discovered in Alaska. Miners and
sailors came back from the North with wonderful stories and pouches of
gold. Tiny saw it and weighed it in her hands. That daring, which nobody
had ever suspected in her, awoke. She sold her business and set out for
Circle City, in company with a carpenter and his wife whom she had
persuaded to go along with her. They reached Skaguay in a snowstorm, went
in dog-sledges over the Chilkoot Pass, and shot the Yukon in flatboats.
They reached Circle City on the very day when some Siwash Indians came into
the settlement with the report that there had been a rich gold strike
farther up the river, on a certain Klondike Creek. Two days later Tiny and
her friends, and nearly everyone else in Circle City, started for the
Klondike fields on the last steamer that went up the Yukon before it froze
for the winter. That boatload of people founded Dawson City. Within a few
weeks there were fifteen hundred homeless men in camp. Tiny and the
carpenter's wife began to cook for them, in a tent. The miners gave her a
building lot, and the carpenter put up a log hotel for her. There she
sometimes fed a hundred and fifty men a day. Miners came in on snowshoes
from their placer claims twenty miles away to buy fresh bread from her, and
paid for it in gold.
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