A LOST LADY
by
WILLA CATHER
Good night, ladies; good night, sweet ladies;
Good night, good night."
MCMLXIII
ALFRED A KNOPF
New York
CONTENTS
PART ONE
I
Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those grey towns along theBurlington railroad, which are so much greyer to-day than they werethen, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for itshospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere. Well known, that isto say, to the railroad aristocracy of that time; men who had to do withthe railroad itself, or with one of the "land companies" which were itsby-products. In those days it was enough to say of a man that he was"connected with the Burlington." There were the directors, the generalmanagers, vice-presidents, superintendents, whose names we all knew; andtheir younger brothers or nephews were auditors, freight agents,departmental assistants. Everyone "connected" with the Road, even thelarge cattle and grain-shippers, had annual passes; they and theirfamilies rode about over the line a great deal. There were then twodistinct social strata in the prairie States; the homesteaders andhand-workers who were there to make a living, and the bankers andgentlemen ranchers who came from the Atlantic seaboard to invest moneyand to "develop our great West," as they used to tell us.
When the Burlington men were travelling back and forth on business notvery urgent, they found it agreeable to drop off the express and spend anight in a pleasant house where their importance was delicatelyrecognized; and no house was pleasanter than that of Captain DanielForrester, at Sweet Water. Captain Forrester was himself a railroad man,a contractor, who had built hundreds of miles of road for theBurlington,—over the sage brush and cattle country, and on up intothe Black Hills.
The Forrester place, as every one called it, was not at all remarkable;the people who lived there made it seem much larger and finer than itwas. The house stood on a low round hill, nearly a mile east of town; awhite house with a wing, and sharp-sloping roofs to shed the snow. Itwas encircled by porches, too narrow for modern notions of comfort,supported by the fussy, fragile pillars of that time, when every honeststick of timber was tortured by the turning-lathe into somethinghideous. Stripped of its vines and denuded of its shrubbery, the housewould probably have been ugly enough. It stood close into a finecottonwood grove that threw sheltering arms to left and right and grewall down the hillside behind it. Thus placed on the hill, against itsbristling grove, it was the first thing one saw on coming into SweetWater by rail, and the last thing one saw on departing.
To approach Captain Forrester's property, you had first to get over awide, sandy creek which flowed along the eastern edge of the town.Crossing this by the foot-bridge or the ford, you entered the Captain'sprivate lane, bordered by Lombardy poplars, with wide meadows lying oneither side. Just at the foot of the hill on which the house sat, onecrossed a second creek by the stout wooden road-bridge. This streamtraced