elp get her cattle together; they
were scattered and might be gorging themselves in somebody's cornfield.

'Maybe you lose a steer and learn not to make somethings with your eyes
at married men,' Mrs. Shimerda told her hectoringly.

Lena only smiled her sleepy smile. 'I never made anything to him with my
eyes. I can't help it if he hangs around, and I can't order him off. It
ain't my prairie.'

V

AFTER LENA CAME To Black Hawk, I often met her downtown, where she
would be matching sewing silk or buying 'findings' for Mrs. Thomas. If
I happened to walk home with her, she told me all about the dresses she
was helping to make, or about what she saw and heard when she was with
Tiny Soderball at the hotel on Saturday nights.

The Boys' Home was the best hotel on our branch of the Burlington, and
all the commercial travellers in that territory tried to get into Black
Hawk for Sunday. They used to assemble in the parlour after supper on
Saturday nights. Marshall Field's man, Anson Kirkpatrick, played the
piano and sang all the latest sentimental songs. After Tiny had helped
the cook wash the dishes, she and Lena sat on the other side of the
double doors between the parlour and the dining-room, listening to the
music and giggling at the jokes and stories. Lena often said she hoped
I would be a travelling man when I grew up. They had a gay life of it;
nothing to do but ride about on trains all day and go to theatres
when they were in big cities. Behind the hotel there was an old store
building, where the salesmen opened their big trunks and spread out
their samples on the counters. The Black Hawk merchants went to look at
these things and order goods, and Mrs. Thomas, though she was I retail
trade,' was permitted to see them and to 'get ideas.' They were all
generous, these travelling men; they gave Tiny Soderball handkerchiefs
and gloves and ribbons and striped stockings, and so many bottles of
perfume and cakes of scented soap that she bestowed some of them on
Lena.

One afternoon in the week before Christmas, I came upon Lena and
her funny, square-headed little brother Chris, standing before the
drugstore, gazing in at the wax dolls and blocks and Noah's Arks
arranged in the frosty show window. The boy had come to town with a
neighbour to do his Christmas shopping, for he had money of his own this
year. He was only twelve, but that winter he had got the job of sweeping
out the Norwegian church and making the fire