Clever Betsy. Clara Louise Burnham

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СКАЧАТЬ more disagreeable for you than it is for me.”

      “Oh – oh – of course not,” returned the fair one. “I only thought it was so small – and the bed is so narrow – and I didn’t know – ”

      “Well,” returned the other, somewhat mollified, and with a yawn, “I saw down in the dining-room to-night that you were a green-horn. We’re mighty lucky not to be in a bigger room with half-a-dozen girls. My name’s Miss Hickey. What’s yours?”

      “Rosalie Vincent,” responded the fair one, still standing rooted to her place while Miss Hickey removed a mammoth rat from her hair, and eclipsed with it one side of the wash-stand, which was dresser as well.

      “Better get to bed, Miss Vincent. You’ll have plenty of chances to stare at me, and you look as tired as I feel. I stayed down to help the pearl-divers awhile to-night.”

      “Pearl-divers?” echoed Rosalie.

      “Yes. Dish-washers, Greenie. I’m a heaver like yourself; but we all have to turn in and help each other, once in a while. This is my third season. My first I waited on the sagebrushers.”

      “Who are they?” asked Rosalie, overawed by so much sophistication.

      “Campers; but I like the hotels best. The dudes are more my style.”

      “What did you call me a few minutes ago? A lay-over?” asked Rosalie.

      “Yes, those are the swells that stay more than one night. They’re the princes of the Yellowstone and they have to pay like princes, too. All their dishes washed separately, separate food, separate everything. I thought you must think you were one to have a room all to yourself.”

      Miss Hickey here completed her hasty night-toilet and jumped into bed. “Come along, child. I’ll make myself small against the wall.”

      “Indeed, I’m not a lay-over,” said Rosalie, now hastening to follow the other’s example. “I’m to be sent on with the crowd to-morrow.”

      “So am I,” returned the other, with nasal sleepiness; “and I’m darned sorry, too. I like the swatties here better than at any post.”

      “Swatties?” echoed Rosalie helplessly.

      “Soldiers, Greenie,” drawled Miss Hickey. “You’ll see a lot more of ’em before you see less. Now I ain’t goin’ to say another word to-night.”

      And Miss Hickey kept her word. Her sleep was as energetic as her waking; and Rosalie listened to her heavy breathing and stared wide-eyed into the darkness.

      She had recognized the Bruce party at the evening meal. She had not been obliged to wait on them, and knew herself unobserved. But the discovery had excited her very much. Mrs. Bruce had been right when she said that Rosalie’s was the artistic temperament. The independence, caution, and reserve of the New Englander were not her characteristics. She longed for companionship and some one with whom to sympathize in the present predicament; for predicament she felt it to be. How extraordinary that this should be the summer chosen by the Bruces for their visit to the National Park.

      She thought of the irreverent punctuation which made a well-known quotation read: “There is a divinity which shapes our ends rough, hew them as we may.”

      She had believed Mrs. Bruce to be in Europe, and though that lady’s natural preoccupation there explained the ignoring of her protégée’s painstaking letters, it did not excuse it, or leave Rosalie the slightest hope that her benefactress continued to feel an interest in her. The fact was a hurt to the grateful girl, and the ever-present consciousness of it gave her a reason for desiring to leave Fairport, where the Bruces would return. This sensitiveness would not have induced her to leave Mrs. Pogram, had the latter’s brother not made her stay unendurable, but it was a secret reason for being glad to escape.

      Perhaps Mrs. Bruce and her son would not remember her at all; but she could not expect to escape Betsy Foster’s recognition. So she lay there awake; at one moment longing for Mrs. Pogram’s kindly, invertebrate protection, and wishing that Mrs. Bruce had never opened to her another world; and again feeling the fire of ambition to repay that lady every cent she had ever spent upon her. Rosalie’s color pressed high as she imagined Mrs. Bruce’s amazed scorn that the talents in which she had at least for a time believed, had carried their possessor no higher as yet than to be a waitress – a heaver, according to Miss Hickey – in the Yellowstone.

      The girl must at last have dozed; for she shortly experienced a vigorous shaking from her companion.

      “Here, here, hustle!” exclaimed Miss Hickey, not unkindly. Rosalie opened her eyes with such bewilderment that her companion laughed.

      “Come on, blue eyes. You look like a baby. Get into your duds. We’re off for Norris Basin, worse luck.”

      The sight of Miss Hickey’s readjusted pompadour gave Rosalie a realizing sense of the situation.

      “Oh, Miss Hickey,” she exclaimed, as she hurried to the washstand, “are many people lay-overs?”

      “Oh, you’ve got them on the brain, have you?” asked the other, proceeding with her own toilet. “Not many, ’cause it costs too much.”

      “I saw some people here last night who have lots of money – oh, lots and lots! Shouldn’t you think they’d stay?”

      “H’m. I only hope they will,” rejoined Miss Hickey, “as long as we’re going. The crowds are fierce.”

      “I do hope they will!” Rosalie’s echo was fervent. She almost summoned courage to tell her aggressive companion the situation; but one glance at the young woman’s coiffure, which was now receiving the addition of a bunch of curls, arrested her.

      Miss Hickey regarded her companion sharply.

      “You ain’t a heaver all the year,” she remarked tentatively, “or else you wouldn’t be afraid o’ those rich folks. There’s the tips, you know.”

      Rosalie was silent.

      “Perhaps you was their waitress and ran off to see the world without giving notice.”

      “No, I wasn’t that; but I – I know them, and – ”

      The speech drifted into silence.

      “You know rich folks, do you? Lucky you.”

      “Not exactly. They – she – ” stammered Rosalie, “they helped – educate me.”

      “Oh, you’re educated, are you?” retorted Miss Hickey, giving her coiffure a satisfied lift. “Well, so am I. I’m a typewriter in Chicago, winters.”

      “Does – does it pay well?” asked Rosalie, with such serious wistfulness that Miss Hickey forgave her her rich acquaintances.

      She grimaced. “Not so you’d notice it. I ain’t goin’ back this fall. You know the Yellowstone Company’ll land you just as many miles from the Park as they brought you, and in any direction you say. Me for Los Angeles. I ain’t afraid I can’t make my living, and I’m sick o’ bein’ snowed on, winters, without any furs.”

      Rosalie looked enviously at the other’s snapping black eyes.

      “Wonder what savage we’ll go over with,” СКАЧАТЬ