She finally looked up at me. “The barns are not open yet. Horses are—where did you say you lived?”

  My face went to flush, red as a piece of calico. “Arizona Territory, ma’am. Would you like to see my drawings? They said in the letter—I got it right here—that I was good enough to come study art here.”

  “Girls who know how to follow directions will do better in classes than those who do not. Take a look at the third paragraph of the acceptance letter. It gives you the date of Monday, August 26, 1907, as the earliest date on which you may arrive, does it not?”

  “Yes, ma’am. How did you know it was there?”

  “I typed that letter to every student, including you, on this very typewriting instrument. The letters to our probationary students all have the same date. It gives you two days to settle in before classes begin.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She peered at me over her spectacles. “Afraid your parents would change their minds?”

  “I … I can’t say, ma’am.” I knew what I’d done. Jumped headlong without thinking, into something new and strange, just like promising to marry Aubrey, without any plan what might happen once I hit the ground. I’d shooed Clover off to the station, too, soon as we ate, telling him I could sure enough find the college again as it was just a straight shot down the road. I’d promised myself I was master of my own life now, and didn’t need his help. “I was afraid I’d miss the train,” was all I could squeak out. I remembered Clover’s wink at me about the schedule and felt even more confused, as if I wasn’t just fooling Mama, but that people were fooling me.

  But while Miss Kotterman seemed stern, she wasn’t without a heart, and pretty soon, I felt altogether thankful that Miss Kotterman allowed to let me sleep on a cot in the library storage room. I was to keep it clean, she warned, and no cooking in there.

  “Ma’am, you reckon I can read some of those books in there?”

  “Yes, you may. Anything you remove from the shelves must be put into the baskets on the end. Our trained staff will replace them. If they were to be misplaced out of order, there would be great trouble replacing them,” she said. “You will have to take suppers with different families who have agreed to temporarily support new students. I’ll give you a list of names and addresses later. You will be expected to stay clean of mind and body. There is a washroom on the second floor.”

  I reckoned that other meals I would have to buy or find, so I thought I’d just try to get some apples and tortillas, as I know I could live on nothing but apples and tortillas, long as I find a place where they know how to make them without too much lard. Duende would be my responsibility, too, she said, and I’d have to purchase his feed and haul it myself for the time being and did I have the money for that? “Yes’m,” I agreed heartily. I might have agreed to anything rather than be told to get myself back on that train toward home for two weeks then turn around and come back. If I were to land on the front porch at home, what with Aubrey’s now having most likely gotten that letter of mine, he’d be there waiting with a lasso to keep me there.

  Once I got the horse’s stall fixed up with some nice grain and water, I took him for a ride up the center street of town. People stared at me. First I thought they were just interested in Duende, because he is a remarkable horse. Then I decided they were city folks and were just rude. I rode on and quit saying good morning to them all. I found a ladies’ goods store; I could tell because they had a corset right in the front window. I went in and handed the lady inside the folder from that doctor on the train, and told her I needed some fitting for my shirtwaists and all, too. At another place I stocked up on some apples and peaches, but no one I asked knew where I could buy tortillas, and acted like they didn’t even know what they were.

  Before long, I was suited up fairly nice, and I bought some needles and thread to fix the rest of my clothes. It was much harder than it had seemed with my ma and sisters all threading needles and snipping cloth at the kitchen table. My stitches were rambling at best, and pure sloppy in the worst places, where I figured no one would see. I never had given thought to having to become good at sewing at the same time as drawing. Meanwhile, I tried to settle into the storage closet, making up the cot with the two blankets that Miss Kotterman had given me on loan. Night was coming on, and I was expected at supper at some member of the school board’s home.

  The supper was pleasant enough. The people were kind to me. They were the Jaegers and had eleven children and said they were Lutherans, and served me and all of the children glasses of beer! I had never had it before, and I said my ma would not allow me to taste liquor. Mr. Jaeger said it was not liquor, only beer, and that it was good for me. I had a sip, trying to be polite, but the taste of it was like a mouthful of soap. I finally asked Mrs. Jaeger for water, saying I was only ever allowed water at home. Though the food was simple it was plentiful, but everything was drenched in lard. I tried to smile often and thanked them as earnestly as I knew how. It gave me something to ponder on later, these people who’d never touched a branding iron or a shooting iron, never seen a person with any color to ’em more than they had. When I tried to tell them about the javelina and coyotes, Mr. Jaeger’s face got pale. He said with a whisper, “Ah. Wild boars and wolves. Just like in the old country.”

  “Yes,” I said, not knowing if it were true or not, but I’d read plenty of tales about wolves.

  He smiled at me and raised his glass of beer. “That’s a wild country you have left. I’m sure you are glad to be here.”

  “Yes,” I said again, thinking that I missed the sounds of quail and the smell of creosote.

  When I left, the sun was waning and the sky raised a mist just like there had been rain. I marveled again at the smell of corn in the air, especially in light of not finding a single tortillaria in this entire town. The barn was dark by the time I got Duende bedded down.

  The library had two fluttering gaslights at the front door, but the entrance I’d been told to use was down one side in the dark. I let myself in, feeling the shadowy interior of the room like it was brushing against me. I struck a match from my pocket and lit the kerosene lamp at the borrowing desk. The books, the rows, the chairs upside down on the tables, all had looked so innocent and somewhat welcoming earlier when Miss Kotterman had shown me to the room. Now the enormous ceilings towered overhead, and everything was dark and whispery, as if the pages full of all those stories were telling them aloud to each other at night. I crept to the storage room on tiptoes and slammed the door. Everything heavy I could stack went in front of the door. I heard footsteps as if someone were pacing around outside it. I tossed all night on the cot, now too hot, now too cold. I cried for lonesomeness. I cried for Ma and Pa and my brothers and sisters. It was the longest night I had spent since Esther passed.

  * * *

  At dawn, I gaped again and again at the rows of shelves laden with more books than a person could read in a lifetime. I climbed every set of stairs. I saw at a far wall, a tall clock, its hands motionless, the pendulum still. Above it hung a great painting that filled the wall nearly to the ceiling. It showed wagons crossing a great divide, and mountains both far and near, a river that looked so real I could hear it gurgle in its bed, wide valleys, and people pushing toward some far-off land. Let my brothers moon over machinery or medicine or baseball. This work of art spoke to me, whispering of divine places. I lost track of time, staring until my eyes felt coated with sand.

  After I had looked everywhere in the library that I could, I went back to the painting and looked upon it until I could hold no more. I remembered my horse and my growling stomach. There was no time to waste. I wanted to devour the contents of this library, to read every book while sitting under that painting. After I’d fed Duende and gotten some breakfast, I checked with Miss Kotterman for the time. Knowing how lost I could get into a single book, and how I’d been warned they held all the classes by the time of day, I set the big wall clock’s hands a couple of minutes beyond what Miss Kotterman had said, pulled the weights, and tipped the pendulum.

  Even though I appreciated people being willing to have me to supper with them, I always left early to get into the storage room while it was light. Trouble was, no matter that I piled the boxes of books, a cabinet of drawers, seven brooms and five mops, and a tin bucket against the door, I heard footsteps outside the storage room. I’d lean against the door and hold my breath, and the steps stopped. Then if I went to lie on the cot, I heard them again.

  I loaded both pistols and laid them at my sides, slipping the knife without its scabbard under my pillow. When I finally fell asleep, however, I reckon I was tired, for I didn’t open my eyes until morning.

  I reported the footsteps to Miss Kotterman, but she dismissed it with, “Students often tell me they hear such things there, even in the daytime. I am sure it is a curtain being drawn out a drafty window or something of the sort.” That explanation didn’t make it set easier with me, but I only had six more nights to go. It might be bats or mice, I thought, but I didn’t say it.

  With a basket full of apples, raw corn in husks, and small bread rolls, I set about reading. I didn’t move the chairs off the tables, except for one I used to reach a book on a top shelf before I discovered the ladders. I read volumes of art and architecture, even one in the section on human anatomy with shocking images of naked people. It made me wonder if in class we’d have to do drawings of bare-naked girls and boys alike. I wanted to paint flowers, and landscapes like the one above my head, and, of course, horses. I brought my notebook and sketchpad along and made lists of the titles and the strange numbers along the spines.

  That night, the same footsteps kept me wary until the small hours. At first I felt frightened. Then I felt angry. If someone wanted to attack me—“ravish” was the word I had read in a novel—let them come try it. If someone was walking around to bother my sleep, I’d like to tie him to an anthill.

  Next day after breakfast, I searched the building top to bottom, sometimes pistol in hand, trying every door and window, searching for something that might draw a curtain. I found nothing unlocked, no glass broken. That was the day I found the huge cabinet of small square drawers full of cards. I figured out the numbers on the book spines went with the numbers on the cards, and I could locate anything I wanted by searching the cards first. What a joy to live in a palace lined with books.

  I moved one of the wooden boxes I used to lock my door at night. Tacks sprang from the side. The contents hit the floor, slithering out like a stack of snake pancakes: old Harper’s Weekly magazines, newspaper clippings, some handwritten pages, and copied drawings that looked like they’d been traced on something held to a window. One of the magazine pictures was tacked to the wall in my own bedroom. I’d drawn that Remington horse at least ten times.

  I took the chairs off one of the large tables, and carefully—the paper was crumbling at the edges—laid out the magazines and tracings and all the rest. Then I picked up the pieces of the crate to take them to Miss Kotterman. She wasn’t in her office. I had a supper scheduled with the Jaeger family again, and I didn’t want to be late, so I went to get my hat and gloves. The lamp I had left turned low was out, and shadows loomed toward me. It seemed to grow dark so much earlier here in Illinois, I thought. The stack of magazines and papers I had laid so carefully on the table had been strewn here to yonder. Not just tipped over or slid off as if I’d stacked them carelessly, no, there were torn pieces hanging from a chandelier. I drew in a breath to shout something about how I wasn’t afraid at all and I would get the person who did this, but I changed my mind. I would set a trap instead.

  I begged pardon from the Jaegers’ table early, telling them I had studying to do, although I just wanted to get back to my bunk while it was still light. I stood my horse at the side of the building before I went in, loosely tied to a bush, and told him to wait for me and not make any sounds until he heard a whistle. Since I had found several kerosene lamps in my searching, I lined them all in a row and took the globes off so that I could light them quick and easy. In a shadowy place where my back was to a solid wall, I tied the saddle end of my lariat to a pillar that held up the upper floor. Made me a good throwing loop. Stacked up those magazines just as pretty as you please.

  Then I got one of the ladders and climbed up on top of the bookshelf. I reminded myself what my brothers had said about hunting. Don’t let your legs go to sleep, no matter if your head does. So I sat to wait, boots and all, a pistol before my left knee, my lariat in my right hand. My calf roping gear, three piggin’ strings and a leather strap, lay in my lap. The big clock chimed seven. I still had an hour of daylight left, but I didn’t have to wait long. I heard the soft click of a key turning a lock. Footsteps. The hairs on my arms raised first, then the ones on the back of my neck.

  A man’s voice with a peevish whine said, “No, no. You can’t put those here.” When the footsteps sped up, I hung my first string in my teeth. In a second, out of another shadow, a form lunged for the stacks of paper and magazines, shouting “No!” again. He flung them with his arm, and no sooner had he sent the last piece of paper sailing into the air toward me, than I let go with the lasso and swung myself to the floor by sliding my gloved hands on the rope. He was too tumbled to fight and I whipped his ankles together with the lash I had held in my teeth. I pulled another string from my waist and had his hands tied before he quit rolling.

  Well, I don’t mind saying that what the fellow hollered wouldn’t set down at Mama’s table, but I booted him like a barrel and rolled him right up in the rope. I yanked another knot in the lariat before I stood up. “You are done stomping around this library all night, scaring the devil out of me,” I said. “Get up.”

  The fellow had bruised his face when he fell. He hollered, “You can’t stay here. That room’s mine!”

  I whistled loudly. The front door creaked open and the unmistakable clopping of a well-shod horse came toward us. I took my bullwhip from the saddle and held it under the man’s nose. “I’m going to let loose your one leg, so’s you can get on down the road.”

  “Where do you think I’m going to go like this? Let me go, I say. Let me go.” Honest to goodness, the man started to buckle up and cry.

  “You’re going, all right,” I said. I stuck the ankle piggin’ line through the knot of the lariat so he had one leg kind of hitched to the middle. He’d go, but he wouldn’t be going too fast. Then I took the lariat off the post and yanked it over the saddle horn, and said, “On your feet, sneak-in-the-night magazine thrower. We’re going to see the sheriff.”

  “No.”

  I snapped the bullwhip at his shoe. I knew he could feel it through the leather because my brothers had tormented me like that once for putting sand in their beds. “I reckon you are going.”

  “There’s no sheriff here.” He snuffled and then raised his eyebrows. “Who are you, a Wild West–show lady?”

  Something about the way he said that made me wonder if the fellow had his senses knocked out of him, so I said, “That’s right. You are coming with me or I’ll know the reason why.”

  After that, he came along fairly peaceful. We created a spectacle in the gas streetlights: Duende, who can draw a crowd by himself, me holding a fancy gold-braided lariat with a bread-loafy-looking man on the end of it, his hands tied together, tears on his face, and gimping because of the tie on his one leg. People pointed, gawking and laughing. The man seemed to like that, and started calling out, “I’m in a Wild West show! Look at me, I’m gonna do some tricks.”

  I pulled my Stetson low, hoping no one would recognize me, but I knew instantly that there was no other woman around wearing a man’s roping hat and hauling an overgrown, childish rascal through the street. I’d made myself a spectacle, for sure. They might send me home from college. It had seemed like the right thing to do, to capture someone messing around the library at night, until people were laughing at me. I came to a building marked DuPage County Courthouse and tied Duende to the rail. I didn’t have to go inside; several men in black suits came out the door to see what was going on. One of them, I saw with relief, was wearing a badge.

  By the time I got back to the storage room bunk that night, I knew plenty about Calvert Mott, the man I had hog-tied and marched down Main Street. He was a simpleminded, much tolerated, overgrown child. To hear the lawman say, he was no more dangerous than a housecat, though he was given to temper tantrums and peevishness. Instead of being locked away, people either ignored him or protected him; fed him, too. But, they didn’t always know what he did with himself, especially during winters. They expected he’d freeze to death somewhere in a barn, but he was always there in the mornings, looking for a meal from his usual “haunts.” He had a clever streak, apparently, for he’d gotten himself a key and let himself into the library at night through an upper hall on the third floor that connected this building to the classrooms next door. He slept in the storage room, but not on the cot I’d been using, for he preferred his own blanket, he said. When he had found his “bedroom” occupied and the door barred, he’d walked the library floors at night, crying, hoping to come find the door open, though it never was.

  In the end, the sheriff and I agreed with Calvert that he could sleep in the jail, unlocked, for the next few days until I was done sleeping in the storage room. For every night he stayed in the jail, I would show him a “real Western rope trick” the following day, like the one I’d used to tie him up. It seemed a small enough trade. I told him I would meet him at the barn of the college, where I knew other hands would be there to keep an eye on him. He may have been simple, but he was a great loaf of a man, and I didn’t want there to be a chance for him to get the upper hand.