pertaters, ja."

"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 Schweizerkase 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