A Lost Lady

Thirty or forty years ago, in one of those grey towns along the
Burlington railroad, which are so much greyer today than they were
then, there was a house well known from Omaha to Denver for its
hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere. Well known,
that is to say, to the railroad aristocracy of that time; men who
had to do with the railroad itself, or with one of the "land
companies" which were its by-products. In those days it was enough
to say of a man that he was "connected with the Burlington." There
were the directors, the general managers, vice-presidents,
superintendents, whose names we all knew; and their younger
brothers or nephews were auditors, freight agents, departmental
assistants. Everyone "connected" with the Road, even the large
cattle- and grain-shippers, had annual passes; they and their
families rode about over the line a great deal. There were then
two distinct social strata in the prairie States; the homesteaders
and hand-workers who were there to make a living, and the bankers
and gentlemen ranchers who came from the Atlantic seaboard to
invest money and to "develop our great West," as they used to tell
us.

When the Burlington men were travelling back and forth on business
not very urgent, they found it agreeable to drop off the express
and spend a night in a pleasant house where their importance was
delicately recognized; and no house was pleasanter than that of
Captain Daniel Forrester, at Sweet Water. Captain Forrester was
himself a railroad man, a contractor, who had built hundreds of
miles of road for the Burlington,--over the sage brush and cattle
country, and on up into the 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 it was. The house stood on a low round hill, nearly a
mile east of town; a white house with a wing, and sharp-sloping
roofs to shed the snow. It was encircled by porches, too narrow
for modern notions of comfort, supported by the fussy, fragile
pillars of that time, when every honest stick of timber was
tortured by the turning-lathe into something hideous. Stripped of
its vines and denuded of its shrubbery, the house would probably
have been ugly enough. It stood close into a fine cottonwood grove
that threw sheltering arms to left and right and grew all down the
hillside behind it. Thus placed on the hill, against its bristling
grove, it was the first thing one saw on coming into Sweet Water by
rail, and the last thing one saw on departing.