ing that might with justice be called a
permanent right of way. Perhaps it was the gray hair--Mrs.
MacCaffery's hair had been gray then, when it ought to have been the
glossy, luxuriant brown that the old-fashioned daguerreotype, hanging
in the shanty's combination dining and silting room, proclaimed that it
once was.

Big Cloud, of course, didn't call her patrician--because they didn't
talk that way out there. They said there was "some class" to Mrs.
MacCaffery--and if their expression was inelegant, what they meant by
it wasn't. Not that they ranked her any finer than Dan, for the last
one of them ranked Dan as one of God's own noblemen, and there's
nothing finer than that, only they figured, at least the women did,
that back in the Old Country she'd been brought up to things that Dan
MacCaffery hadn't.

Maybe that accounted for their sending young Dan East, and pinching
themselves pretty near down to bed rock to give the boy an education
and a start. Not that Mrs. MacCaffery had any notions that railroading
and overalls and dirt was plebeian and beneath her--far from it! She
was proud of old Dan, proud of his work, proud of his record; she'd
talk about Dan's engine to you by the hour just as though it were
alive, just as Dan would, and she would have hung chintz curtains on
the cab windows and put flower pots on the running boards if they had
let her. It wasn't that--Mrs. MacCaffery wasn't that kind. Only there
were limitations to a cab, and she didn't want the boy, he was the only
one they had, to start out with limitations of any kind that would put
a slow order on his reaching the goal her mother's heart dreamed of.
What goal? Who knows? Mothers always dream of their boy's future in
that gentle, loving, all-conquering, up-in-the-clouds kind of a way,
don't they? She wanted young Dan to do something, make a name for
himself some day.

And young Dan did. He handed a jolt to the theory of heredity that
should, if it didn't, have sent the disciples of that creed to the mat
for the full count. When he got through his education, he got into a
bank and backed the brain development, the old couple had scrimped to
the bone to give him, against the market--with five thousand dollars of
the bank's money. Old Dan and Mrs. MacCaffery got him off--Mrs.
MacCaffery with her sweet old face, and Dan with his grim old honesty.
The bank didn't prosecute. The boy was drowned in a ferryboat accident
the year after. A