"Humph! What's the use of talking about it? I tell you Jerry will have enough for all her needs, and I want you here. I shall not consider any more such notions, Eugene. You are both going to stay right here as you have done. Let's talk of something else."
"We can't yet, Aunt Jerry, because I have not enough for myself, even if Gene would accept a living from you," Jerry Swaim declared.
Jerusha Darby opened her narrow eyes and stared at her niece. If the older woman had made one plea of loneliness, if she had even hinted at sorrow for the loss of the companion of her business transactions, Jerry Swaim would have felt uncomfortable, even though she knew her aunt too well to be deceived by any such demonstration.
"Geraldine Swaim, what are you saying?" Mrs. Darby demanded, in a hard, even voice. Something in her manner and face could always hold even the brave-spirited in frightened awe of her.
Eugene Wellington lost courage to go on, and the same thing came again that Jerry Swaim had twice seen on his face in the rose-arbor this evening. The two were looking straight at the girl now. The firelight played with the golden glory of her hair and deepened the rose hue of her round cheeks. The dark-blue eyes seemed almost black, with a gleam in their depths that meant trouble, and there was a strength in the low voice as Jerry went on:
"I'm talking about what I know, Aunt Jerry. All there is of my heritage from my father is a 'claim,' they call it, at New Eden, in the Sage Brush Valley in Kansas; twelve hundred acres. I'm going out there to manage it myself and support myself on an income of my own."
For a long minute Jerusha Darby looked steadily at her niece, her own face as hard and impenetrable as if it were carven out of flint. Then she said, sharply:
"Where did you find out all this?"
"It is all in a document here that I found in the rose-arbor this afternoon," the girl replied. "Aunt Jerry, I must use what is mine. I wouldn't be a Swaim if I didn't."
"You won't stay there two weeks." Mrs. Darby fairly clicked out the words. Her face was very pale and something like real fright looked through her eyes as she took the paper from her niece's hand.
"And then?" Jerry inquired, demurely.
"And then you will come back here where you belong and live as you always have lived, in comfort."
"And if I do not come?"
Jerusha Darby's face was not pleasant to see just then. The firelight that made the girl more winsomely pretty seemed to throw into relief all the hard lines of a countenance which selfishness and stubbornness and a dictatorial will had graven there.
"Jerry Swaim, you are building up a wild, adventurous dream. You are Lesa Swaim over and over. You want a lark, that's what you want. And it's you who have put Eugene up to his notions of a career and all that. Listen to me. Nothing talks in this world like money. That you have to have for your way of living, and that he's got to have if he wants to be what he should be. Well, go on out to Kansas. You know more of that prosperous property out there than I do. I'll let you find it out to the last limit. But when you come back you must promise me never to take another such notion. I won't stand this foolishness forever. I'll give you plenty of money to get there. You can write me when you need funds to come back. It won't take long to get that letter here."
"And if I shouldn't come?" Jerry asked, calmly.
"Look what you are giving up. All this beautiful home, to say nothing of the town house—and Eugene—and other property."
"No, no; you don't count him as your property, do you?" Jerry cried, turning to the young artist, whose face was very pale.
"Jerry, must you make this sacrifice?" he asked, in a voice of tenderness.
"It isn't a sacrifice; it's just what I want to do," Jerry declared, lightly.
Jerusha Darby's face darkened. The effect of a long and absolute exercise of will, coupled with ample means, can make the same kind of a tyrant out of a Kaiser and a rich aunt. The determination to have her own way in this matter, as she had had in all other matters, became at once an unbreakable purpose in her. She wanted to keep fast hold of these young people for her own sake, not for theirs. For a little while she sat measuring the two with her narrow, searching eyes.
"I can manage him best," she concluded to herself. At last she asked, plaintively, "With all you have here, Jerry, why do you go hunting opportunities in Kansas?"
"Because I want to," Jerry replied, and her aunt knew that, so far as Jerry was concerned, everything was settled.
"Then we'll drop the matter here. I can wait for you to come to your senses. Eugene, if you can give her up, when you've always been chums, I certainly can."
With these words Mrs. Darby rose and passed out, leaving the two alone under the rose-colored lights of the richly furnished parlor.
It was not like Jerusha Darby to make such a concession, and Jerry Swaim knew it, but Eugene Wellington, who was of alien blood, did not know it.
The room was much more beautiful without her presence; and her sordid hinting at the Darby wealth which Jerry must count on, and Eugene must meekly help to guard for future gain, rasped harshly against their souls, for they were young and more sentimental than practical. Left alone to their youth, and strength, and nobler ideals, they vowed that night to hold to better things. Together they builded a dream of a rainbow-tinted world which they were going bravely forth to create. Of what should follow that they did not speak, yet each one guessed what was in the other's mind, as men and maidens have always guessed since love began. And on this night there were no serpents at all in their Eden.
The sun of a mid-June day glared down pitilessly on the little station at the junction of the Sage Brush branch with the main line. There was not a tree in sight. The south wind was raving across the prairie, swirling showers of fine sand before it. Its breath came hot against Jerry Swaim's cheek as she stood in the doorway of the station or wandered grimly down between the shining rails that stretched toward a boundless nowhere whither the "through" train had vanished nearly two hours ago. As Jerry watched it leaving, a sudden heaviness weighed down upon her. And when the Pullman porter's white coat on the rear platform of the last coach melted into the dull, diminishing splotch on the western distance, she felt as if she were shipwrecked in a pathless land, with the little red station house, reefed about by cinders, as the only resting-place for the soles of her feet. When her eyes grew weary of the monotonous landscape, Jerry rested them with what she called "A Kansas Interior." The rustic station under the maples at "Eden" was always clean and comfortably appointed. Big flower-beds outside, Uncle Cornie's gift, belonged to the station and its guests, with the spacious grounds of "Eden," at which the travelers might gaze without cost, lying just beyond it.
This "Kansas Interior" seemed only a degree less inviting than the whole monotonous universe outside. The dust of ages dimmed the windows that were propped and nailed and otherwise secured against the entrance of cool summer breezes, or the outlet of bad, overheated air in winter. Iron-partitioned seats, invention of the Evil One himself, stalled off three sides of the room, intending to prove the principle that no one body can occupy two spaces at the same time. In the center of the room a "plain, unvarnished" stove, bare and bald, stood on a low pedestal yellowed with time and tobacco juice. A dingy, fly-specked map of the entire railway system hung askew on the wall—very fat and foreshortened as to its own extent, very attenuated and ill-proportioned as to other insignificant systems cutting spidery lines across it.
Behind a sealed tomb of a ticket-window Jerry could hear the "tick-tick, tick-a-tick-tick, tick-tick" of a telegraph-wire. Somebody must be in there who at set times, like a Saint Serapion from his hermit cell, might open this blank wall and speak in almost human tones. Just now the solitude of the grave prevailed, save for that everlasting "tick-a-tick" behind the wall.
When Jerry Swaim gripped her hands on the plow handles, there would be no looking back. She persuaded herself that she wasn't going to die of the jiggermaroos in the empty nothingness here. It would be very different at New Eden, she was sure of that. And this York Macpherson must be a nice old man, honest and easy-going, because he had never realized any income from her big Kansas estate. She pictured York easily—a short, bald-headed old gentleman with gray burnsides and benevolent pale-blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, driving a fat sorrel nag to an easy-going old Rockaway buggy, carrying a gold-headed cane given him by the Sunday-school. Jerry had seen his type all her life in the business circles of Philadelphia and among the better-to-do country-dwellers around "Eden."
At last it was only fifteen minutes till the Sage Brush train would be due; then she could find comfort in her Pullman berth. She wondered what Aunt Jerry and Eugene were doing now. She had slipped away from "Eden" on her wild adventure in the early dawn. She had taken leave of Aunt Jerry the night before. Old women need their beauty sleep in the morning, even if foolish young things are breaking all the laws by launching out to hunt their fortunes. Eugene had been hurriedly sent away on Darby estate matters without the opportunity of a leave-taking, two days before Jerry was ready to start for Kansas. Everything was prearranged, evidently, to make this going a difficult one. So, without a single good-by to speed her on her quest, the young girl had gone out from a sheltering Eden of beauty and idleness. But the tears that had dimmed her eyes came only when she left the lilac walk to the station to slip around by Uncle Cornie's grave beside the green-coverleted resting-places of Jim and Lesa Swaim.
"Maybe mother would glory in what I am doing, and father might say I had the right stuff in me. And Uncle Cornie—'If a man went right with himself'—Uncle Cornie might have said 'if a woman went right with herself,' too. I'm going to put that meaning into his words, even if he never seemed to think much of women. Oh, father! Oh, mother! Youlivedbefore you died, anyhow, and I'm going to do the same. Uncle Cornie died before he ever really lived."
Jerry stretched out her hands to the one good-by in "Eden" coming to her from these silent ripples of dewy green sod. Then youth and the June morning and the lure of adventure into new lands came with their triple strength to buoy her up to do and dare. Behind her were her lover to be—for Eugene must love her—her home ties, luxury, dependent inactivity. Before her lay the very ends of the earth, the Kansas end especially. The spirit of Sir Galahad, of Robinson Crusoe, of Don Quixote, combined with the spirit of a self-willed, inexperienced girl, but dimly conscious yet of what lay back of her determination to go forth—because she wanted to go.
Chicago and Kansas City offered easy ports for clearing. And the Kaw Valley, unrolling its broad acres along the way, gave larger promise than Jerry had yet dared to dream of for the New Eden farther west. The train service, after the manner of a Pacific Coast limited, had been perfect in every appointment. And then—this junction episode.
Two eternity-long hours before the Sage Brush branch could take her to New Eden were almost ended.
"It's not so terrifying, after all." Jerry was beginning to "see things again." "It's all in the game—and I am going to be as 'game' as the thing I am playing. Things always come round all right for me.They must."
The square white chin was very much a family feature just now. And the shapely hands had no hint of weakness in their grip on the iron arms of the station seat.
The door which the wind had slammed shut was slammed open again as three prospective passengers for the Sage Brush train slammed through it laden with luggage. At the same time the sealed-up ticket-window flew open, showing the red, grinning face of the tick-tick man behind its iron bars. If Jerry had never paid the slightest heed to the bunch of grubs on the Winnowoc branch, except as they kept down the ventilation, or crowded their odors of Limburger on her offended senses, the Sage Brush grubs were a thousandfold less worthy of her consideration. As the three crowded to the ticket-window, laughing among themselves, she stared through the doorway, unconsciously reading the names on the cars of a freight-train slowly heaving down alongside the station. Who invented freight-cars, anyhow? The most uninteresting and inartistic thing ever put on wheels by the master mechanic of the unbeautiful, created mainly to shut off the view of mankind from what is really worth looking at. Jerry read the dulled lettering mechanically: "Santa Fé" with its symbol of a fat cross in a circle, "Iron Mountain," "Great Northern," "Rock Island," "Frisco," "Union Pacific," "Grand Trunk," came creeping by. "New York Central," "Lehigh Valley," "Pennsylvania Line." These took her back to "Eden" and the Winnowoc country. The station building shook; the ugly old cars slam-banged a bit faster back and forth; the engine, with the breath almost knocked out of it, was puffing down by the switch, and the whole body behind it quivered to a standstill. But Jerry Swaim's tear-blurred eyes were seeing only the green fields of the Darby country-place and the rose-arbor and Eugene Wellington. A voice loud, but not unpleasant, and a laugh, a merry, catching, giggling guffaw, drove the picture of "Eden" and all that belonged to it into "viewless air" that went flapping and flaring across the Kansas landscape.
"You don't mean it! He, he! Haw!" Everybody must smile now. "The old Sage Brush local is locoed 'way up toward S'liny. Engine shortage, car shortage, common sense shortage. He, he! And we must ride in that sunflower de luxe limited standing out there. Come on, Thelmy. You can take lower nothin', car one-half. We'll soar in now while the soarin's good."
Jerry looked at the bunch of grubs for the first time. One had to see where that big gloom-chasing giggle came from. Thelma was a spotlessly clean, well-made country product, wherein the girl had easily given place to the woman, erect, full-bosomed, strong of frame. The hazel eyes were arched over by heavy brown brows. There was no rosebud curve to the rather wide mouth that showed a set of magnificent white teeth. The brown hair wound braid on braid about the head was proof of the glory of Saint Paul's scriptural decree. Not that Jerry Swaim really noted any of these features. She merely saw a country girl—a not offensive native. The native's comrade, he with the big-laugh fixtures, was short and stout, with a round face on the front side of a round head, set on top of a tight-built body. Grub though he was, Jerry involuntarily smiled with him. That far the fat little man controlled everybody. But the funny little strut in his gait as he walked was irresistible. The third passenger, the grubbiest of the three grubs, was a nondescript of whose presence Jerry was not even aware until she heard his voice. It was a thin, high, unused voice, and its pitch wabbled up and down.
"Be you goin' on the Sage Bresh train, lady?"
The questioner had turned back after the country girl and the fat man had passed out.
Jerry looked at him without taking his question to herself. His shoes, draped with wrinkled-down hose, were very much worn. His overalls flapping around his legs, his shirt and neck and face and hair and hat, were all of one complexion, a fuzzy, yellow brown.
"Be you goin' on this train, too?"
It was a humble, kindly voice, and the scaly old hand holding the door open against the high prairie wind was only a fisherman's hand. The deep-set eyes in the yellow-brown old face were trained to read the river; the patient mouth set to wait for the catch of lines and nets.
Jerry had never in her life spoken to such a creature. So far as she was concerned, he did not exist.
"This is the only train on the Sage Bresh to-day, lady. The reg'lar train's busted through a culbert out yander," the high, quavering voice persisted.
A sharp tooting from the engine down the line emphasized the statement, and Jerry saw the grinning red-faced tick-tick man hastily wheeling mail-sacks and sundry other parcels by the door. In a bewildered way she rose and passed out, giving no recognition to the shabby old man who had been thoughtful of her ignorance.
"We gotta go to the last car down yander, lady," the old man squeaked out, as he started down the cinder-paved way with a bearlike, shuffling, sidewise sort of gait.
Jerry followed him slowly to "the last car down yander."
A plain day coach, the sixtieth and last vertebra in this long mechanical spine, was already crowded with a bunch of grubs, none of whom could belong to Jerry Swaim's sphere. Moreover, they were all tightly packed in and wedged down so that it was impossible to detect the leaving off of the full-fare passenger and the beginning of suit-cases, old-style telescopes, baskets, bundles, boxes, half-fare children, bags of fruit, lunch-crates, pieces of farming tools, babes in arms, groceries—everything to cabbages and kings. Jerry wondered where all thesethingscame from. Every object in that car, human being or salt pork, crying baby or kingbolt, was athingto Jerry Swaim. And all of them were very warm and nervously tense, as if the hot June wind had blown them all inside, that the hot June sun, through the closed windows, might stew them stinkily; or, through the open windows, grime their sweaty faces with hot dust off the hot prairie. There was only one vacant seat left. It was on the shady side, facing the rear of the car, and was half occupied already by the humble grub of the squeaky voice. The girl, Thelma, and the fat little man had taken the seat opposite him. As Jerry entered the car the little man was on his feet, bowing and strutting and insisting that a woman with a babe in arms should exchange seats with him, putting her on the cool side, while he took her place in the sun across the aisle from Thelma. In the transfer he did not see Jerry, who was looking in vain for an opening in that mass of "human various." It was the humble grub who saw her standing there. Evidently his little yellow-green eyes took her measure at a glance, but he did not spread out his effects and stare out of the window as some other men were doing, nor gather himself and his into his own half of the seat to make room for her beside him. He rose, and in a shrill little quaver he bade her take his place. It did not occur to Jerry to tell him that there was room for two, as she saw him shuffle down the aisle with a queer, limping hitch. In the same impersonal way she watched him through the open door, sitting on the rear platform during the long afternoon, humpbacked against the cinders and dust that beat upon him, swaying with the rocking car, jerked along over a sun-baked, treeless prairie at the tail of a long jerky freight-train. He meant nothing to this dainty city product; his kind had never entered her world; no more had the red-faced, tow-headed young mother, with white eyebrows and hat knocked rakishly aslant, with her big, restless, bald-headed baby rolling over her in waves, sprawling about Thelma, and threatening to bump its head off as it overflowed all the narrow space, aimlessly and persistently.
But if Jerry Swaim felt out of her element in this company, her fellow-passengers felt much more embarrassed by her presence. Thelma's neat gingham dress became limp and mussy and common. The tired mother's yellow lawn was rumpled into a dish-rag. And with every jerk of the train she lost a hair-pin from her tow hair that was already stringing down in long wisps on her neck. The baby, really a happy, white, blue-veined infant, became a fussy flushed impossibility.
All this, it seemed, just because of the presence of a faultlessly dressed, fair-faced stranger who awed everybody by not seeing them, but whose very daintiness and beauty drew them hungrily to her. Nobody could be in Jerry Swaim's presence and not feel the spell of her inherent magnetism.
The laughter and complaints of the passengers dulled down to endurance. Only the face of the short man wore a smile. But his mouth was made with that kind of a curve, and he couldn't help it. Breathing deeply and perspiring healthfully, he sat against the heat streaming into his side of the car, and forgot his troubles in his unbreakable good nature. For a long time he and Thelma had talked across the aisle above and through the train's noises. Their talk was all of Paul and Joe's place, and the crops; of how glad Thelma was to be at home again on Paul's account; and how long it would take her yet if the alfalfa and wheat turned out well.
Jerry heard it all without knowing it, as she looked at the monotonous landscape without knowing it. And then the dry prairies began to deepen to a richer hue. Yellow wheat-fields and low-growing corn and stretches of alfalfa broke into the high plains where cattle grazed. And then came the gleam of a river, sometimes shallow along sandy levels, sometimes deep, with low overhanging brush on either side. And there were cottonwood-trees and low twisted elms and scrubby locust and oak saplings, and the faint, fresh scent of moisture livening the air.
The train jerked itself to a standstill, thought better of it, and hunched along again for a rod or two, then jostled itself quiet again.
Jerry was very drowsy now, but she was conscious of hearing the fat man calling out, cheerfully:
"Home at last, Thelmy. There's Paul waiting for you. Well, good-by."
And of Thelma's "Good-by" in a louder tone than was necessary. Of more strutting and bowing and no end of luggage clearing itself away.
Through the window Jerry caught sight of a tall, fair-haired boy, who looked like Thelma, except that in his white face was the pathos of the life-cripple. She saw Thelma kiss him, and then the two started down the sunny, cindery side-track together. In the distance, close to the river, there was a small plain house under a big cottonwood-tree. The glimpse of red about a little porch meant that the crimson ramblers were in bloom there. Oh, the roses of "Eden," and the cool rose-arbor! Jerry must have dreamed then, for "Eden" was about her again. Through it the limping grub came humbly to claim his sundry own from behind and under the seat. Even in "Eden" she thought how much like a clumsy bear his gait was. And when the little man called him "Teddy" she knew he was not a fisherman sort of creature, but a real bear in yellow-brown overalls, and that the general fuzziness of his make-up was fur, and that his stubby, scaly hands were claws. He dropped off somewhere when the freight took a siding very near the river. It was the Sage Brush, but it ran through the "Eden" grounds and Uncle Cornie was throwing his discus beside it. The rose-arbor was just across the aisle. The little fat man was sitting in its doorway, with a new moon of a smile on the smooth side of his round head where his face was, a half-quizzical, half-sympathetic smile with no guile in it. Jerry really liked him for that kind of a smile. It belonged to him. The rose-arbor was very warm, for the man was sweating more copiously than ever.... Uncle Cornie was gone. The limping Teddy Bear was gone.... It was very, very hot and sunny in "Eden." The big maples and cool lilacs were gone.... "Eden" was gone. In its stead came the art exhibit in the cool gallery in the city. And that yellow-gray desert landscape with the flaming afterglow and purple mists. The flames seemed almost real, and the yellow gray almost real, and the art-gallery was getting warmer as "Eden" had done. It was positively hot.... And then the Sage Brush freight was laboring slowly and painfully through a desert with clack and roar and cloud of cindery dust.... Jerry sat up, wide awake, and looked up at the fat stranger who was looking at her, the smile on the inside of his face, as it were, showing only in the eyes.
Outside, the river was gone, taking with it all the cool-breathing alfalfa, and elm and cottonwood shade, and leaving in their stead only bare earth-ridges and low dunes. As far as Jerry could see, there was nothing but a hot yellow plain, wrinkled here and there in great barren folds, with wave and crest and hollow of wind-shifted sand crawling endlessly back and forth along the face of the landscape. A few spiny green shrubs struggled through at intervals, but their presence only intensified the barrenness about them.
The train was entering a deep wrinkle not unlike that cut beyond the third crossing of the Winnowoc. Jerry remembered the day she had watched that other train from the bluff road, and her exultation in pounding her big car up the steep way instead of crawling through, as Eugene was doing. Later she had found out that Eugene really preferred that to the more daring climb. Jerry involuntarily gripped the car seat with a subconscious longing to get out and drive over the whole thing. Across the aisle, the smile on the fat man's face was coming outside as he watched the stranger passenger.
They were deep in now—a valley-like thing that was hotter than any other inch of the whole way they had come. On either side tall slabs of timber, planted upright, closed in the right of way. They were barely moving through this narrow lane. The engine was gasping for breath, and the cars dragged themselves after it by inches. Then all came to a dead stop.
"Everybody turn out and help," somebody in uniformed authority called through the car door, and all the men passengers stirred to action.
"Thedickens!" the short fat man exclaimed to everybody. "Stuck in a sand-drift in that danged blowout. That's what comes of letting this wind go all day. I told 'em up at the junction to stop it, but they wouldn't listen to me. Now we've got to soar out of here and shovel for our lives."
When he laughed everybody else had to laugh, too, and it was a really good-natured company of men that piled down from the train to help the cause of railway transportation.
The fat man had been last to leave the car.
"Let me close all these windows," he urged, strutting from seat to seat. "It'll be hot with 'em shut, but you'll be buried in sand in here if we leave 'em open, and we men don't want to dig you and the engine all out in one day. We mightn't find all the children, you know, and leave some of 'em in here covered up. He, he! Haw!" He struggled with the last windows until they were sealed down, then turned away to lend his aid in a good cause.
The tow-headed woman and her little perpetual-motion baby, who had been sleeping wearily for a few miles, roused at the jolly man's loud laugh.
"It's the blowout," the mother said, as Jerry looked at her for the first time. "Them timbers is driv in to keep out all that sand. See how it's heaped up ag'in' 'em on the outside. On awfully windy days it blows over and fills the tracks and stops the train, and then the men all get out and help to shovel it off. Gee whiz! but it's hot in here! We'd be just smothered in sand if we left the windows open, though. There! There!"
The last to the big baby, stirring uneasily, whom the mother patted off to slumber again.
Jerry walked to the rear door and looked out at the narrow space walled in by palisades, and at glimpses of sand waves on either side of the road beyond them; at the little hot-looking green shrubs clinging for life to their shifting depths, and the heat-quivering air visible above them. In all her life she had never felt so uncomfortable as now; never realized what it means toendurephysical misery. She had seen the habitable globe features—lake-shore, and seaside, and mountain resorts; big navigable rivers; big forests; narrow little valleys; sheer cliffs and wonderful waterfalls. She didn't know that the world held such a place as this that anybody but a Hottentot was supposed to inhabit. Through a long hour and a half the train was held back by the sand of what Jerry heard was a "blowout." She did not know nor care what the term meant.She wanted to getout of it and go on, and what Jerry Swaimwantedshe had always had the right to have.
The sun was getting low in the west when the local freight labored up the Sage Brush Valley to its terminal in the yards at New Eden. All of the passengers except Jerry tumbled out, much as tired boys rush from the church door after a long doctrinal sermon. The car was stopped at the freight-station, some distance down the line from the passenger-station, which was itself a long way out from New Eden, after the manner of Western small towns. The middle '80's, when railroad branch lines were building, found road directors and town councils falling out over technicalities, with the result that the railroad seldom secured the ground it wanted and the town was seldom given a convenient station site.
The buses filled rapidly, and the mail and express wagons were rattling off ahead of buses and foot passengers, and still the young stranger sat in the car. A sudden sense of loneliness had enveloped her like a cloud. She was not a novice abroad. She had gone to strange towns alone before. She knew all the regulations of hotel service. She knew why she had come here and what she had to do, and she had abundant means for all her needs. But with all these points in her favor a helplessness swept over her, and the "what next" for the moment perplexed her. The engine was getting restless again. However long it may require a local freight to get from one given point to another, the engine, like an ill-broken colt, will keep stepping up or pulling back through every halt of the train. Jerry sat inside, watching the last bus, loaded and hung-on-to, swinging off down the dusty road toward the town, a full half-mile across the prairie from the station. Life was getting a trifle too interesting in this foreign clime, and when the short man appeared in the doorway, even the full-moon face and half-moon smile, the profound bow and comical strut, could not out-weigh the genuine comfort his presence seemed to bring.
"Pardon me, Miss—Miss—"
"Miss Swaim," Jerry informed him, sure of herself and unafraid again.
"Oh, Miss Swaim! My name is Ponk—Junius Brutus Ponk. Pardon again if I seem to intrude. This is the Sage Brush terminal. Excuse me if I say thank the Lord for the end ofthisday's journey! The buses are all gone. May I take you to your destination here in my little gadabout? You want to stop somewhere in New Eden overnight, anyhow."
"Thank you very much."
Jerry looked at him gratefully, even if he was only one of the bunch of grubs she had been forced to ride with all this long afternoon, she who had once repudiated the Winnowoc train and all trains without Pullman accommodations. "The smile on her face was mightily winsome," Ponk declared afterward, "and just took all my ramparts and citadels and moats and drawbridges at one fell swoop."
He gathered up her bags and helped her off the car pompously, saying:
"Here she is, Miss Swaim. Step right in." And then with a flourish of arms he had Jerry and her belongings stored inside a shiny gray runabout and was off down the grassy road with a dash.
"Where shall I take you to, Miss Swaim?" he inquired, when the little car had glided gracefully around the lumbering buses and rattling wagons.
"To the best hotel, please," Jerry replied. "Do you know which one that is?"
"Yes'm. There isn't but one. The Commercial Hotel and Gurrage. I'm the proprietor, so I know." The smile that broke around the face of the speaker was too good-natured to make his words seem presumptuous.
Jerry smiled, too, finding herself in the grasp of a strange and complete confidence in the pompous little unknown chauffeur.
"Do you know an old gentleman here named York Macpherson, a Mortgage Company man?" she asked, looking at him directly for the first time.
Ponk seemed to gulp down a smile before he replied: "Ye-es, I do know York very well. He's prob'bly older than he looks. His office is right across the street from the Commercial Hotel and Gurrage."
Afterward he declared: "From the minute that girl turned her eyes full on me and I saw how blue them orbs were, I begun to wish I had a gold button instead of a bone one in the back of my collar. I knew she could see that cheap bone thing right through my neck and I was willing right then to lay down and play dead if she wanted me to, and I'm never going to recover, never."
"Would you do—me a favor?" Jerry asked, hesitatingly.
Asking favors was a new line for her and she followed it prettily.
"Wouldn't I!" Mr. Ponk exclaimed. "Try me."
"Even his voice has a strut in it," Jerry thought. Aloud she said: "I have business with this old gentleman and I would be much obliged if you would tell him that Miss Geraldine Swaim is in the city and would like to meet him."
"Why, I'll soar right over there as soon as we get to the hotel and gurrage."
Junius Brutus Ponk looked slyly at the face of his companion as he spoke. What he was thinking just then it would have been hard to guess. With a flourish and curve that were wholly Ponkish the fat little man swung the gray car up to the brick-paved porch of the "Commercial Hotel and Gurrage."
"Why, there's York now, reading his mail! I'll go right over and tell him," Mr. Ponk declared. "Here, George, tell Georgette to give Miss Swaim number seven."
George assisted Miss Swaim to the hotel register and Georgette led her to room No. 7. Georgette wanted to linger a minute, for this guest was so unlike the usual commercial-traveler kind of ladies who sold books, or canvassed for extracts, or took orders for crayon portraits enlarged from little photographs; but Miss Swaim's manner gave no excuse for lingering. Alone, Jerry closed her door and turned, with a smile on her lips, to face her surroundings. The room was clean and cool, with a big window overhanging the street. Jerry sat down before it, realizing how weary the long journey had made her. Across the street, the sign of the Macpherson Mortgage Company in big gold letters hung above a plate-glass window. Mr.
Ponk, who had just "soared" across, was sitting in his car before it. Jerry saw a man inside at a desk very much like Uncle Cornie's in the Philadelphia banking-house where Eugene Wellington was busy now helping Aunt Jerry to settle things. This man was reading letters when the Ponk car tooted before the big window. He waved a hand to the tooter, then put his letters away and came leisurely outside. Jerry saw a tall, finely proportioned man, the set of whose clothes had a city air, and there was something in his whole manner that would have distinguished him from every other man in New Eden.
The fat little man talked earnestly, with a flourish of the hand now and then toward the room where Jerry sat watching the two. York Macpherson rested one foot on the running-board, and leaned his arms on the side of the car, listening intently to what Mr. Ponk was saying.
"So that is this York Macpherson who was never responsible for my estate not making any returns. And I called him an old man. The hotel proprietor must be telling him that now." Jerry laughed as she saw the two men chuckling together. "Well, I hope the pompous little fellow tells him I'm an old woman. It would even things up wonderfully."
Ten minutes later Jerry was shaking hands with York Macpherson and promising him to go to his home and meet his sister as soon as she had cleared her eyes of dust sufficiently to see anybody.
It must have been the dust in her eyes, Jerry thought, that made York Macpherson appear so unlike the benevolent, inefficient old gentleman she had pictured to herself. The hotel parlor was in twilight shadows, which helped a little to conceal the surprise of these two when they met there. Jerry knew what she had been anticipating. Whether York Macpherson knew or not, he was clearly not expecting what he found in the hotel parlor.
"I'll soar down to your shack with the lady as soon as she has had her supper and got herself rightly in hand," Ponk declared to York when he came into the hotel office. "You see, we got stuck in that danged, infernal blowout, and it was as hard on the womenkind who had to sit inside and swelter as on us men who nobly dug. 'Specially this Miss Swaim. She must have 'wept to see such quantities of sand,' same as them oysters and walruses and carpenters. We'll be along by and by, though. Have a cigar. What do you make of her, anyhow, York?"
"I don't make anything. I leave that job to you," York replied, with a smile, as he turned abruptly and left the hotel.
"Unless you see eight per cent. interest coming your way, I see. There might be a bigger interest in this investment than any you ever made in your life," Ponk called after him.
But York only waved off the words without looking back. Outside, the sunset's splendor was filling the western sky—the same old prairie sunset that he had seen many a time in his years in Kansas. And yet, on this evening it did not seem quite the same; nor were the sunsets, New Eden, and the Sage Brush Valley from this evening ever quite as they had been before, to York Macpherson.
Because of a broken "culbert" out toward "S'liny" the afternoon train on the Sage Brush branch was annulled for the day. Because of this annulment the mail for the Sage Brush Valley was brought up on the local freight, which is always behind time when it reaches its terminal, which accounted for the late delivery of the mail at the New Eden post-office, which made York Macpherson's dinner late because of a big batch of letters to be read, and an important business call at the Commercial Hotel following the reading and the delivery of Mr. Ponk's message.
Purple shadows were beginning to fold down upon the landscape, while overhead the sky was still heliotrope and gold, but York Macpherson, walking slowly homeward, saw neither the shadows nor the glory that overhung them. It was evident to his sister Laura, who was waiting for him in the honeysuckle corner of the big front porch, that his mind was burdened with something unusual to-night.
York Macpherson was a "leading citizen" type of the Middle West. Wholesome, ruggedly handsome, prosperous, shrewd to read men's minds, quick to meet their needs, full of faith in the promise of the Western prairies, with the sort of culture no hardship of the plains could ever overcome—that was York. Although he was on the front edge of middle life in years, with a few gray streaks in his wavy brown hair, he had the young-looking face, the alert action, and vigorous atmosphere of a young-hearted man just entered into his full heritage of manhood.
"The train was delayed down the river on account of sand drifted over the track by the south wind, and that made the mail late," York explained, when he reached the porch. "I'll bet you have had the house shut up tight as wax and have gone about all day with a dust-cloth in your hand. Given a south wind and Laura Macpherson, and you have a home industry in no time. Let's hurry up the dinner" (it was always dinner to the Macphersons and supper to the remainder of New Eden) "and get outside again as soon as possible. I can't think in shut-up rooms."
"When there is a south wind it makes little difference whether or not one does any thinking. I postpone that job to the cool of the evening," Laura Macpherson declared, as she led the way to the dining-room.
When the two came outside again the air off the prairie was delicious, and there was promise of restfulness later in the black silence of the June night that made them forget the nervous strain of the windy day. The Macphersons had no problems that they could not talk over in the shadowy stillness of that roomy porch on summer evenings.
York had been a bachelor boarder at the "Commercial Hotel and Garage" for some years before the coming of his sister Laura, who was at once his housekeeper, companion, and counselor. When he first went to the hotel New Eden was in its infancy, and the raw beginnings of things were especially underdone in this two-dollars-a-day, one-towel-a-week establishment. It was through York that Junius Brutus Ponk had given up an unprofitable real-estate business to become proprietor of the Commercial Hotel—"and Gurrage" was added later with the advent of automobiles, the "Gurrage" part being a really creditably equipped livery for public service. By this change of occupation for Ponk, the Macpherson Mortgage Company accomplished several things. It got rid of an inefficient competitor whose very inefficiency would have made him a more disagreeable enemy than a successful man would have been. Further, it placed the ambitious little man where his talents could flourish (flourish is the right word for J. B. Ponk), and it put into the growing little town of New Eden a hotel with city comforts that brought business to the town and added mightily to its reputation and respectability.
York Macpherson's business had grown with the town he had helped to build. Long before other towns in this part of Kansas had dreamed it possible for them, New Eden was lighted with electricity. Water-works and a sewer system fore-ran cement sidewalks and a mile of paving, not including the square around the court-house. And before any of these had come the big stone school-house on the high ridge overlooking the Sage Brush Valley for miles. That also was York Macpherson's task, which he had carried out almost single-handed, and had the satisfaction of bringing desirable taxpaying residents to live in New Eden who would never have come but for the school advantages. Then Junius Brutus Ponk, who had learned to couple with York, got himself elected to the board of education and began to pay higher salaries to teachers than was paid by any other town in the whole Sage Brush Valley; to the end that better schools were housed in that fine school-building, and a finer class of young citizens began to put the good name of New Eden above everything else. The hoodlum element was there, of course, but it was not the leading element. Boys stuck to the high-school faithfully and followed it up with a college course, even though a large per cent. of them worked for every dollar that the course cost them. Girls went to college, too, until it became a rare thing to find a teacher in the whole valley who had not a diploma from some institution of higher learning.
It was only recently that Laura Macpherson had come to New Eden to make her home with her brother. An accident a few years before had shortened one limb, making her limp as she walked. She was some years older than York, with a face as young and very much like her brother's; a comely, companionable sort of woman, popular alike with men and women, young folks and children.
Some time before her coming York had bought the best building-site in New Eden, a wooded knoll inside the corporation limits, the only natural woodland in the vicinity, that stood directly across the far end of Broad Avenue, the main business street, whose mile of paving ended in York's driveway. In one direction, this site commanded a view far down Sage Brush Valley; in the other, it overlooked the best residence and business portion of New Eden. Here York had, as he put it, "built a porch, at the rear of which a few rooms were attached." The main glory of the place, however, was the big porch.
York had named their home "Castle Cluny," and his big farm joining it just outside the town limits "Kingussie," after some old Macpherson-clan memories. There were no millionaires in the Sage Brush Valley, and this home was far and away the finest, as well as the most popular, home in a community where thrift and neatness abounded in the homes, and elegance was very much lacking, as was to be expected in a young town on the far edge of the Middle West.
"Joe Thomson came in to-day to see me about putting a mortgage on his claim this side of the big blowout. Looks like a losing game for Joe. His land is about one-third sand now," York commented, thoughtfully, as he settled himself comfortably in his big porch chair.
"Well, why not let the sand have its own third, while he uses the other two-thirds himself? They ought to keep him busy," Laura suggested.
The country around New Eden was still new to her. Although she overflowed the town with her sunny presence, her lameness had kept her nearer to "Castle Cluny" than her brother had comprehended. She did not understand the laws, nor lawlessness, of what her brother called the "blowout," nor had she ever seen the desolation that marked its broadening path.
"A blowout is never satisfied until it has swallowed all the land in the landscape," York explained. "I remember a few years ago there was just a sandy outcrop along a little draw below Joe's claim, the line of some prehistoric river-bed, I suppose. That was the beginning of the thing Joe is fighting to-day. Something started the sand to drifting. It increased as the wind blew away the soil; the more wind, the more sand; the more sand, the more wind. They worked together until what had been a narrow belt spread enormously, gradually overlapping Joe's claim, making acres of waste ground. I hate to see Joe shoulder a mortgage to try to drive back that monstrous thing. But Joe is one of those big, self-contained fellows who takes the bit in his teeth and goes his own gait in spite of all the danger signals you wigwag at him."
"Why do you loan him money if you know he can't succeed?" Laura inquired.
"Making farm loans is the business of the Macpherson Mortgage Company. That's how we maintain our meager existence," York replied, teasingly. "Joe wants to fight back the blowout creeping over his south border farther and farther each year. Our company gets its commission while he fights. See?"
"Oh, you grasping loan shark! If I didn't know how easy it is for you to lie I'd disown you," Laura declared, flinging a chair pillow at her brother, who was chuckling at her earnestness.
But York was serious himself in the next minute.
"Our company doesn't want the prairie; it wants prosperity. A foreclosed mortgage is bad business. It brings us responsibility and ill-will. What we want is good-will and interest money. I have put the thing up to Joe just as it is. Man is a free agent to choose or let alone. I have a bigger problem than Joe to handle now. I had a letter this evening from Miss Geraldine Swaim, of Philadelphia. Do you remember her, Laura? She used to come up to Winnowoc when she was a little girl."
"I remember little Jerry Swaim, Jim and Lesa's only child," York's sister declared. "She was considerably younger than I. I pushed her in her baby-cab when I wasn't very big myself. When I went away to college she was a little roly-poly beauty of ten or eleven, maybe. Wasn't she named for her father's rich sister, Mrs. Darby? I never knew that Mrs. Darby's name was Geraldine."
"It wasn't; it was Jerusha; and Jim's name was Jeremiah; and Lesa's was plain Melissa," York explained. "But Lesa changed all of their names to make them sound more romantic. Romance was Lesa's strong suit. She called her daughter 'Jerry,' to please Mrs. Darby, but the child was christened Geraldine—never Jerusha. Lesa wouldn't stand for that."
"And now what does this Geraldine want from my respected brother?" Laura inquired, leaning back on the cushions of her chair to listen.
York's face was hidden by the darker shadows of the porch, but his sister knew by his grave tone, when he spoke again, that something deeper than a business transaction lay back of this message from Philadelphia.
"It's an old story, Laura. The story of parents rearing a child in luxury and then dying poor and leaving this child unprovided for and unfitted to provide for herself. Jim Swaim was as clear-headed as his wife was soft-hearted and idealizing. Every angle of his was a right angle, even if he did grow a bit tight-fisted sometimes for his family's sake. But a leech of a fellow, a sort of relative by marriage, got his claws into Jim some way, and in the end got him, root and branch. Then Lesa contracted pneumonia and died after a short illness. And just when Jim was most needed to hold up his business interests and tide things over, as well as look after his daughter, they found him dead in his office one morning. Heart failure, the doctors said, the kind that gets a brain-fagged business man. The estate has been in litigation for two years. Now it is settled, and all that is left for Geraldine is a claim her father held out here in the Sage Brush Valley. She thinks she is going to live on that. She came in on the afternoon train and is stopping at the Commercial Hotel. I called to see her a minute on my way home. That was why I ate a cold dinner this evening. I asked her to come here at once, but she refused. Some one from the hotel will bring her over later. That means Ponk, of course. He's the whole Commercial Hotel 'and Gurrage.' We must have her here to stay with us awhile, of course."
"York Macpherson!" his sister fairly gasped. "Coming to call this evening! Will stay with us awhile, of course. All right. I'm willing she should stay with us awhile, but how canshelive on a Sage Brush claim? Why doesn't her rich aunt Darby provide for her? What does she look like?"
"I don't know," York drawled, provokingly. Then he added: "Mrs. Darby also writes, saying that she hopes we will look after Jerry while she is here, but that she herself can do nothing for her niece, because a relative of her dear deceased husband, an artist of merit but no means, is dependent on her, and she owes it to her dear deceased's memory to look after this young man. I've a notion that there is something back of both letters, but I haven't had time to read behind the lines yet."
"Turns out her own flesh and blood, a girl, too, to shift for herself, and coddles this man, this artist thing, for her dear deceased's sake. Whatdoyou think of that?" Laura burst out.
"I don't think of that," York replied. "Not really knowing any woman but my sister, I can't judge them by the sample. Besides, this 'girl thing' may have elected to come to the Sage Brush herself; that would be like Jim Swaim. Or she may be making a lark of the trip; that's her mother's child. And, anyhow, she has property in her own name, you see."
"Property, bosh! Where is this precious claim that is to sustain this luxuriously reared child?" Laura Macpherson insisted.
"It is an undeveloped claim down the Sage Brush, in a part of the country you haven't seen yet. That is what this child of luxury has come out for to live upon," York said, with a minor chord of anxiety in his voice.
Then a silence fell, for Laura Macpherson felt that something tragical must be bound up in the course of coming events.
It was the poet's hour of "nearly dark." The "high lights" were beginning to gleam from the cupola of the court-house and high-school, and station tower out across the open stretch that lay between it and the town. New Eden was unusually well lighted for its size. York Macpherson had forced that provision into the electric company's franchise. But New-Edenites were still rural in their ways, and never burned up the long summer twilight with bug-alluring street lights. Homes, too, were mostly shadowy places, with the dwellers resting in porch swings or lawn chairs. Moreover, although there was a little leakage somewhere through which things disappeared occasionally, nobody in town except bankers, postmasters, and mortgage companies locked their doors. The jail was usually empty on the Saturday night, and the churches were full on Sunday, as is the normal condition of Middle West towns in a prohibition state.
"The wind is in the east. It will rain to-morrow," York said, after a pause. "I had planned to go to the upper Sage Brush country for a couple of days. I'll wait till after Sunday now."
Laura Macpherson did not know whether the last meant relief or anxiety. York was not readable to-night.
"What are you staring at?" York asked, presently, from his vine-sheltered angle, as he saw his sister looking intently down into the street.
"Humans," Laura replied, composedly.
"Not the Big Dipper, I hope. Isn't the town big enough without her ranging all over 'Kingussie'?"
"Oh, York, you will call Mrs. Bahrr 'the Big Dipper' to her face some day, if you don't quit your private practice," Laura declared.
"Well, her name is Stella Bahrr. 'Stellar,' she calls it, and she pronounces her surname just plain 'Bear.' If that isn't starry enough I don't know my astronomy. And she is always dipping into other folks's business and stirring up trouble with a high hand. Laura, once and for all, never tie up with that little old hat-trimmer. She'll trim you if you do."
"Don't be uneasy about our getting chummy. I'm positively rude to her most of the time. She isn't coming here. She has veered off toward the Lenwells'. But look who is coming, York."
York shifted his chair into line with the street.
"It's the fair Philadelphian and her pompous gentleman in waiting," York declared.
"Look at little Brother Ponk strut, would you? 'A charge to keep I have.' But, York, Miss Swaim appears a bit too Philadelphian for our New Eden scenery!" Laura exclaimed.
"She is a type all her own, I would say. Jim Swaim's determined chin and Lesa's dreamy eyes. She will be an interesting study, at least. I wonder which parent will win in her final development," York replied, as the two approached the house.
"I have brought the young lady to call on you," Mr. Ponk said, presenting his companion with a flourish, as if she were a trophy cup or a statue just unveiled. "Sorry I can't stay to visit with you, but my clerk is out to-night. They'll take care of you beautiful, Miss Swaim. No, thank you, no. I'll just soar back to the hotel."
He waved off the seat York had proffered him, and bowed himself away as gracefully as a short, round man can bow.
Laura Macpherson had an inborn gift of hospitality, but she realized at once that this guest brought an unusual and compelling interest. She was conscious, too, in a vague way, of the portent of some permanent change pending. What she saw clearly was a very pretty girl with a soft voice and a definite, forceful personality.
"Miss Swaim, you must be tired after your long journey," Laura began, courteously.
"Please don't call me that. I am so far from home I'll be 'Miss Swaimed' enough, anyhow."
The appeal in the blue eyes broke down all reserve.
"Then I'll call you 'Jerry,' as I did when you were a little girl and I was beginning to think about getting grown up," Laura exclaimed.
"And since you are far from home, we hope you may find a home welcome in our house, and that you will come at once and be our guest indefinitely," York added, with his winning smile that ought to have sent him to Congress years ago.
Something about Jerry Swaim had caught Laura Macpherson in a moment. She hoped that York had the same feeling. But York was one of the impenetrable kind when he chose. And he certainly chose that evening to prove his impenetrability.
"You are very kind," Jerry said, looking at York with earnest eyes, void of all coquettishness. Then, turning to York's sister, she went on:
"I am not tired now. But the last part of my journey was frightful. The afternoon was hot, and the wind blew terrifically. They had to close the windows to keep out the dust. Then we were delayed in what they told me was called a 'blowout.'" Her eyes were sparkling now, but her emphasis on the term seemed to cut against York Macpherson's senses like burning sand-filled wind as he sat studying her face.
"All the 'blowouts' I ever heard of were in the tires of our limousine car," she continued, musingly. "And my cousin, Gene Wellington, of Philadelphia, didn't know what to do about them at all. He is an artist, and artists never do take to practical things. Gene was more helpless when anything went wrong with the car than ever I was, and awfully afraid of taking a risk or anything."
And that, it seemed to the Macphersons, must have been helpless indeed. For as she sat there at ease in the shadowy dimness of the summer evening, York Macpherson thought of Carlyle's phrasing, "Her feet to fall on softness; her eyes to light on splendor," a creature fitted only to adorn the upholstered places of life.
"Did you ever see that dreadful 'blowout' thing?" Jerry asked, coming back from the recollection of limousine cars and Cousin Gene of Philadelphia.
"No, I have only been here a short time myself, and the country is almost as new to me as it is to you," Laura Macpherson replied.
"Oh, it issuchan awful place!" Jerry continued. "Everywhere and everywhere one can see nothing but great sand-waves all over the land. They have almost buried the palisades that protect the railroad. It just seemed like the Red Sea dividing to let the Israelites go through, only this was red-hot sand held back to let the train pass through a deep rift. And to-day the wind had filled up the tracks so it couldn't go through until the sand was cleaned out. There is only one kind of shrub, a spiny looking thing, growing anywhere on all those useless acres. It is a perfectly horrid country! Why was such land ever made?" Jerry turned to York with the question.
"I can't tell you," York said, "but there are some good things here."
"Yes, there is my claim," Jerry broke in. "It's all I have left, you know. Cousin Gene tried to persuade me it would be better off without me, but I'm sure it must need the owner's oversight to make it really profitable. There was no record, in settling up the estate, of its having produced any income at all. I certainly need the income now. Taking care of myself is a new experience for me."
All the vivacity and hopefulness of youth was in her words. But the dreamy expression on her face that came and went with her moods soon returned.
"Cousin Gene Wellington is not my real cousin, you know. He is Uncle Darby's relative, not Aunt Jerry's. He is an artist, but without any income right now, like myself. Both of us have to learn how to go alone, you see, but I'm not going back to Philadelphia now, no matter what Aunt Jerry Darby may say."
This was no appeal for sympathy. Taking care of oneself seemed easy enough to Lesa Swaim's child, to whom the West promised only one grand romantic adventure. There was something, too, in the tone in which she pronounced the name of Gene Wellington that seemed to set it off from every other name. And she pronounced it often enough to trouble York Macpherson. No other name came so easily and so frequently and frankly to her lips.
"We hope you will like the West. The Sage Brush isn't so bad when you get acclimated to its moods," York assured her. "But don't expect too much at first, nor too definite a way of securing an income."
Only Laura Macpherson caught the same minor chord of anxiety in her brother's voice that she recalled had been in it when he told her of Jerry's claim. It seemed impossible, however, that anything could refuse to be profitable for this charming, blossomy kind of a girl who must thrive on easy success or perish, like a flower.
"Oh, land always means an income, my father used to say. Aunt Jerry has only two hundred acres, but it is a fortune to her," the girl declared. "I'm not uneasy. As soon as I get a real hold on my property here I'll be all right. It is getting late. I must go now. No, I am going by myself," she declared, prettily, as York prepared to accompany her back to the hotel. "It is straight up this light street and I am going to try it alone from the very beginning. That's why I didn't go to your office as soon as I got here to-day. I told Cousin Gene I could take care of myself and make my own way out here, just as he is making his own way in the East, working in his studio. No, you shall not go with me. Thank you so much. No. Good-by." This to York Macpherson, who was wise enough to catch the finality of her words.
The twilight was almost gone, but a young moon in the west made the street still light as the two on the porch watched the girl going firm-footed and unafraid, unconscious of their anxiety for what lay in the days before her.
"Is it courage, or contempt for the West, that makes her fearless where one would expect her to be timid? She seems a combination of ignorance and assertiveness and a plea for sympathy all in one," Laura Macpherson declared.
"She is the child of two different temperaments—Jim one, and Lesa another; a type all her own, but taking on something of each parent," York asserted, as he watched until the girl had disappeared at the door of the Commercial Hotel, far up the street.
The next day was an unusual one for four people in New Eden. The wind came from the east, driving an all-day rain before it, and York Macpherson did not go to the upper Sage Brush country. Instead, he worked steadily in his office all day. Some files he had not opened for months were carefully gone over, and township maps were much in evidence. Every now and then he glanced toward the upper windows of the Commercial Hotel. Mr. Ponk had said that Jerry had No. 7, the room he had occupied for several years. He wondered if this rain was making her homesick for the Winnowoc Valley and "Eden" and that wonderful Cousin Gene, blast him! There was a smile in York's eyes whenever he looked across the street. When he turned to his work again his face was stern. What he thought was a determination not to be bothered by rainy-day loafers coming into his office, what made him set his teeth and grip to his work, was really the fight with a temptation to go over to the hotel and look after a homesick girl.
Meantime Jerry Swaim, snug in a filmy gray kimona with pink facings and soft gray slippers, was enjoying the day to the full limit. Secure from strangers, relaxed from the weariness of travel, she slept dreamlessly, and wakened, pink and rested, to watch the cool, life-giving rains and dream her wonderful day-dreams wherein new adventure, victory over obstacles, and Eugene each played a part. Jerry was in love with life. Sunshine and rain, wind and calm, every season, were made to serve her, all things in nature to bring her interest and pleasure—all exceptsand. That hot hour and a half between sand-leaguered palisades seared her memory. But that was all down-stream now, with the junction station, and the country Thelma, and the tow-headed woman and flabby flopping baby, and the little old Teddy Bear humping his yellow-brown fuzziness against the swirl of cinders and prairie dust. The recollection of it all was like the touch of a live coal on the cool surface of her tranquil soul, a thing abhorred that yet would not be uncreated nor forgotten.
"To-morrow will be Sunday." The little pagan would have one more idle day. "I'll get a letter from Eugene on Monday. On Monday," dreamily, "I'll beg into live here, not stay here. What charming folks the Macphersons are! and—so different."
There was a difference. Jerry did not know, nor care to analyze it, nor explain to herself, why these two people had in themselves alone begun to make New Eden worth while for her. She for whom things, human and otherwise, had heretofore been created—all exceptsand.
The third New-Edenite who had some special interests on this rainy day was Junius Brutus Ponk. Often an idler in the Macpherson Company's office, he was always interesting to York. There were never created two of his kind. That in itself made him worth while to the big, strong man of many affairs. And, much as York wanted to be alone to-day, he welcomed the coming of Ponk. In the long, serious conversation that followed, their usual bantering had no place. And when the little man went slowly out, and slowly crossed the street to the hotel, indifferent to the steady fall of rain, York Macpherson's eyes followed him earnestly.
"He'll almost forget to strut if that girl stays here—but she won't stay. And he will strut. He's made that way. But down under it all he's a man, God bless him—a man any woman could trust."
Up at "Castle Cluny" the rainy day brought one caller whom "chilling winds nor poisonous breath" could never halt—Mrs. Stellar Bahrr, otherwise—"the Big Dipper"—the town gossip.
Mrs. Stellar Bahrr was a married, widowed-by-divorce, old-maid type, built like a sky-scraper, of the lean, uncertain age just around sixty, with the roundness of youth all gone, and the plump beauty of matronliness all lacking, wrinkled with envy and small malice, living on repeating what New Eden wanted kept untold. Hiding what New Eden should have known of her, she maintained herself on a pension from some one, known only to York Macpherson, and the small income derived just now from trimming over last year's hats "to make them look like four-year-olds," York declared.
The real milliner of the town was a brisk, bright business woman who had Stellar Bahrr on her trail in season and out of season. Mrs. Bahrr herself could not have kept up a business of any kind for a week, for she changed callings almost with the moon's phases.
No more unwelcome caller could have intruded on the homey, delicious, rainy-day seclusion of "Castle Cluny."
"I jis' run in to see the hat again you're goin' to wear to-morrow, Miss Laury. I 'ain't got more 'n a minute. Ye ain't alone this dreary day, are ye? The Lenwells was sayin' last night your brother was goin' to the upper Sage Brush on some business with the Posers. But they're in town, rainy as it is, an' all. Did he go?"
"No, he put it off till Monday," Laura replied, wondering what interest York's going or coming could be to Stellar Bahrr.
"As I was sayin', the Posers is in town. Come to meet Nell and her baby. They come in on the freight yesterday. The biggest, bald-headest young un you ever see. Nell wants her hat fixed over, and nothin' on the livin' earth to fix it with, ner money to pay for it. I'll make ol' Poser do that, though. Lemme see your hat, so's I can get an idy or two. You've got some 'commodation, if that blamed millinery-store hain't. Thank ye for the favor."
Stellar had a way of pinning her eyes through one until her victim could not squirm. She also had a way of talking so much she gave the impression of running down and the promise of a speedy leave-taking, which she never took until she had gained all the information she wanted. Her talent in a good cause would have been invaluable, for she was shrewd, patient, and everlastingly persistent.
Laura Macpherson reluctantly left the room to get her hat, wondering, since it had not been out of the box before, how in the world Stellar Bahrr knew anything about it. Mrs. Bahrr was standing by the dining-room window when she returned.
"I jis' come out here to see if the Sage Brush is raisin' down yonder. Who is that strange girl Ponk's running around with last night?" The gossip turned the question suddenly. "I seen 'em comin' up here myself. Folks down-town don't know yet." The sharp, steel-pointed eyes caught into Laura like hooks.
"I don't—believe you'll like this hat." Laura had meant to say, "I don't intend to tell you," but she was hooked too quickly.
"Who'd you say she is?"
There was no courteous way out now.
"She is a Miss Swaim."
"Say, this hat's a jew'l. Looks younger 'n the girls' hats does on 'em. Where's she from?"
"East. This color is a bit trying for me, I think."
"Oh, no 'tain't! What's she here for?"
"I—You'll have to ask York." Laura rolled her burdens on her brother's shoulders, as did likewise the remainder of New Eden, when crowded to the wall.
"York! She ain't after him, I hope. Don't blush so. That's a good one on York. An' he never met her at the station, even. Ponk—little fiend" (Ponk always turned game-cock when Stellar approached him), "little devil he is—he telephoned in from down at the sidin', by the deep fishin'-hole."
Mrs. Bahrr caught her breath and bit her lips as she eyed her hostess slyly. Laura Macpherson was white with disgust and anger. Of all the long-tongues, here was the queen.
"Where's the deep fishing-hole?" she asked, innocently, to get her unpleasant caller on another tack.
For a moment Mrs. Bahrr did not reply, busying herself with examining the new hat's lining and brim-curves. If Laura had known what York Macpherson knew she would have realized that here was the place to score by dwelling on the deep fishing-hole. But Laura was new to Sage Brush traditions.
"Ponk calls in to have his spanky new runabout all ready at the station. George nearly busted hisself gettin' there. Then Ponk, the miserable brute, he hangs around and keeps Miss Swine—"
"Swaim, Geraldine Swaim," Laura cried, in disgust.
"Yes, Geraldine Swim—keeps her inside, so's nobody gets a good look at her. I was there myself, a-watchin' him. I'd gone to see if my fish 'd been sent up, an' when they'd all cleared out he trots her out, big as Cuffey, and races to the hotel with her. Maybe, though, York didn't know she was comin', or had Ponk put up to lookin' after her for him. You never can tell about these men. I noticed York never walked home with her last night, neither. 'Course it was light as day. Well, well, it's interestin' as can be. An' she come here purpose to see your brother, too."
"If you are through with my hat"—Laura was fairly gray with anger and her eyes flashed as she tried to control herself.
Nobody was wiser than Stellar Bahrr in situations like this.
"In jest a minute. Them's the daintiest roses yet. Thank you, Miss Laury. You ain't above helping a person like me. There's them that is here in New Eden. But I know 'em—I know 'em. They talk to your back and never say a word to your face, not a blamed word. But you're not like 'em. Everybody says you're just like your brother, an' that's enough for anybody to know in the Sage Brush country. He's been the best friend I ever had, I know that. I hope that pink-'n'-white city girl 'll find out that much pretty quick. Somebody ought to tell her, too. Well, good day, Miss Laury. My umberel's right outside in the umberel-stand."
Poor Laura! She was no fighter from choice, no imputer of evil motives, but her love for her brother amounted almost to idolatry.
"I'm her one weakness," York often said. "Her strength is in her sense of humor, her kind heart, her love of beautiful things, and the power of the old scrapping blood of the Macphersons that will stand so much—and then Joan of Arc is a tennis-player alongside of my blessed sister in her righteous wrath."
That rainy day ended with a problem in the minds of at least three New Eden dwellers: York Macpherson, who carried a bigger load now than Joe Thomson's unwise but determined mortgage matter; Junius Brutus Ponk, who was sharing York's problem to a degree, and Laura Macpherson, who realized that a malicious under-current was already started whose undermining influence might sooner or later grow into a menacing power.
And Jerry Swaim, unconscious cause of all this problem element, ate and slept and laughed and dreamed her pretty day-dreams in utter content. It was well that the next day was Sunday. The rain-washed prairie and the June sunshine did so much to lift the tension in this New Eden where even the good little snakes are not always so very good.