Seen from a balloon, Moonstone would have looked like a Noah’s ark town
set out in the sand and lightly shaded by gray-green tamarisks and
cottonwoods. A few people were trying to make soft maples grow in their
turfed lawns, but the fashion of planting incongruous trees from the
North Atlantic States had not become general then, and the frail,
brightly painted desert town was shaded by the light-reflecting,
wind-loving trees of the desert, whose roots are always seeking water
and whose leaves are always talking about it, making the sound of rain.
The long porous roots of the cottonwood are irrepressible. They break
into the wells as rats do into granaries, and thieve the water.
The long street which connected Moonstone with the depot settlement
traversed in its course a considerable stretch of rough open country,
staked out in lots but not built up at all, a weedy hiatus between the
town and the railroad. When you set out along this street to go to the
station, you noticed that the houses became smaller and farther apart,
until they ceased altogether, and the board sidewalk continued its
uneven course through sunflower patches, until you reached the solitary,
new brick Catholic Church. The church stood there because the land was
given to the parish by the man who owned the adjoining waste lots, in
the hope of making them more salable—“Farrier’s Addition,” this patch
of prairie was called in the clerk’s office. An eighth of a mile beyond
the church was a washout, a deep sand-gully, where the board sidewalk
became a bridge for perhaps fifty feet. Just beyond the gully was old
Uncle Billy Beemer’s grove,—twelve town lots set out in fine,
well-grown cottonwood trees, delightful to look upon, or to listen to,
as they swayed and rippled in the wind. Uncle Billy had been one of the
most worthless old drunkards who ever sat on a store box and told filthy
stories. One night he played hide-and-seek with a switch engine and got
his sodden brains knocked out. But his grove, the one creditable thing
he had ever done in his life, rustled on. Beyond this grove the houses
of the depot settlement began, and the naked board walk, that had run in
out of the sunflowers, again became a link between human dwellings.
One afternoon, late in the summer, Dr. Howard Archie was fighting his
way back to town along this walk through a blinding sandstorm, a silk
handkerchief tied over his mouth. He had been to see a sick woman down
in the depot settlement, and he was walking because his ponies had been
out for a hard drive that morning.
As he passed the Catholic Church he came upon Thea and Thor. Thea was
sitting in a child’s express wagon, her feet out behind, kicking the
wagon along and steering by the tongue. Thor was on her lap and she held
him with one arm. He had grown to be a big cub of a baby, with a
constitutional grievance, and he had to be continually amused. Thea took
him philosophically, and tugged and pulled him about, getting as much
fun as she could under her encumbrance. Her hair was blowing about her
face, and her eyes were squinting so intently at the uneven board
sidewalk in front of her that she did not see the doctor until he spoke
to her.
“Look out, Thea. You’ll steer that youngster into the ditch.”
The wagon stopped. Thea released the tongue, wiped her hot, sandy face,
