The Telegram Said His Mail Order Bride Died on the Way West — She Stepped Off the Train Alive
Chapter 7
The train made its connection east of Denver in good order, and then, fourteen miles out of the city, the seventh car developed a fault in its running gear that the crew diagnosed by sound alone, a grinding that made the conductor’s face change.
Alice was transferred to a later service with her trunk and her satchel and the cloth strip around her forearm, and she arrived in Denver two days behind her schedule, in the thin bright air of the high country, with a burn on her arm that had begun to announce itself properly.
She found a physician that afternoon. The burn was not serious — the physician was a brisk, competent man who told her so while he dressed it. “You’ll carry a scar and a story,” he said. “Keep it clean, keep it covered, it’ll heal. Travel as you like.”
She wrote to Nolan Reeves from Denver.
My train was delayed by a mechanical fault and by the fire in Kansas on the fifth, which you may have seen mentioned in the papers — the correspondents have been calling it the Kansas Car Fire, and it has earned the name. I was in the seventh car and am entirely safe, save for a small burn on my left forearm which a physician has dressed, and which will be the least of the things you hear about the journey. I am two days behind, and I am coming on. I will be at Stone Creek as soon as the service will carry me. Do not meet the train on the 14th — I will not be on it. Meet it when you see me.
— A.H.
She mailed it on a Thursday, from the post office in Denver, in the late afternoon.
The letter would travel east-station-to-station and reach Stone Creek eleven days later, which was two days after matters had already been decided there in a way no letter could unsay.
She did not know any of this.
That is the part that has to be told plainly, because the cruelty of the error was that it was never engineered — no malice, no misdirection, no hand. It was a night fire, a bad-light manifest, and two names that were nearly the same being written down by a clerk who had been up since four, in the wrong place on a page of names.
Clara Hartwell of Ohio, on her way to her brother in Utah, dead of smoke in the fourth car, aged twenty-nine.
Alice Hartley of Boston, on her way to a ranch in Stone Creek, alive, boarding services in Denver with a dressed burn and a letter in the mail.
The clerk wrote Hartley where the manifest wanted a casualty, because he had heard the name answered clear and a neighbor name unanswered in the dark, and he had trusted the shape of the letters over the shape of the facts.
The telegraph sent west that night read: REGRET INFORM — ALICE HARTLEY, PASSENGER DENVER SERVICE, KILLED IN CAR FIRE KANSAS APRIL 5 STOP DENVER CORRESPONDENCE AGENCY CONVEYS DEEPEST SYMPATHY TO WILLIFORD N. REEVES STOP —
The clerk at the Denver depot had copied the name from the agency’s own registration ledger: Miss A. Hartley, fiancée of N. Reeves, Stone Creek.
It went out across the wire in the small hours, while Alice Hartley slept in a clean bed in a Denver boarding house with her arm dressed and her trunk at the foot of the bed, dreaming of nothing that mattered.