“Thank you. You must be popular with your boarders.”
She giggled. “Ja, all de train men is friends mit me. Sometimes dey bring me a liddle Sweitzerkase from one of dem big saloons in Omaha what de Cherman beobles batronize. I ain’t got no boys mein own self, so I got to fix up liddle tings for dem boys, eh?”
She stood nursing her stumpy hands under her apron, watching every mouthful he ate so eagerly that she might have been tasting it herself. The train crew trooped in, shouting to her and asking what there was for dinner, and she ran about like an excited little hen, chuckling and cackling. Claude wondered whether working-men were as nice as that to old women the world over. He didn’t believe so. He liked to think that such geniality was common only in what he broadly called “the West.” He bought a big cigar, and strolled up and down the platform, enjoying the fresh air until the passenger whistled in.
After his freight train got under steam he did not open his books again, but sat looking out at the grey homesteads as they unrolled before him, with their stripped, dry cornfields, and the great ploughed stretches where the winter wheat was asleep. A starry sprinkling of snow lay like hoar-frost along the crumbly ridges between the furrows.
Claude believed he knew almost every farm between Frankfort and Lincoln, he had made the journey so often, on fast trains and slow. He went home for all the holidays, and had been again and again called back on various pretexts; when his mother was sick, when Ralph overturned the car and broke his shoulder, when his father was kicked by a vicious stallion. It was not a Wheeler custom to employ a nurse; if any one in
