The next morning, when Jerry Swaim was ready to go to the bank, her pretty beaded bag seemed light as she lifted it, and when she opened her purse she found it empty. Then she sat down and stared at herself in the mirror opposite her.
"Well, what next? Go mad or go back East? This must be the last ditch," she murmured. "Joe Thomson said he didn'tgomad, but he didgetmad. I'm mad clear to my Swaim toes, and I'm not going to take another bump. It's been nothing but bumps ever since I reached the junction of the main line with the Sage Brush branch back in June, and I'm tired of it. Gene Wellington said the West got the better of his father. The East seems to have gotten the best of his father's son."
Across her mind swept the thought of how easy Gene's way was being made for him in the East, and how the way of the West for her had to be fought over inch by inch.
"Neither East nor West shall get me." She tossed her head imperiously, for Jim Swaim's chin, York Macpherson would have said, was in command, and the dreamy eyes were flashing fire.
An hour later Ponk's gray runabout was spinning off the miles of the trail down the Sage Brush, with Jerry Swaim's hands gripping the wheel firmly, though her cheeks were pink with excitement. Where a road from the west crossed the trail, the stream cut through a ledge of shale, leaving a little bluffy bank on either side, with a bridge standing high above the water.
Joe Thomson, in a big farm wagon, had just met his neighbor, Thelma Ekblad, in her plain car, at the end of the bridge, when Jerry's horn called her approach. Before they had time to shift aside the gray car swept by with graceful curve, missing the edge of the bridge abutment by an eyelash.
"Great Scott! Thelma, I didn't notice that this big gun of mine was filling up all the road," Joe exclaimed. "That was the neatest curve I ever saw. That's Ponk's car from New Eden, but only a civil engineer's eye could have kept out of the river right there."
"The pretty girl who is visiting the Macphersons was the driver," Thelma said.
"No! Was it, sure?" Joe queried, looking with keen eyes down the trail, whither the gray runabout was gliding like a bird on the wing.
"Why, of course it was!" Thelma assured him, feeling suddenly how shabby her own machine became in comparison. "I must go now. Come over and see Paul when you can."
"I will. How is the baby?" Joe asked.
"Oh, splendid, and so much company for Paul!" Thelma declared.
"Yes, a baby is the preacher and the whole congregation sometimes. Let me know if you need any help. Good-by."
So in neighborly good-will they separated, Joe to follow the gray car down the trail, and Thelma to wonder briefly at the easy life of the beautiful Eastern girl whose lot was so unlike her own. Only briefly, however, for Thelma was of too happy a temperament, of too calm and philosophical a mentality, to grieve vainly. It always put a song in her day, too, to meet Joe upon the way. Not only on common farm topics were she and Joe congenial companions, but in politics, the latest books, the issues of foreign affairs, the new in science, they found a common ground.
Joe's thoughts were of the Eastern girl, too, as he thundered down the trail in his noisy wagon.
"I wish I could overtake her before she gets to the forks of the road," he said to himself. "I know she's not going to go my way farther than that. But why is she here at all? There's nobody living down the river road for miles, except old Fishing Teddy. She did dine at his expense the day she came out to her sand-pile. He told me all about it the night when we rode down from town together. Funny old squeak he is. But he can't interest her. Hello! Yonder we are."
In three minutes he was beside the gray car, that was standing at the point where the river road branched from the main trail.
"Good morning, Mr. Thomson. I knew you were coming this way, so I waited for you here. I don't go down that road. You know why."
Jerry pointed toward the way down which her own land lay.
Joe lifted his hat in greeting, his cheeks flushing through the tan, for his heart would jump furiously whenever he came into this girl's presence.
"Good morning, Miss Swaim. I am glad you waited," he managed to say. "You certainly know how to guide a car. I didn't know I was filling the whole highway up at the bridge."
"Oh, there was plenty of room," Jerry said, indifferently.
"Yes, plenty if you know how to stick to it. That's the secret of a lot of things, I guess—not finding a wider trail, but knowing how to drive straight through on the one you have found."
Joe was talking to gain time with himself, for he was inwardly angry at being upset every time he met this pretty girl.
This morning she seemed prettier than ever to his eyes. She was wearing a cool gray-green hat above her golden-gleaming hair, and her sheer gingham gown was stylishly summery. Exquisite taste in dress, as well as love of romance, was a heritage from Lesa Swaim.
"You are a real philosopher and a poet," Jerry exclaimed, looking up with wide-open eyes.
"A sort of Homer in homespun," Joe suggested.
"Probably; but I have a prose purpose in detaining you and I am in great luck to have found you," Jerry replied.
"Thank you. The luck will be mine if I can serve you."
The bronze young farmer's gallantry was as gracious as ever the well-groomed Philadelphia artist's had been.
"Kansas seems determined to get rid of me, if hard knocks mean anything. I've had nothing but bumps and knotty problems since I landed on these sand-shifting prairies. It makes me mad and I'm not going to be run off by it." Jerry's eyes were darkly defiant and her lifted hand seemed strong to strike for herself.
"You have the real pioneer spirit," Joe declared. "It was that very determination not to be gotten rid of by a sturdy bunch of forefathers and mothers that has subdued a state, sometimes boisterous and belligerent, and sometimes snarling and catty, and made it willing to eat out of their hands."
"Oh, it's not all subdued yet. It never will be." Jerry pointed down the trail toward the far distance where her twelve hundred blowout-cursed acres lay.
Joe Thomson's mouth was set with a bulldog squareness. "Are we less able than our forefathers?" he asked.
"As to sand—yes," Jerry replied, "but to myself, as a first consideration, I'm dreadfully in trouble."
"Again?"
"Oh, always—in Kansas," Jerry declared. "First my whole inheritance is smothered in plain sand—and dies—hard but quickly. Then I fight out a battle for existence and win a schoolmarm's crown of—"
"Of service," Joe suggested, seriously.
"I hope so. I really do," Jerry assured him. "Next I lease my—dukedom for a small but vital sum of money on which to exist till—till—"
"Yes, till wheat harvest, figuratively speaking," Joe declared.
"And this morning my purse is empty, robbed of every cent, and my pearl-handled knife and a button-hook."
Joe had left his wagon and was standing beside Jerry's car, with one foot on the running-board.
"Stolen! Why, why, where's York?" he asked, in amazement.
"I don't know. I don't think he took it," Jerry replied.
"Oh, but I mean what's he doing about it?" Joe questioned, anxiously.
"Nothing. He doesn't know it. I came to find you first, to get you to help me."
"Me!" Joe could think of nothing more to say.
"You won't scold, and I'm afraid York would. I don't want to be scolded," Jerry declared. "He would wonder why I hadn't put it in the bank. And, besides, there have some queer things been happening in New Eden—I can't explain them, for you might not understand, but I do really need a friend right now. Did you ever need one?"
To the girl alone and under suspicion, however kind the friends who were puzzled over her situation, conscious that too many favors were not to be asked of the good-souled Junius Brutus Ponk, the young farmer seemed the only one to whom she could turn. And she had the more readily halted her car to wait for him because she had already begun to weave a romance in homespun about this splendid young agriculturist and the good-hearted country girl, Thelma Ekblad. He, himself, was impersonal to her.
"I'm always needing friends—and I'm more glad than you could know to have you even think of me in your needs. But everybody turns to York Macpherson. He's the lodestar for every Sage Brush compass," Joe said, looking earnestly at Jerry.
"I'm on my way to the old Teddy Bear's house, your Fishing Teddy," Jerry declared, "and I thought you would go with me. I don't want to go alone."
"Let me take this machinery to the men—they are waiting for it to start to work—and I'll be glad to go," Joe answered her.
The gray car followed the big wagon down the trail to the deep bend of the Sage Brush in the angle of which Joe's ranch-house stood; and the load of machinery was quickly given over to the workmen. As Joe seated himself in the little gray car Jerry said:
"You are wondering why, and too polite to ask why, I go to Hans Theodore's. Let me tell you." Then she told him of her dazed wanderings down the river road two months before, and of her meal near old Teddy's shack.
"He brought me fried fish on a cracked plate, and buttermilk in a silver drinking-cup—a queer pattern with a monogram on the side. The next morning I saw another cup exactly like that on the buffet in the Macpherson dining-room. They told me there should be two of them. One they found was suddenly missing. Later it suddenly was not missing. York said their like was not to be had this side of old 'Castle Cluny' on the ancient Kingussie holding of the invincible Clan Macpherson's forebears. So this must have been the same cup. It was on the morning after you called and took the old Teddy Bear home with you that the missing cup reappeared. You remember he was shambling around the grounds the night before, waiting for you?"
"Yes, I remember," Joe responded, gravely.
"Meantime Laura Macpherson lost her purse. It was found in my hand-bag. I believe now that the one that took it became frightened or something, and tried to put it on me. Maybe somebody knew how dreadfully near the wall I was. Then York paid me lease money, as I told you—three hundred dollars. It was in my purse last evening when I went out for a ride. As I sat in the side porch alone, earlier in the evening, I saw the old Teddy Bear shamble and shuffle about the shrubbery and disappear down the slope in the shadows on the town side of the place. This morning my money is all gone. I am going down here after it."
"And you didn't ask York to help you?" Joe queried, anxiously.
"Why, no. I wanted you to help me. Will you do it?" Jerry asked, looking up into the earnest face of the big farmer beside her.
Was it selfishness, or thoughtlessness, or love of startling adventure, or insight, or fate bringing her this way? Joe Thomson asked himself the question in vain.
"I'll do whatever I can do. This is such a strange thing. I knew things were missing by spells up in town, but we never lose anything down our way, and you'd think we would come nearer having what old Fishing Teddy would want if he is really a thief," Joe declared.
"I am going down to old Teddy's shack and ask him to give me my money, anyhow," Jerry repeated.
"And if he has it and refuses, I'll pitch him into the river and hold him under till he comes across. But if he really hasn't it?" Joe asked.
"Then he can't give it, that's all," Jerry replied.
"But how will you know?" Joe insisted.
"I don't know how I'll know, but when the time comes I'll probably find a way to find out," Jerry declared. "Anyhow, I must do something, for I'm clear penniless and it's this or go mad or go back East. I'm not going to do either. I'm just going to get mad and stay mad till I get what's mine."
"I'll be your faithful sleuth, but I can't believe you'll find your bag of gold at the end of this rainbow. The old man is gentle, though, and you couldn't have any fear, I suppose," Joe suggested.
"Not with you along I couldn't," Jerry replied.
She was watching the road, and did not see how his eyes filled with a wonderful light at her words. She was not thinking of Joe Thomson, nor of York Macpherson, nor yet of Junius Brutus Ponk. She was thinking far back in her mind of how Eugene Wellington would admire her some day for really not giving in. That faint line of indecision in his face as she recalled it in the rose-arbor—oh, so long ago—that was only emphasized by his real admiration for those who could stand fast by a determination. She had always dared. He had always adored, but never risked a danger.
Down by the deep fishing-hole the willows were beginning to droop their long yellow leaves on the diminishing stream, and the stepping-stones stood out bare and bleaching above the thin current that slipped away between them. A little blue smoke was filtering out from the stove-pipe behind the shack hidden among the bushes. Everything lay still under the sunshine of late summer.
"You keep the car. I'm going in," Jerry declared, halting in the thin shade by the deep hole.
"I think I'd better go, too," Joe insisted.
"I think not," Jerry said, with a finality in her tone there was no refuting.
York Macpherson had well said that there was no duplicate for Jerry, no forecasting just what she would do next.
As Jerry's form cast a shadow across his doorway old Fishing Teddy turned with a start from a bowl of corn-meal dough that he was stirring. The little structure was a rude domicile, fitted to the master of it in all its features. On a plain unpainted table Jerry saw a roll of bills weighted down by an old cob pipe. A few coins were neatly stacked beside them, with a pearl-handled knife and button-hook lying farther away.
"I came for my money," Jerry said, quietly. "It's all I have until I can earn some myself."
The old man's fuzzy brown cheeks seemed to grow darker, as if his blush was of a color with the rest of his make-up. He shuffled quickly to the table, gathered up all the money, and, coming nearer, silently laid it in Jerry's hands.
The girl looked at him curiously. It was as if he were handing her a handkerchief she had dropped, and she caught herself saying:
"Thank you. But what made you take it? Don't you know it is all I have, and I must earn my living, too, just like anybody else?"
Old Fishing Teddy opened his mouth twice before his voice would act. "I didn't take it. I was goin' to fetch it up to you soon as I could git up there again," he squeaked out at last.
Jerry sat down on a broken chair and stared at him, as he seated himself on the table, gripping the edge on either side with his scaly brown hands, and gazed down at the floor of the cabin.
"If you didn't take it, why did you have it here? I saw you last night on Macpherson's driveway," Jerry said, wondering, meanwhile, why she should argue with an old thieving fellow like Fishing Teddy—Jerusha Darby's niece and heir some fine day, if she only chose, to all of the Darby dollars.
"I can't never explain to you, lady. They's troubles in everybody's lots, I reckon. Mine ain't nothin' but a humble one, but it ain't so much different from big folks's in trouble ways. An' we all have to do the best we can with what comes to us to put up with. I 'ain't never harmed nobody, nor kep' a thing 'at wa'n't mine longer 'n I could git it back. You ask York Macpherson, an' he'll tell ye the truth. He never sent ye down here, York didn't."
The old man ceased squeaking and looked down at his stubby legs and old shoes. Was he lying and whining for mercy, being caught with the spoils of his thieving?
Jerry's big eyes were fixed on him as she tried to fathom the real situation. The bunch of grubs on the Winnowoc local—common country and village folk—had been far below her range of interest, to say nothing of sympathy. Yet here she sat in the miserable shack of a hermit fisherman, an all-but-acknowledged thief, with his loot discovered, studying him with a mind where pity and credulity were playing havoc with her better judgment and her aristocratic breeding. Had she fallen so low as this, or had she risen to a newer height of character than she had ever known before?
Suddenly the old grub hunched down on the table before her looked up. Jerry remembered afterward how clear and honest the gaze of those faded yellow eyes set in a multitude of yellow wrinkles. His hands let go of the table's edge and fitted knuckle into palm as he asked, in a quavering voice:
"Be you really Jim Swaim's girl who used to live up in that there Winnowoc country back yander in Pennsylvany?"
Jerry's heart thumped violently. It was the last word she had expected from this creature. "Yes, I'm Jim's only child." The same winsome smile that made the artistic Eugene Wellington of Philadelphia adore her beamed now on this poor old outcast down by the deep hole of the Sage Brush.
"An' be you hard up, an' earnin' your own livin' by yourself, did ye say? 'Ain't ye got a rich kin back East to help ye none?" The voice quavered up and down unsteadily.
"Yes, I have a rich aunt, but I'm taking care of myself. It makes me freer, but I have to be particular not to—to—lose any money right now," Jerry said, frankly.
"Then ye air doin' mighty well, an' it's the thing that 'u'd make your daddy awful glad ef he only could know. It 'u'd be fulfillin' his own wish. I know it would. I heered him say so onct."
Jerry Swaim's eyes were full of unshed tears. Keenly she remembered when Uncle Cornie had told her the same thing at the doorway of the rose-arbor in beautiful "Eden" in the beautiful June-time. How strange that the same message should come to her again here in the shadow of New Eden inside the doorway of a fisherman's hut. And how strange a thing is life at any time!
"Please don't be unhappy about this." Jerry lifted the money which lay in her lap. "It shall never trouble you."
And then for a brief ten minutes the two talked together, Geraldine Swaim of Philadelphia, and old Fishing Teddy, the Sage Brush hermit.
Joe Thomson, sitting in the gray car, saw Jerry coming through the bushes, her hat in her hand, the summer sunshine on her glorious crown of hair, her face wearing a strange new expression, as if in Fishing Teddy's old shack a revelation of life's realities had come to her and she had found them worthy and beautiful.
Little was said between the two young people until they reached the Thomson ranch-house again and Jerry had halted her car under the shade of an elm growing before the door. Then, turning to Joe, she said:
"You are right about the old Teddy Bear. He isn't a thief. I don't know what he is, but I do know what he isn't. Since you know so much about my coming here already, may I tell you a few more things? I want to talk to somebody who will understand me."
Jerry did not ask herself why she should choose Joe Thomson for such a confidence. She went no deeper than to feel that something about Joe was satisfying, and that was sufficient. Henceforth with York and the hotel-keeper she must be on her guard. Joe was different.
In the half-hour that followed the two became fast friends. And when the little gray runabout sped up the long trail toward New Eden Joe Thomson watched it until it was only a dust-spot on the divide that tops the slopes down to Kingussie Creek. He knew now the whole story of Laura's purse and her suspicions, of Ponk's offer of help, and he shrewdly guessed that the pompous little man had met a firm check to anything more than mere friendship. For Jerry's comfort, he refuted the possibility of the Macphersons' harboring a doubt regarding her honesty.
"A mere remark of the moment. We all make them," he assured her.
Lastly, he was made acquainted with the events inside of Hans Theodore's shack.
"Something is wrong there, but it is deeper than we can reach now," Jerry said. "Maybe we can help the old fellow if he is tempted, and shield him if he is wronged."
How fair the face, and soft and clear the voice! It made Joe Thomson's own face harden to hide a feeling he would not let reveal itself.
As he watched the girl's receding car he resolved anew to conquer that formless enemy of sand and to reclaim for her her lost kingdom in Kansas. His reward? That must come in its own time. Ponk was out of the running. York was still a proposition. As for all that stuff of York's about some Eastern fellow, Joe would not believe it.
And the girl driving swiftly homeward thought only of the romance of Joe and Thelma, if she thought of them at all—for she was Lesa Swaim's child still—and mainly and absorbedly she thought of her father's wish to be fulfilled in her.
So the glorious Kansas autumn brought to Jerry Swaim all of its beauty, in its soft air, its opal skies, its gold-and-brown-and-lavender landscapes, its calm serenity. And under its benediction this girl of luxurious, idle, purposeless days in sunny "Eden" on the Winnowoc was beginning a larger existence in New Eden by the Sage Brush, and through the warp and woof of that existence one name was all unconsciously woven large—Joe.
For three years the seasons sped by, soft-footed and swift, and the third June-time came smiling up the Sage Brush Valley. Many changes had marked the passing of these seasons. Ranches had extended their cultivated acres; trees spread a wider shade; a newly settled addition had extended the boundaries of New Eden; and a new factory and a high-school building for vocational training marked the progress of the town. Budding youth had blossomed into manhood and womanhood and the cemetery had gathered in its toll. Three years, however, had marked little outward change in the young Eastern girl who stayed by her choice of the Sage Brush country for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer. She had flung all of her young energy into the dull routine of teaching mathematics; romance had given place to reality; idleness and careless dependence to regulated effort and carefully computed expenditures; gay social interests to the companionship of lesser opportunities, but broader vision. However, these things came at a sacrifice. When the newness wore away from her work, Jerry's hours were not all easeful, happy ones. Slowly, with the passing of the days, she began to learn the hard lesson of overcoming, a lesson doubly hard for one whose life hitherto had been given no preparation for duty. Yet, as her days gathered surer purpose her dark-blue eyes were less often dreamy, her fair cheeks took on a richer bloom, while her crown of glorious hair lost no glint of its gold.
Her gift of winning friends, the old imperious power to make herself the center of the universe, was in no wise disturbed by being a citizen and a school-teacher instead of an Eastern lady of leisure sojourning temporarily in the Sage Brush country. The young men of the valley tried eagerly to win a greater place than that of mere friendship with her, but she gave no serious consideration to any of them, least of all—so she persuaded herself—to the young ranchman whom she had met so early after her arrival in Kansas. Further, she had persuaded herself that the pretty rural romance she had woven about him and his Norwegian neighbor, Thelma Ekblad, must be a reality. Thelma had finished her university course and was making a success of farming and of caring for her crippled brother Paul and that roly-poly Belkap baby, now a white-haired, blue-eyed, red-lipped chunk of innocence, responsibility, and delight. Gossip, beginning at Stellar Bahrr's door, said that interest in her neighbor, the big ranchman down the river, was responsible for Thelma's staying on the Ekblad farm, now that she had her university degree, because she could make a career for herself as a botany specialist in any college in the West. Jerry knew that love for a crippled brother and the care of a worse than orphaned child of the woman that brother had loved were real factors in the life of this country girl, but her air castles must be built for somebody, and they seemed to cluster around the young Norwegian and the ranchman. Of course, then, the ranchman, Joe Thomson, could interest Jerry only in a general genial comradeship kind of way. Beginning in a common bond, the presence of a common enemy—the blowout—chance meetings grew into regular and helpful association. That was all that it meant to Jerry Swaim.
Three stanch friends watched her closely. Ponk, of the Commercial Hotel and Garage, believed blindly and wholly in her ability, laying all blame for her defective work in the school upon other shoulders, standing manfully by her in every crisis. Laura Macpherson, although never blinded to the truth about Jerry in her impetuous, self-willed, unsympathetic, undeveloped nature, loved her too well to doubt her ultimate triumph over all fortune. Only York, who studied her closest of all three, because he was the keenest reader of human nature, still held that the final outcome for Jerry Swaim was a matter of uncertainty.
"I tell you, Laura," York said, one evening in the early spring of the third year, when Jerry had gone with Joe Thomson for a long horseback ride up the Sage Brush—"I tell you that girl is still a type of her own, which means that sometimes she is soft-hearted, and romantic, and frivolous, and impulsive, and affectionate, like Lesa Swaim, and sometimes clear-eyed, hard-headed, close-fisted, with a keen judgment for values, practical, and clever, like old Jim."
"And which parent, Sir Oracle, would you have her be most like?" Laura inquired.
"Lord knows," York replied. "As He alone knows how much of the good of each she may reject and how much of the weak and objectionable she may appropriate."
"Being a free moral agent to just dissect her fond parents and choose and refuse at will when she makes up her life and being for herself! It's a way we all have of doing, you know," Laura said, sarcastically. "Remember, York, when you elected to look like papa, only you chose mother's wavy brown hair instead of her husband's straight black locks; and you voted you'd have her clear judgment in business matters, which our father never had."
"And gave to you the same which he never possessed. Yes, I remember," York retorted. "But how is all this psychological analysis going to help matters here?"
"How's it going to help Joe Thomson, or keep him from being helped, you mean?" Laura suggested.
A faint flush crept into York Macpherson's brown cheek.
"It's dead sure Jerry has little enough thought of Joe now," York said, gravely. "She's living a day at a time, and underneath the three years' veneer of genuine service the real Philadelphia Geraldine Swaim is still a sojourner in the Sage Brush Valley, not a fixture here."
And York was right so far as Jerry Swaim's thought of Joe Thomson was concerned.
After signing the lease with York Macpherson she rarely spoke of her property to any one until it came to be forgotten to the few who knew of it at all.
Once she had said to Joe:
"That heritage of mine is like the grave of an enemy. I couldn't look at it forgivingly; so I would never, never want to see it again, and I never want to hear the awful word 'blowout' spoken."
"Then forget it," Joe advised.
And Jerry forgot it.
But for Joe Thomson the seasons held another story. Down the Sage Brush, fall and spring, great steam tractors furrowed the shifting sands of the blowout, until slowly broom-corn and other coarse plants were coaxing a thin soil deposit that spread northward from the south edge of the sand-line. Little attention was paid to these efforts by the few farmer folk who supposed that Joe was backing it, for they were all a busy people, and the movement was too futile to be considered, anyhow.
Late in the summer of her first season in New Eden, affairs came to a head suddenly. Three years before, Junius Brutus Ponk's well-meant warning to Jerry to be on her guard against Stellar Bahrr's mischief-making had not been without cause or results. Before the opening of the school year, beginning with the Lenwells as a go-between, percolating up through families where fall sewing was in progress, on to the Macphersons and their closest friends, the impression grew toward fact that Jerry was a sort of adventuress who had foisted herself upon the Macphersons and had befuddled the brain of the vain little hotel-keeper, who had overruled the other members of the school board and forced her into a good place in the high school, although she was without experience or knowledge of the branch to which she was elected. And then she met young men in the cemetery and rode in Ponk's car over the country alone.
One of the easy acts of the average, and super-average, mortal is to respect a criticism made upon a fellow-mortal—doing it most generally with no conscious malevolence, prompted largely by the common human desire to be the bearer of new discoveries.
New Eden was no worse than the average little town at any point of the compass. It took Stellar Bahrr at her par value, listened, laughed, and declared it disbelieved her stories—and mainly in that spirit repeated them, but in any spirit always repeated them. When the reports of Jerry had gone to the farthest corners of town they came at last to the office of York Macpherson. And it was Ponk himself who brought them, with some unprintable language and violent denunciations of certain females who were deadlier, he declared, than any males, even blackmails. York forgave the atrocious pun because of the righteous wrath back of it. He knew that Ponk's suit with Jerry failed temporarily, and he admired the little man for his loyal devotion in spite of it.
The Macphersons had completely convinced Jerry of their faith in her, and in that congenial association she had almost forgotten the incident of the porch conversation about her. To Ponk's anxious query, "What will you do?" (nobody ever said "can" to York Macpherson; he always could), York had replied:
"I shall go straight to Jerry. She will hear it, anyhow, and she has displayed such a deal of courage so far she'll not wither under this."
"You bet she won't, York, but what will stop it? I mean Stellar Bahrr's mischief-makin'. She's subtler than the devil himself."
"We'll leave that to Jerry. She may have a way of her own. You never can tell about Jerry." As he spoke York was turning his papers over in search of something which he did not find, and he did not look up for a minute.
"I'll leave the matter to you now," Ponk said. "I have other affairs of state to engross my attention," and he left the office, muttering as he strutted across to the garage door.
"Thinks he can pull the wool over my eyes by not lookin' at me. Well, York wouldn't be the best man on the Sage Brush if he didn't fall in love with Miss Jerry. She's not only the queen of hearts; she's got the whole deck, includin' the joker, clear buffaloed."
York was true to his word as to telling Jerry, when the three were on the porch that evening, what was in the air and on the lips of the "town tattlers," as he called them. Jerry listened gravely. She was getting used to things, now, that three months ago would have overwhelmed her—if she hadn't been Jim Swaim's child. When he had finished and Laura was about to pour out vials of indignation, Jerry looked up without a line on her smooth brow, saying:
"Will you go over to Mrs. Bahrr's with me now, York?"
York rose promptly, questioning, nevertheless, the outcome of such an interview.
Mrs. Bahrr had just followed her corkscrew way up to the side gate of the Macpherson home as the two left the porch, when she heard Jerry call back to Laura:
"If we find Mrs. Bahrr at home we won't be gone long."
"And if you don't?" Laura asked.
The answer was lost, for Mrs. Bahrr turned and fled across lots, by alley gate and side walk-way and vacant yard, to her own rear door. One of Mrs. Bahrr's strong points was that of being more ready than her antagonist and her habit of thought had made her world an antagonistic one.
York was curious to see how Jerry would meet her Waterloo, for that was what this encounter would become, and he was glad that she had asked him to go with her instead of running off alone, as she had done when she wanted to see her estate.
Seated in the little front parlor, Jerry took her time to survey the place before she came to her errand. It was a very humble home, with a rag carpet, windows without draperies, but with heavy blinds; chairs that became unsettled if one rocked in them; cheap, unframed chromos tacked up on the walls; an old parlor organ; and a stand with a crazy-quilt style of cover on which rested a dusty Bible. York saw a look of pity in Jerry's eyes where three months before he felt sure there would have been only disdain.
Very simply and frankly the girl told the purpose of her call, ending with what might have been a command, but it was spoken in the clear, soft voice that had always won her point in any argument.
"Whether these stories came from you or not you will be sure not to repeat them."
Stella Bahrr bristled with anger. Whatever might have been said behind her back, nobody except York Macpherson and Junius Brutus Ponk had ever spoken so plainly to her face before. And they had never spoken in the presence of a third party. And here comes a pretty, silly young thing with a child's Sunday-school talk to her, right in York's presence, in her own house. Jerry Swaim would pay well for her rudeness.
"I don't know as it's up to me to keep still when everybody's talkin'. I won't promise nothin'. An' I 'ain't got nothin' to be afraid of." Mrs. Bahrr hooked her eyes viciously into her caller.
"I'm afraid of a good many things, but I'm not so very much afraid of people. I was a little afraid of you the first time I saw you. You remember where that was, of course."
Jerry looked straight at Mrs. Bahrr with wide-open eyes. Something in her face recalled Jim Swaim's face to York Macpherson, and he forgot the girl's words as he stared at her.
"When I was a child," Jerry continued, "they used to say to me, 'The goblins 'll git you ef you don't watch out.' Now I know it is the Teddy Bear that gits you ef you don't watch out."
Mrs. Bahrr's lips seemed to snap together and her eyes tore their way out of Jerry and turned to the window. Jerry stepped softly across to her chair and, laying a hand on her shoulder, said, with a smile:
"Hereafter it will be all right between us."
And it was—apparently.
As they walked slowly homeward York and Jerry said little. The girl's mind was busy with thoughts of her new work—the only work she had ever attempted in her life; and York's thoughts were busy with—Jerry.
That night York sat alone on the porch of "Castle Cluny" until far toward morning, beginning at last to fight out with himself the great battle of his life. The big, kindly, practical man of affairs, arrow-proof, bullet-proof, bomb-proof to all the munitions of Cupid, courted and flattered and admired and looked up to by a whole community, seemed hopelessly enmeshed now in the ripples of golden-brown hair, held fast by the beautiful dark-blue eyes of a young lady whose strength to withstand what lay before her he very much doubted.
"If I speak to her now, she'll run away from us and leave Laura lonely. She can't go to the hotel, because I know Ponk has tried and failed. I'm one degree behind him in that. Where would she go? And how would the Big Dipper act? I've no faith in her keeping still if Jerry did use some magic on her to-night. Nobody will ever Rumpelstilskin her out of herself. I'll be a man, and wait and befriend my little girl whenever I can, although I'm forced every day to see how she is growing to take care of herself. When nothing else can decide events, time is sure to settle them."
All this happened at the beginning of the three years whose ending came in a June-time on the Kansas plains. Summer and winter, many a Sabbath afternoon saw the hotel-keeper and the pretty mathematics-teacher strolling out to the cemetery "to call on mother." The quaint, firm faith of the pompous little man that "mother knew" had no place in Jerry Swaim's code and creed. But she never treated his belief lightly, and its homely sincerity at length began to bear fruit.
Not without its lasting effect, too, was the silent influence of Laura Macpherson upon her guest. The bright, happy life in spite of a hopeless lameness, the cheerful giving up of what that lameness denied the having, all unconsciously wrought its beauty into the new Jerry whom the "Eden" of an earlier day had never known. Nobody remembered when the guest and friend of the Macphersons began to be a factor in the New Eden church life, but everybody knew at the close of the third year that the churches couldn't do without her. And neither the Baptist minister, holding tenaciously to salvation by immersion, nor the Presbyterian, clinging to the doctrine of infant damnation, nor the Methodist, demanding instantaneous revival-meeting conversion from sin, asked once that the fair Philadelphian should "become united with the church." That would necessitate the query, "Which church?" And that would mean a loss to two and a gain to only one. As far as the blowout sand differed from "Eden" on the Winnowoc, so far Jerry's religious faith now differed from the disbelief that followed the death of her father. In Kansas where the artistic Eugene Wellington had declared his own faith would perish, she had learned for the first time how to pray.
Letters had long since ceased to come from Aunt Jerry Darby to her niece, although in a friendly and patiently expectant form Eugene Wellington wrote beautiful missives breathing more and more of commercialized ideals and less and less of esthetic dreams, and not at all of the faith that had marked the spiritual refinement of his young manhood.
The third spring brought busy, trying days. A sick teacher made it necessary for the well ones to do double work. The youngest Lenwell boy, leader of the Senior class, started the annual and eternally trivial and annoying Senior-class fuss that seems fated to precede most high-school commencements. For two years it had been Jerry Swaim, whose mathematical mind seemed gifted with a wonderful generalship, who had managed to bring the class to harmony with an ease never known in the New Eden High School before. This year Clare Lenwell was perfectly irreconcilable, and Jerry, overworked, as willing teachers always are, was too busy to bring the belligerents to time before the bitterness of a town-split was upon the community. When she did come to the rescue of the superintendent, his own inefficiency to cope with the case became so evident that he at once turned against the young woman who "tried to run things," as he characterized her to the school board.
That caused an explosion of heavy artillery from the "Commercial Hotel and Garage," which made one member of the board, an uncle of young Lenwell, to rise in arms, and thus and so the fires of dissension crisscrossed the town, threatening to fulmine over the whole Sage Brush Valley. To make the matter more difficult, the town trouble-maker, Stellar Bahrr, for once seemed to have been innocently drawn into the thing, and everybody knew it was better to have Stellar Bahrr's good-will than to start her tongue.
York Macpherson and Junius Brutus Ponk both felt sure that Stellar had really stirred up the Lenwells, for whom she was constantly sewing; and, besides, a distant relative of theirs had married into the Bahrr family back where Stellar came from, "which must have been the Ark," Ponk declared, "and the other one of the pair died of seasickness." Anyhow, the local school row became the local town row, and it was a very real and bitter row.
In these days of little foxes that were threatening the whole vineyard, Jerry turned more and more to Joe Thomson. All of New Eden was tied up in the fuss, took sides, and talked it, except the Macphersons and a few of their friends, and they talked it without taking sides because the thing was in the air constantly. Jerry could not find even in "Castle Cluny" a refuge from what was uninteresting to her and thoroughly distasteful in itself. Ponk, being by nature a rabid little game-cock, was full of the thing, and was no more companionable than the Macphersons. But when the quiet ranchman came up from the lower Sage Brush country, his dark eyes glowing with pleasure and his poised mind unbiased by neighborhood failings, he brought the breath of sweet clover with his coming. When Jerry came home from their long rides up-stream—they never rode toward the blowout region—she felt as if she had a new grip on life and energy and ambition for her work. Joe was becoming, moreover, the best of entertainers, and the comradeship was the one thing Jerry had learned to prize most in her new life in the Middle West.
When the spring had slipped into early May Joe's visits grew less frequent, on account of his spring work. And once or twice he came to town and hurried away without even seeing Jerry. It comforted her greatly—she did not ask herself why—that he did drop a note into the post-office for her, telling her he was in town and regretting that he must hurry out without calling.
It was during this time that Thelma Ekblad came up to New Eden to do some extensive shopping and spend a week with the Macphersons. There were other guests at "Castle Cluny," and Thelma and Jerry shared the same room.
Back in "Eden" the heir apparent would never have dreamed of sharing anything with a Winnowoc grub. How times change us! Or do we change them?
Thelma was sunny-natured, spotlessly neat in her dress, and altogether vastly more companionable to Jerry than the Lenwell girls, who would persist in pleading their little high-school Senior brother's cause; or even the associate teachers, who were troubled and tired and overworked like herself.
Jerry had met Thelma often, and thought of her oftener, in the three years since they had come upon the Sage Brush branch of the local freight together one hot, sand-blown June day, three summers before. She had woven a romance about Thelma. Romances seemed now to belong to other people. They never came to her. She was glad, however, when Thelma's shopping was done and she went back to the farm down the Sage Brush, and her brother Paul, and the growing, joyous Belkap child who filled the plain farm-house with interest.
Stellar Bahrr, in Jerry's presence, had spoken ill of no one since the memorable call three years ago. On the evening after Thelma left town she cork-screwed over to "Castle Cluny" for a friendly chat with Laura.
"I run in to see Thelmy Ekblad. She 'ain't gone home, is she? Got her shopping all done a'ready? Some girls can buy their weddin' finery quicker 'n scat. Did she say who was to make that new white dress she was buyin' yesterday at the Palace Emporium?" This straight at Jerry, who was resting lazily in the porch swing after an unusually annoying day.
"Not to me," Jerry replied, sliding another pillow behind her shoulders and leaning back comfortably.
"Well, well! I s'posed girls always told them things to each other. 'Specially if they slep' together. She's gettin' a mighty fine man, though—Thelmy is—at least, folks says she's gettin' him. He's there a lot, 'specially 'long this spring. His farm's right near her and Paul's. And she's one prince of a girl. Don't you say so, Miss Swaim?"
Jerry smiled in spite of herself, saying: "Yes, she's a prince of a girl. I like her." And then, because she was tired that night, both of Stellar and her topic, and the whole Sage Brush Valley, she turned away that neither Laura nor Stellar might see how much she wanted to cry.
But turning was futile. Mrs. Bahrr's eyes went right through the girl and she knew her shaft had hit home.
Joe had not been to town for weeks. It didn't matter to Jerry. Yet the next day after Stellar's call lacked something—and the next and the next. Not a definite lack, for Jerry's future was settled forever.
Down on the Sage Brush ranches Joe Thomson was trying to believe that things wouldn't matter, too, if they failed to go his way. These were lonely days for the young ranchman, who saw little of Jerry Swaim because every possible minute of his time was given to wrestling with the blowout.
There were many more lonely days, also, for Jerry, who now began to miss Joe more than she thought it could be possible to miss anybody except Gene Wellington, idealized into a sad and beautiful memory that kept alive an unconscious hope. And, with all her energy and her determination, many things combined to make her school-room duty a hard task to one whose training had been so unfitting for serious labor. The flesh-pots of the Winnowoc came temptingly to her memory, and there were weary hours when the struggle to be sure and satisfied was greater than her friends could have dreamed.
The third winter of her stay had seen an unusual snowfall for the Sage Brush, and this spring following was an unusually rainy one. Everywhere rank vegetation flourished, prairies reveled in luxurious growths, and cultivated fields were burdened with the promise of record-breaking harvests.
York Macpherson's business had begun to call him to the East for prolonged trips, and he had less knowledge than formerly of the details of the affairs of New Eden and its community.
One day not long after Thelma's shopping trip Joe Thomson dropped into the office of the Macpherson Mortgage Company.
"How's the blowout?" This had become York's customary greeting.
"Never gentler." Joe's face was triumphant and his dark eyes were shining with hope. "This rainy season and the good old steam-plows are doing their perfect work. You haven't had any sand-storms lately, maybe you have noticed. Well, wheat is growing green and strong over more than half of that land now. There's not so much sand to spare as there used to be."
"You don't mean it!" York exclaimed, incredulously.
"Go and look at it yourself, you doubting old Missourian who must be shown," Joe retorted. "There's a stretch on the northeast toward the bend in the Sage Brush that is low and baked hard after the rains, and shifty and infernally stubborn in the dry weather."
York meditated awhile, combing his heavy hair with his fingers. "The river runs by your place?" he asked, at length.
"Yes, my house is right at the bend, and there is no sand across the Sage Brush," Joe replied.
"Well, the blowout will never stop till it gets up to the south bank of the bend. As I've told you already, you'll have to take the Lord Almighty into partnership to work a miracle. Otherwise this creeping up from behind and beyond the thing will be a never-ending job of time and money and labor. You'll never catch up with it. It's just too everlastingly big, that's all. You'll be gray-bearded, and bald-headed, and deaf, and dim-sighted before you are through."
"I will not," Joe declared, doggedly. "And I've already told you that I've always taken the Lord Almighty into partnership, or I'd have been a derelict on a sea of sand lang syne."
"Joe, your faith in the Lord and faith in the prairies might move mountains, but they haven't yet moved the desert."
"Not entirely," Joe replied, "but if I do my part, who knows what Providence may do?"
As he sat there in the hope and strength of his youth, something in Joe Thomson's expectant face brought a pang to the man beside him.
"Joe, your lease will soon expire. I said to you three years ago that women are shiftier than blowouts. You didn't believe me, but it's the truth."
"Naturally the Macpherson Mortgage Company must acquire much knowledge of such things in the development of their business," Joe responded, jokingly. "Little Thelma Ekblad on the claim above mine has helped to pay off the mortgage your company held, and sent herself to the university, working in the harvest-fields and at the hay-baler to do it. Thelma never seemed shifty to me. She's a solid little rock of a woman who never flinches."
"I'll except Thelma. You ought—" But York went no further, for he knew Joe's spirit would not respond to his thought, and he had no business to be thinking, anyhow. He had known Joe Thomson from childhood. He admired Jerry Swaim greatly for what she had been doing, but he knew much of the Philadelphia end of the game, and his heart ached for the young Westerner, who, he believed, had shouldered a stupendous, tragical burden for the sake of a heart-longing only a strong nature like Joe's could know.
"By the way, Jerry Swaim's aunt, back East, is in a bad way and may die at any time, but she will never forgive Jerry to the point of inheritance. I happen to be in the old lady's confidence that far."
"You are a social Atlas, York," Joe declared. "You hold the world on your shoulders. But what you say doesn't interest me at all. So don't prejudge any of us, maid or man."
"And don't you let your bloomin' self-confidence and ability to work half-miracles be your undoing. A house builded on the sand may fall, where one built on gold dust may stand firm," York retorted.
"Do you believe your own words?" Joe asked, rising to his feet.
"The point is for you to believe them, whether I do or not," York answered, as Joe disappeared through the doorway.
"Why, in the name of fitness, can't that fellow fall in love with that little Thelma Ekblad, a girl who knows what sacrifice on the Sage Brush means and who has a grip on the real values of life? Oh, well, just to watch the crowd run awry ought to be entertainment enough for a bachelor like myself," York thought, as he sat staring after Joe. "I've lived to see a few half-miracles myself in the last decade. Anybody whose lot is cast in western Kansas can see as many of them as the old Santa Fé Trail bull-whackers saw of mirages in the awful 'fifties. There's a lot of reclaiming being done on the Sage Brush, even if that struggle of Joe's with the blowout is a failure. Thelma Ekblad in her splendid victory over ignorance, carrying a university degree; Stellar Bahrr"—York smiled, "Ponk, who would put a flourish after his name if he were signing his own death-warrant, the little hero of a hundred knocks, living above everything but his funny little strut, and he's getting over that a bit; old Fishing Teddy, brave old soul, down in his old shack alone; Jerry, with her luxurious laziness and doubt in God and a hereafter—all winning slowly to better things, maybe; but as to sand and Joe—
"'Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?' You'll never do it, Joe, never, and you'll never win the goal you've set your heart on. Poor fellow!"
That night, on the silent porch alone, York finished the battle he had begun on the evening after he and Jerry had called on Stella Bahrr.
"It's the artist bank clerk against the field, and we'll none of us bat above his average. Good night, old moon, and good night, York, to what can't be."
He waved a hand at the dying light in the west, and a dying hope, and went inside.
Cornelius Darby had lain in his beautifully decorated grave for three years, and a graceful white shaft pointing heavenward amid the shrubbery had become a landmark for the bunch of grubs who rode the Winnowoc local.
"Must be getting close to the deppo. Yonder is old Corn Darby's gravestone over on the bluff," they would say, as the train chuffed up out of the valley on either side of the station. That was all the memory of him that remained, save as now and then a girl in a far-away Kansas town remembered a June evening when a discus shied out from its course and rolled to the door of a rose-arbor.
But "Eden," as a country estate, lost nothing by the passing of the husband of its lady and mistress, who spared none of the Darby dollars to make both the town and country home delightful in all appointments, hoping and believing that in her policy of stubbornness and force she could have her way, and bring back to the East the girl whom she would never invite to return, the girl whose future she had determined to control. The three years had found Jerusha Darby's will to have Jerry Swaim become her heir under her own terms—mistaking dependence for appreciation, and idleness for happiness—had ceased to be will and become a mania, the ruling passion of her years of old age. She never dreamed that she was being adroitly managed by her husband's relative, Eugene Wellington, but she did recognize, and, strangely enough, resent, the fact that the Darby strain in his blood was proving itself in his ability, not to earn dollars, but to make dollars earn dollars once they were put plentifully into his hands.
Since Mrs. Darby had only one life-purpose—to leave her property to Jerry Swaim under her own terms—it galled her to think of it passing to the hands of the relatives of the late Cornelius. She believed that love of Eugene would bring Jerry back, for she was Lesa's own romance-loving child—even if the luxuries that wealth can offer should fail; and she had coddled Eugene Wellington for this very purpose. But after three years he had failed to satisfy her. She was becoming slowly but everlastingly set on one thing. She would put her property elsewhere by will—when she was through with it. She could not do without Eugene as long as she lived—which would be indefinitely, of course. But she would have her say—and (in a whisper) it wouldnotbe a Darby norkinof a Darby who might be sitting around now, waiting for her to pass to her fathers, who would possess it.
In this intense state of mind she called Eugene out to "Eden" in the late May of the third year of Jerry Swaim's stay in Kansas. The rose-arbor was aglow with the same blossoming beauty as of old, and all the grounds were a dream of May-time verdure.
Eugene Wellington, driving out from the city in a big limousine car, found them more to his taste than ever before, and he took in the premises leisurely before going to the arbor to meet Mrs. Darby.
"If I could only persuade Jerry to come now, all would be well," he meditated. "And I have hopes. The last news of her tells me a few things. She hasn't fallen in love with York Macpherson. He'd hate me less if she had, and he detests me. I saw that, all right, when he was here last month. And she's pretty tired of the life of the wilderness. I know that. If she would come right now it would settle things forever. I'd go after her if the old lady would permit it. I'd go, anyhow, if I dared. But I must keep an eye on Uncle Cornie's widow day and night, and, hungry as I am for one glimpse of Jerry's sweet face, I couldn't meet Jerusha D. in her wrath if I disobeyed her."
Eugene had the chauffeur pause while he surveyed the lilac-walk and the big maples and the lotus-pond.
"If Jerry would comenow," he began again, with himself, "she would be heir to all this. If she doesn't come soon, there's trouble ahead for Eugene of the soft snaps. To the rose-arbor, Henderson."
So Henderson whirled the splendid young product to the doorway of the pretty retreat.
Mrs. Darby met her nephew with a sterner face even than she was accustomed to wear.
"I want to see you at once," she said, as the young man loitered a moment outside.
"Yes, Aunt Jerry," he responded, dutifully enough—as to form.
"What have you heard from Jerry recently?" she demanded.
"What York Macpherson told us—that she has had a hard year's work in a school-room," Eugene replied.
"Humph! I knew that. What are you doing to bring her back to me?" Mrs. Darby snapped off the words.
"Nothing now!" the young man answered her.
"'Nothing now!' Why not?" Mrs. Darby was in her worst of humors.
"Because there is positively nothing to do but to wait," Eugene said, calmly. "She is not in love anywhere else. She is getting tired and disgusted with her plebeian surroundings, and as to her estate—"
"What of her estate? I refused to let York Macpherson say a word, although he tried to over-rule me. I told him two things: I'd never forgive Jerry if she didn't come back uninvited by me; and I'd never listen to him blow a big Kansas story of her wonderful possessions. What do you know? You'd be unprejudiced." The old woman had never seemed quite so imperious before.
"I have here a paper describing it. York Macpherson sent it to Uncle Cornelius the very week he died. I found it among some other papers shortly after his death and after Jerry left. When York was here he confirmed the report at my insistent request. Read it."
Jerusha Darby read, realizing, as she did so, that neither her husband nor York Macpherson had succeeded in doing what Eugene Wellington had done easily. Each had tried in vain to have her read that paper.
"You knew the condition of this estate for three years, and never told me. Why?" The old woman's face was very pale.
"I did not dare to do so," Eugene replied, that line of weakness in his face which Jerry had noted three years before revealing itself for the first time to her aunt.
"This is sufficient," she said, in a quiet sort of way. "To-morrow I make my will—just to be sure. I shall probably outlive many younger people than myself. Write and tell Jerry I have done it. This time to-morrow night will see my estate settled so far as the next generation is concerned. If I do not do it, Eugene, some distant and improvident relatives of Cornelius will claim it. Send the lawyer out in the morning."
"All right, Aunt Jerry. I must go now. I have a club meeting in the city and I can make it easily. The car runs like the wind with Henderson at the wheel. Good-by."
And Eugene Wellington was gone.
"Three years ago I'd have left everything to him if I had been ready to make a will then. I'm ready now, and any time in the next ten years I can change it if I want to. But this will bring things my way, after all. I told York I'd never forgive Jerry!"
Mrs. Darby paused, and a smile lighted her wrinkled face.
"To think of that girl just shouldering her burden and walking off with it. If she isn't Brother Jim over again! Never writing a word of complaint. Oh, Jerry! Jerry! I'll make it up to you to-morrow."
To Jerusha Darby money made up for everything. She sat long in the rose-arbor, thinking, maybe, of the years when Jerry's children and her children's children would dominate the Winnowoc countryside as they of the Swaim blood had always done. And then, because she was tired, and the afternoon sunshine was warm, and her willow rocking-chair was very comfortable—she fell asleep.
"Went just like her brother, the late Jeremiah Swaim," the papers said, the next evening.
Instead of the lawyer, it was the undertaker who came to officiate. And the last will and testament, and the too-late evidence of a forgiving good-will, all were impossible henceforth and forever.
The estate of the late Jerusha Darby, relict of the late Cornelius Darby, no will of hers having been found, passed, by agreement under law, to a distant relative of the late Cornelius, which relative being Eugene Wellington, whose knowledge of the said possible conditions of inheritance he had held in his possession for three years, since the day he accidentally found them among the private papers of his late uncle, knowing the while that any sudden notion of the late Jerusha might result in putting her possessions, by her own signature, where neither Jerry, as her favorite and heir apparent, nor himself, as heir-in-law without a will, could inherit anything. Truly Gene had had a bothersome time of it for three years, and he congratulated himself on having done well—excellently well, indeed. Truly only the good little snakes ever entered that "Eden" in the Winnowoc Valley in Pennsylvania.
The glory of that third springtime was on the Kansas prairies and in the heart of a man and a maid, the best of good fellows each to the other, who rode together far along their blossomy trails. The eyes of the man were on the future and in his heart there was only one wish—that the good-fellowship would soon end in the realization of his heart's desire. The eyes of the maid were closed to the future. For her, too, there was only one wish—that this kind of comradeship might go on unchanged indefinitely. To Jerry no trouble seemed quite so big when Joe was with her, and little foxes sought their holes when he came near. If the spring work had not grown so heavy late in May, and Joe could have come to town oftener, and one teacher had not fallen sick, and Clare Lenwell hadn't been so stubborn, and if Stellar Bahrr had held her tongue—But why go on with ifs? All these conditions did exist. What might have been without them no man knoweth.
One of the humanest traits of human beings is to believe what is pleasant to believe, and to doubt and question what would be an undesirable fact. Jerry Swaim, clinging ever to a memory of what might have been, building a pretty love dream, it is true, to be acted out some far-away time by a young farmer and his neighbor in the Sage Brush Valley, listened to Stellar Bahrr's version of Thelma Ekblad's shopping mission, held back the tears that burned her eyeballs for a moment, and then, being human, voted the whole thing as impossible, if not as malicious as any of Stellar Bahrr's stories. Indeed, Thelma Ekblad was now, as she had always been, the very least of Jerry's troubles.
The school row, that had become the community fuss, culminated in the superintendent putting upon his teachers the responsibility of settlement.
If they were willing to concede to the foolish demands of the class, led by Clare Lenwell, and grant full credits in their branches of study, he would abide by their decision. The easiest way, after all, to quiet the thing, he said, might be to let the young folks have their way this time, and do better with the class next year. They could begin in time with them. As if Solomon himself could ever foresee what trivial demand and stubborn claim will be the author and finisher of the disturbance from year to year in the town's pride and glory—the high-school Senior class, and its Commencement affairs. The final vote to break the tie and make the verdict was purposely put on Jerry Swaim, who had more influence in the high school than the superintendent himself. Jerry protested, and asked for a more just agreement, finally spending a whole afternoon with Clare Lenwell in an effort to induce him to be a gentleman, offering, in return, all fairness and courtesy.
Young Lenwell's head was now too large for his body. He was the hero of the hour. Rule or ruin rested on this young Napoleon of the Sage Brush, divinely ordained to free the downtrodden youths of America from the iron heel and galling chains with which the faculty of the average American high school enthralls and degrades—and so forth, world without end.
This at least was Clare Lenwell's attitude from one o'clockP.M.to five o'clockP.M.of an unusually hot June day. At the stroke of five Jerry rose, with calm face, but a dangerously square chin, saying, in an untroubled tone:
"You may as well go. Good afternoon."
Young Lenwell walked out, the cock of the hour—until the next morning. Then all of the Seniors were recorded as having received full credits for graduation from all of the faculty—except one pupil, who lacked one teacher's signature. Clare Lenwell was held back by Miss Swaim, teacher of the mathematics department.
The earthquake followed.
In the session of the school board on the afternoon of Commencement Day Junius Brutus Ponk, who presided over the meeting, sat "as firm as Mount Olympus, or Montpelier, Vermont," he said, afterward; "the uncle Lenwell suffered eruption, Vesuviously; and the third man of us just cowed down, and shriveled up, and tried to slip out in the hole where the electric-light wire comes through the wall. But I fetched him back with a button-hook, knowin' he'd get lost in that wide passageway and his remains never be recovered to his family."
It was not, however, just a family matter now among the Lenwells. In the presence of the superintendent and Mrs. Bahrr, Miss Swaim was called to trial by her peers—the board of education. In this executive session, whose proceedings were not ever to be breathed—for York Macpherson would have the last man of them put in jail, he was that influential—Other Things Were Made Known—Things that, after the final settlement, became in time common property, and so forgotten.
Herein Stellar Bahrr's three years of pent-up anger at last found vent. She had been preparing for this event. She had adroitly set the trap for the first difficulty, that had its start in the Lenwell family, while she was doing their spring sewing. Incessantly and insidiously she laid her mines and strung her wires and stored her munitions, determined to settle once for all with the pretty, stuck-up girl who had held a whip over her for three whole years.
Charges were to be brought against Miss Swaim of aseriouscharacter, and she was to be tried and condemned insecret sessionand allowed toleavethe townquietly.Nothingwould be saidalouduntil she wasgone.
In despair, Ponk sought York Macpherson two hours before the trial began.
"There's two against me. And no matter what Isay, they'll outvote me. It's the durned infernal ballot-box that's a curse to a free government. If it wasn't for that, republics would flourish. Bein' an uncrowned king don't keep a man from bein' a plain short-eared jackass—and they's three of us of the same breed—two against one."
York's face was gray with anger, and he clutched his fingers in his wavy hair as if to get back the hold on himself.
"You will have your trial, of course. Demand two things—that the accused and the accusers meet face to face. It will be hard on Jerry."
"Has she flinched or fell down once in three years, York Macpherson? Ain't she stronger and handsomer to-day than she was the day I had the honor to bring her up from the depot in that new gadabout of mine? If I could I'd have had it framed and hung on the wall and kept, for what it done for her."
The two men looked into each other's eyes, and what each read there made a sacred, unbreakable bond between them for all the years to come.
The trial was held in the hotel parlor, behind closed doors. The charges were vague and poorly supported by evidence, but the venom back of them was definite. Plainly stated, a pretty, incompetent girl had come Westfor some reasonnever made clear to New Eden. Come as an heiress in "style and stuckuppitude of manner" (that was Stellar Bahrr's phrasing); had suddenly become poor and dependent on the good-will of J. B. Ponk, who had fought to the bitter end to give her "a place on the town pay-roll and keep her there" (that was the jealous superintendent's phrasing); and on the patronage of York Macpherson, who had really took her in, he and his honorable sister, even if they really were the worse "took in" of the two. At this point Ponk rapped for a better expression of terms. The young person had tried to "run things" in the church and schools and society. Even the superintendent himself had to be sure of her approval before he dared to start any movement in the high school. And no one of the preachers would invite her to unite with his church.
But to the charges now:
First: She had refused to let Clare Lenwell graduate who wasn't any worse than the rest of the class.
Secondly: She had a way of riding around over the country with young men on moonlight nights on horseback. Of going, the Lord knows where, with young men,joy-ridingin cars, or of going alone wherever she pleased in hired livery cars. Andsomethought she met strange men and was acquainted with rough characters, and the moral influence of that was awfully bad; and there was somethingeven worse, if that were possible, WORSE!
Things had disappeared around town often, but inthe last three yearsespecially. If folks were poor, they needed money.
Then Stellar Bahrr came into the ring.
Jerry had sat and listened to the proceedings as an indifferent spectator to what could in no wise concern her. With the entrance of Mrs. Bahrr to the witness-stand, the girl's big, dreamy eyes grew brighter and her firm mouth was set, but no mark of anxiety showed itself in her face or manner.
Mrs. Bahrr whined a bit as to wishing only to do the right thing, but her steel-pointed eyes, as she fixed them in Jerry, wrote as with a stylus across the girl's understanding:
"You are hopelessly in the minority. Now I can say what I please."
What Mrs. Bahrr really knew, of course, she couldn't swear to in any court, because of Laura and York Macpherson. She wouldn't shame them, because they had befriended a fraud, all with good intentions. She only came now because she'd been promised protection by the board from what folks would say, and she was speaking what mustneverbe repeated.
"Most of us need that kind of protection when you are around," Ponk declared, vehemently, knowing that, while the school board would keep her words sacred, nothing said or done in that trial would be held sacred by her as soon as the decision she wished for was reached.