Louis L'Amour by The Cherokee Trail Page B

buildings burned, the stock driven off. It would cost many thousands of dollars to put it in a producing condition and to restock it. Certainly, more than she could earn here running a stage station.
    Yet somehow it must be done. She wanted for Peg the graceful, gracious, pleasant life she had known when her father was alive and before the war had torn their lives to shreds.
    “Matty,” she said suddenly, “when spring comes, we must plant some flowers. I miss them so!”
    “And I, mum. Last night, I was thinkin’ back to Ireland again.”
    Mary laughed. “And I to Virginia! Well, it does no harm to remember. Often I worry about Peg. I am afraid her life is so barren here.”
    “ ’Tis no such thing, mum. She’ll see more kinds of folks here than ever she’d see elsewhere!”
    “Like the Mormon man who wanted you for his second wife?” she said, teasing.
    Matty flushed. “Ah, he’d no such thought, mum. He was but teasing, as you are now. But he had a nice smile, a smile from the heart, it was. A girl can always make do with a man who smiles from the heart, mum.”
    Matty paused, putting down the cup she was drying. “Have you noticed Wat, mum? He’s taken to combing his hair before meals, and he washes his hands clean before drying them on the towel.”
    Mary had been too busy to be lonely, and only occasionally did she stop to remember that life so suddenly gone that it seemed like a dream, like an enchanted time, as indeed it had been.
    For all of that, what she did here was useful. It was essential, and
she
was essential. Had she been that back in Virginia? She might have become so, but when all went to pieces back there, she was but another pretty young lady with pretty gowns and a lot of would be beaus attracted by her father’s plantation, perhaps, as much as by her.
    “It’s useful work, Matty.” She voiced her thoughts suddenly. “What we’re doing here can be important. These are busy people, but they are often lonely people, too. They are making a long, hard trip, and many of them have no idea what to expect at the end of it. We can leave them with a bright, happy memory, and we can give them a friendly welcome when they come.”
    “ ’Tis my thought exactly, mum. Travelers are either lonely folk, all by themselves, like, or they are herded about like cattle, and a kind word is remembered long after.”
    “We must have a word for each one if we can, Matty, and we must remember those who come again, as some will. It is flattering to be remembered and called by name.”
    “Aye.” Matty swept a hand around. “We’ve changed it, mum. It was a dull, dirty room when we came, but now, with the tableclothes, curtains, and all, it’s a cheerful room. It’s a happy room.”
    “And clean,” Mary agreed.
    Mentally, she checked over the stage station, the corrals, the barn, the house. All had been swept, mopped, and cleaned. In the barns, the harness was neatly hung, as in her father’s stable. The stalls were clean, and there was fresh hay scattered on the dirt floor in place of the straw they did not have.
    Tables had been set outside, ready for the incoming passengers, and inside, about the stove and the fireplace, pots were polished and neatly hung. It was a far different place from what they had come upon first.
    Peg and Wat had helped, but much had been done by Ridge Fenton, the hostler she hired from Laporte. Grudgingly, at first, because he detested working for a woman, then with more enthusiasm, he accepted her way of doing things.
    “Mr. Fenton,” she had said, “you may not like my way of doing things at first, but you are a reasonable man, a man of good judgment and discrimination. Let’s try it my way, and then if it does not work, we can always try another.”
    She paused and then said, “Mr. Fenton, I understand you are from Virginia?”
    “West Virginny, ma’am.”
    “Did you ever get down to Virginia?”
    “I did, ma’am, a time or two with my pappy. He taken me to see