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<h2><span style="font-size: 144%">V</span></h2>
<p id="p0478"><span class="tei tei-hi"><span style="font-variant: small-caps">After</span></span> Lena came to
Black Hawk I often met her downtown, where she would be matching
sewing silk or buying “findings” for <span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span>
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.</p>
<p id="p0479">The Boys’ Home was the best hotel on our branch
of the Burlington, and all the commercial travelers in that territory
tried to get into Black Hawk for Sunday. They used to assemble in the
parlor 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 parlor
and the dining-room, listening to the music and giggling at the jokes
and stories. Lena often said she hoped I would be a traveling 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 theaters 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
<span class="tei tei-abbr">Mrs.</span> Thomas, though she was “retail trade,”
was permitted to see them and to “get ideas.” They were
all generous, these traveling 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.</p>
<p id="p0480">One afternoon in the week before Christmas I came
upon Lena and her funny, square-headed little brother Chris, standing
before the drug-store, 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 neighbor 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 in it
every Sunday morning. A cold job it must have been, too!</p>
<p id="p0481">We went into Duckford’s dry-goods store, and
Chris unwrapped all his presents and showed them to me—something for each of the six younger than himself, even a rubber pig
for the baby. Lena had given him one of Tiny Soderball’s bottles
of perfume for his mother, and he thought he would get some
handkerchiefs to go with it. They were cheap, and he had n’t
much money left. We found a tableful of handkerchiefs spread out for
view at Duckford’s. Chris wanted those with initial letters in
the corner, because he had never seen any before. He studied them
seriously, while Lena looked over his shoulder, telling him she
thought the red letters would hold their color best. He seemed so
perplexed that I thought perhaps he had n’t enough money, after
all. Presently he said gravely,—</p>
<p id="p0482">“Sister, you know mother’s name is
Berthe. I don’t know if I ought to get B for Berthe, or M for
Mother.”</p>
<p id="p0483">Lena patted his bristly head. “I’d get
the B, Chrissy. It will please her for you to think about her name.
Nobody ever calls her by it now.”</p>
<p id="p0484">That satisfied him. His face cleared at once, and he
took three reds and three blues. When
the neighbor came in to say that it was time to start, Lena wound
Chris’s comforter about his neck and turned up his jacket collar—he had no overcoat—and we watched him climb into the
wagon and start on his long, cold drive. As we walked together up the
windy street, Lena wiped her eyes with the back of her woolen glove.
“I get awful homesick for them, all the same,” she
murmured, as if she were answering some remembered reproach.</p>
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