Chapter 3
The train climbed for a whole day.
It did not feel like a train anymore. It felt like a crate being hauled up a wall on a rope.
The engine labored and coughed. Twice it stopped altogether while men got down to see to the wheels.
Through the window the ground fell away on one side into a gorge so deep that Antonia could not see the bottom of it.
On the other side, rock went straight up.
She had never seen anything like it. Nobody in the car had.
The three who were left, Antonia with the two boys, sat with their faces at the glass and forgot to be anything but astonished.
There were trees growing out of bare stone.
There was a river the color of milk. There was snow, real snow, lying in the shadows of the high places, though it was only the last week of September.
"Galena Springs," Mr. Croft said, reading from his paper. "Silver camp. Population about eleven hundred. A church hall, and a reverend by the name of Bowen who has agreed to receive us."
"Is that the last, sir?" Toby asked.
"That's the last."
The town, when it came, was stacked up the side of a gulch like plates in a rack.
The houses stood one above another with their back doors level with their neighbors' roofs.
Everything was gray boards or raw yellow ones.
Above the highest house was a great scar of tumbled rock with a wooden tower on it, and a wheel turning in the tower.
"The mine," Pete said.
There was a smell to the place that Antonia would never afterward forget. Woodsmoke and pine, with a bitter edge underneath, like a struck match.
The church hall was a long room with a stove at each end.
It was full before they got there. Mining people, Antonia thought, though she had never seen one.
The men had gray dust in the creases of their faces.
The women wore aprons over their good dresses, as if they had come straight from their kitchens and meant to go straight back.
They looked at the three children the way people look at the last loaves on a shelf.
Mr. Croft read the rules.
Toby was taken before he had finished. A big man with hands like shovels walked up, looked him over, asked his age, felt his arm, and said, "He'll do for the sorting floor.
Where's your paper?" Pete went ten minutes after to a widow with four sons already.
One more mouth was no odds, she said, when there were strong hands attached to it.
Antonia stood at the end of a line of one.
She held her carpetbag in front of her. She looked at her boots.
And she heard Toby, across the hall where the big man was signing, begin to tell a knot of camp children all about Jinx Jenkins.
* * *
He told it well. Thirty times he had told it, and he had learned what to leave in.
The fire went in, and the baby. The stove door went in, with the coals on the boards.
So did the lamp that burst with nobody near it, and Pete's scalded hand.
So did the barn in Nebraska, burned to the ground the very night a family said they would take her.
What he left out was that Pete had stolen her bread. He had always left that out.
The camp children listened with their mouths open.
Then they scattered, the way children do, each one to a mother's skirt or a father's sleeve. Antonia watched the story go through the hall.
It moved faster than Mr. Croft could talk.
He was in the middle of saying that the last child was a girl of eight, healthy, quiet, a good reader.
By the time he got to good reader, a woman by the door had gathered her skirts in one hand.
She pulled them aside, as if Antonia had walked past her.
Antonia had not moved. The woman did it anyhow.
Then another did it. Then a third.
Mr. Croft saw. He raised his voice a little.
"She is a well-behaved girl. The Society will provide her clothing for the first year, and a payment toward her schooling. Any respectable household..."
"Any respectable household with a man down the Pemberton," said the man with hands like shovels, not loud, "ain't taking a fire-jinx under its roof. You want to bring bad luck to a mining camp, mister? You know what a mine is? It's a hole in the ground with a lamp in it."
There was a murmur of agreement. Not angry. Nobody in the hall was angry with her. They were only certain.
A woman near the front said, "It's a wicked shame, the poor little thing," and drew her own child closer while she said it.
Antonia kept her eyes on her boots.
She had learned this. When you looked up, they looked away. When you looked down, they could look at you all they liked, and you did not have to see it.
Her boots were scuffed at the toes. The left one had a crack across it where the leather had dried out.
She studied the crack. She thought about how far the boots had walked.
From the Society office to the shed with the trains in it.
Then across a whole country, platform by platform, always to the end of the line.
Behind her, the hall was already emptying.
* * *
"There must be someone," Mr. Croft said.
He had a way of standing when he was tired, with his satchel held against his chest like a shield. He was standing that way now in the little vestry, in front of a lean man in a coat that had been black once.
Reverend Bowen took off his spectacles and rubbed his eyes. His spectacles had a way of sliding down. He pushed them back up, and they slid again.
"Mr. Croft, I have asked. I asked before you came, when your letter reached me, and I have asked again this half hour.
There are eleven hundred souls in Galena Springs.
Nine hundred of them draw wages from the Pemberton mine, one way or another.
There is not a household among them that would take a child the whole camp calls a jinx. "
He said the word carefully, as if it tasted bad.
"I do not believe in it. I want to say that. I do not believe a child can carry fire about with her like a pocket watch. But I am not the one who has to go down a shaft in the morning, and they are."
"Then I'll take her on to Denver. The Society has a house there."
"When?"
"The train's tomorrow."
"Mr. Croft." The reverend put his spectacles back on.
"It is the last week in September, and there is snow on the passes already.
Did you look out of the window on your way up?
That line will close with the first hard storm.
It may close this week. It has closed in September before now, and stayed closed until May.
You may get her to Denver. You may also spend the winter in a railroad car on the far side of a drift with a sick child and no doctor. I have seen it."
Mr. Croft looked at his paper. Antonia, standing in the doorway where they had forgotten her, watched him.
"You said nine hundred draw wages from the mine," he said at last. "That leaves two hundred."
"Storekeepers. The livery, the assay man. The schoolmistress, who boards. My own house, which is full, God forgive me, with my wife's sister and her three."
"Two hundred, and not one with a spare room?"
The reverend was quiet for a moment.
"There is one," he said. "There is one house in this town with room in it and no miner under its roof. It's the doctor's. Aldridge. He has five rooms and lives in two of them."
He took his spectacles off again.
"He will not want her. I ought to tell you that plainly. He is a good man and a fine physician. Since his wife died, he has not wanted anything at all. But he is the only physician in forty miles. The camp cannot do without him, so nobody will say a word against his house, whatever is in it."
"Will he do it?"
"He'll say no."
"Then what good is he to me?"
"He'll say no," the reverend said, "and then he will do it anyway. That is the kind of man he is. Bring your paper."
* * *
The doctor's house stood a little apart, higher up the gulch than the church. There was a brass plate on the door that Antonia could not read in the dark.
They had climbed to it in the last of the light. The reverend went first, with a lantern. Mr. Croft came after with his satchel. Antonia came last with her carpetbag, up a path so steep that there were steps cut into it. At the top, she stood between the two men on a plank porch and faced the door.
There was a lamp lit somewhere inside. That was all she could tell.
Mr. Croft knocked.
Nothing happened. Then, after what seemed an age, there were footsteps, unhurried, and a bolt drawn back. The door opened on a man so tall that she had to tip her head back to find his face.
He was thin. That was what she saw first. Thin in the way of a man who forgot to eat, with dark hair going gray at the sides, though he did not look old.
He had a lamp in one hand and a book in the other, with his finger still in the page.
His eyes were gray and very tired. They went from the reverend to Mr. Croft to the satchel and understood the whole of it before anybody spoke.
"No," he said.
"Charles," said the reverend.
"Josiah, I heard the whole business from Mrs. Purdy at four o'clock. The camp has been talking of nothing else. I have no wife, no housekeeper past six in the evening, no notion how to raise a child, and no wish to acquire one. Take her to the Society in Denver."
"The passes," the reverend said.
"Are not my concern."
"Doctor." Mr. Croft stepped forward. He had the paper out, and he held it in the lamplight so that it could be read.
"This is a board-and-keep agreement. It is not an adoption, nor a placement.
It binds you to a roof and a table until the spring thaw, at which time I return to remove her to Denver.
The Society pays two dollars a month toward her food.
You may sign it and never think of it again. "
"I have signed nothing."
"The reverend has signed it as witness. Your name is written in. It wants only your hand."
The doctor looked at the paper without taking it.
Then he looked down, for the first time, at Antonia.
She looked back. She had not meant to. Her eyes had been on her boots, as they should have been, and then somehow they were not. She was looking straight up into the tired gray eyes of a man who did not want her. In a town that did not want her. At the end of a line that had nowhere left to go.
She did not look away.
Neither did he.
"How old is she?"
"Eight," Mr. Croft said. "Her name is Antonia."
"Does she speak?"
"Not since the fire."
The doctor was silent for so long that the reverend's lantern began to gutter. Down in the gulch, a dog barked. The mine wheel turned with a sound like a slow breath. The first flakes of snow came out of the dark and settled on Antonia's hair.
"Until spring," the doctor said.
"Until spring. Not a day past."
He set his book on the hall table, took the pen, and signed.