Collection 6: "Train Time" by D'Arcy McNickle

He was exasperated. He was tired. A man driving cattle through timber had it easy, he was thinking.

Let anyone try corralling twenty to thirty Indian kids, dragging them out of hiding places, getting them away from relatives and together in one place, then holding them, without tying them, until train time!

Major Miles was a man of conscience.

Whatever he did, he did earnestly.

On this hot end-of-summer day he perspired and frowned and wore his soldier bearing.

Words tumbled about in his mind. Somehow, he realized, he had to vivify the moment. These children were about to go out from the Reservation and get a new start. Life would change.

The air was stifling with end-of-summer heat.

She sat close by the fire, trying with a good-natured grin to lift her ponderous body from a low seated rocking chair.

Sitting there in the frosty cabin, he pondered their plight and at the same time wondered if he would get away without coming down with pneumonia.

If one undertook to provide sustenance out of one’s own pocket there would be no end to the demands. Government salaries were small, resources were limited.

It happened just like that, inexplicably.

You would be shirking your duty if you failed to recognize and to help a boy of his sort.

And that was why, when he made up a quota of children to be sent to the school in Oregon, the name of Eneas Lamartine was included.

It was a breaking away from fear and doubt and ignorance.

Already it had emerged from the canyon, and momentarily the headlong flying locomotive loomed blacker and larger.