Chapter IV: Part III: Jerry and Eugene--And Joe (4)

"'Where the stream bends sharp to the east away from a ranch-house,'" Jerry was quoting Ponk. "I'm sure I can't miss it if I follow his directions and the stream and bend and house and cottonwood-trees and oak-grove are really there. I love oaks and I hope my woodland is full of them. There must be a woodland on my farm, even if the trees are few and small and scattered here, so far as I have seen. But there was really something pitiful in the little man's eyes when he was talking to me. Maybe he is a wee bit envious of my possessions. Some men are jealous of women who have property. No doubt my workmen will need managing, and some adjusting to a new head of affairs. I'll be very considerate with them, but they must respect my authority. I wish Gene was with me this morning."

Then she fell to musing.

"I wonder what message Gene will send me, and whether he will write it himself, or, as he suggested, will send it through Aunt Jerry's letters to York. It was his original way of doing to say I'd find things out through Aunt Jerry, when she probably won't write me a line for a long time. I know Gene will choose nobly, and I know everything will turn out all right at last.... I wonder if my place is as beautiful as this. How I wish Gene could see it with his artist eyes."

Jerry brought her engine down to slow speed as she passed a thrifty ranch-house where barns and clustering silos, and fields of grain and cattle-dotted prairies outlying all, betokened the possibilities of the Sage Brush Valley. The blue eyes of Lesa Swaim's daughter were full of dreamy light as she paused to picture here the possibilities of her own possessions.

At the crest of a low ridge the road forked, one branch wandering in and out among the small willow-trees along the river, and the other cutting clean and broad across the rougher open land swelling away from the narrowed valley.

"Here's something Mr. Junius Brutus Ponk left out of his map. I'll take the rim road; it looks the more inviting," Jerry decided, because the way of least resistance had been her life-road always.

This one grew narrow and clung close to the water's side. Its sandy bed was damp and firm, and the slender trees on either side here and there almost touched branches overhead. Mile after mile it seemed to stretch without another given landmark to show Jerry her destination. Beyond where the road curved sharply around a thicket of small trees and underbrush Jerry halted her car. Before her the waters of the river rippled into foam against a rocky ledge that helped to form a deep hole above it. Below, the stream was shallow, and in dry midsummer here offered rough stepping-stones across it. It was a lonely spot, with the river on one side and a tangle of bushes and tall weeds on the other, and the curves along the roadway, filled with underbrush and low timber shutting off the view up-stream and down-stream.

At the coming of Jerry's car a man who had been kneeling over some fishing-lines at the river's edge rose up beside the road, brushing the wet sand from his clothes, and staring at her. He was small and old and stooped and fuzzy, and thoroughly unpretty to see.

"It's the Teddy Bear who 'sat in the sand and the sun' coming up from that horrid railroad junction. Who's afraid of bears? I'll ask him how to find my lost empire."

Jerry did not reflect that it was the unconscious effect of this humble creature's thoughtfulness for her that made her unafraid of him in this lonely spot. Reflection was not yet one of her active psychological processes.

"I want to find a ranch-house by a big bend in the river where it turns east," Jerry said, looking at the man much as she would look at the bend in the river--merely for the information to be furnished. He pushed his brown cap back from his forehead and rubbed his fingers thoughtfully through his thin sunburnt hair.

"It's Joe's place, eh?" the high, quavering voice squeaking like an unused machine afraid of itself. "You'd ought to took the t'other fork of the road back yander. It's a goodish mile on down this way now to where you das to turn your cyar round. When you get where you kin turn, then go back and take the t'other fork. It'll take you right to Joe's door about."

The words came hesitatingly, as if the speaker had little use for sounding them in his solitary, silent life. Fishermen don't catch fish by talking to them.

"A mile! I think I'll turn right here," Jerry declared.

Then, as the meek unknown watched her in open-mouthed wonder, she swung her car deftly about, the outer wheels barely keeping a toe-hold on the edge of the river-bank, with hardly more than an inch of space between them and the crumbling sand above the water. As she faced the way over which she had come she reached out to drop a piece of silver into the man's hand. He let it fall to the ground, then picked it up and laid it on the top of the car door.

"I ain't workin' for the gov'mint," he quavered. "I thankee, but I don't have no knowin's to sell. Ye're welcome to my ketch of information any day ye're on the river."

He made an odd half-military salute toward his old yellow-brown cap and shuffled across the road toward a narrow path running back through the bushes.

At the bend in the river Jerry found herself.

"That must be the ranch-house that Mr. Ponk gave me for a landmark, for there goes the river bending east, all right. What a quaint, picturesque thing that is, and built of stone, too, with ivy all over it! It must have been here a long time. And how well kept everything is! The old Teddy Bear said it was 'Joe's place.' Well, Joe keeps it looking as different from some of the places I've passed as 'Eden' differs from other country-places back in Pennsylvania."

The long, low, stone ranch-house, nestling under its sheltering vines, had an old and familiarly homey look to Jerry.

"That wide porch is a dream. I'll have one just like it on my place. I wonder if this farm has any name. I suppose not. What shall I call mine? 'New Eden' wouldn't do, of course. I might call it 'Paradise Prairie.' That's pretty and smooth. Gene would like that, and talk a lot about going 'from Nature up to Nature's God.' I don't care a whiff about all his religious talk, somehow. That's just one thing wherein we will never agree. If I can go from nature to the finished produce I'll be satisfied. Oh, yonder are my three trees."

At the bend of the Sage Brush Jerry left the stream road and sped across a long level swell toward three cottonwood-trees standing sentinel on a small rise of the prairie. From there she was to see the oak-grove, the center of her own rich holdings. Oh, Jerry!

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Down under the spreading oaks a young man in rough ranchman's dress stood leaning against a low bough, absorbed in thought. He was tall, symmetrically built, and strong of muscle, without a pound of superfluous fat to suggest anything of ease and idleness in his day's run. Some of the lines that mark the stubborn will were graven in his brown face, but the eyes were all-redeeming. Even as he stared out with unseeing gaze, lost in his own thoughts, the smile that lighted them hovered ready to illuminate what might otherwise have been a severe countenance.

In all the wide reach of level land there was no other living creature in sight. The breeze pulsing gently through the oak boughs poured the sunlight noiselessly down on the shadow-cooled grass about the tree-trunks. The freshness of the morning lingered in the air of the grove.

Suddenly the young man caught the sound of an automobile coasting down the long slide from the three cottonwoods, and turned to see a young girl in a shining gray car gliding down into the edge of the shade. A soft hat of Delft-blue, ornamented, valkyrie-wise, with two white wings; golden-gleaming hair overshadowing a face full of charm; blue eyes; cheeks of peach-blossom pink; firm, red lips; a well-defined chin and white throat; a soft gown, Delft-blue in color; and white gauntlet gloves--all these were in the blurred picture of that confused moment.

As for Jerry Swaim, all farmer folk looked alike to her. It was not the sudden appearance of a stranger, but the landscape beyond him, that held her speechless, until the shrill whistle of a train broke the silence.

"Is that the Sage Brush Railroad so near?" she asked, at last, with no effort at formal greeting.

"Yes, ma'am. It is just behind the palisades over there. You can't see it from here because the sand-drifts are so high. That's the morning freight now."

The light died out of Jerry Swaim's eyes, the pink bloom faded to ivory in her cheeks, even the red lips grew pale, as she stared at the scene before her. For the oak-grove stood a lone outpost of greenness defending a more or less fertile countryside from a formless, senseless monster beyond it. Jerry had pictured herself standing in the very center of her heritage, where she might "run her eyes around," as Ponk had said, "and figure how many acres she could see, and they were all hers." And now she was here.

Wide away before her eyes rippled acre on acre, all hers, and all of billowing sand, pointed only by a few straggling green shrubs. The glare of the sunlight on it was intolerable, and the north wind, sweeping cool and sweet under the oak-trees, brought no comfort to this glaring desert.

Suddenly she recalled the pitying look in Ponk's eyes when he had begged her to wait for York Macpherson to come with her to this place, and she had thought he might be envious of her good fortune. And then she remembered that Laura Macpherson had put up the same plea for York. He was the shield and buckler for all New Eden, it would seem. And the three, Laura and York and Ponk, all knew and were pitying her, Jerry Swaim, who had been envied many a time, but never, never pitied. Even in the loss of the Swaim estate in Philadelphia, Mrs. Jerusha Darby had made it clear to every one that her pretty niece was still to be envied as a child of good fortune.

Flinging aside her hat and gloves, unconscious of the stray sunbeams sifting down through the oak boughs on her golden hair, Jerry Swaim gazed toward the railroad with wide-open, burning eyes, and her white face was pitiful to see. At length she turned to the young man who still stood leaning against the oak bough beyond her car, waiting for her to speak.

"Can I be of any service to you?" he asked, courteously.

"Who are you?" Jerry questioned, with unconscious bluntness.

"My name is Joe Thomson." The smile in his eyes lighted his face as he spoke.

"Tell me all about this place, won't you?" Jerry demanded, pointing toward the gleaming sands. "Was it always like this, here? I thought when the Lord finished the earth He looked on His work and found it good. Did He overlook this spot?"

Surprise and sarcasm and bitter disappointment were all in her tone as she asked these questions.

Joe Thomson frowned as he replied:

"It wasn't an oversight at all. There was a fine piece of prairie here until a few years ago, with only one little sandy strip zigzagging across it. Ages back, there may have been a stream along that low place yonder that dried up and blew away some time, when the forest fires changed the prehistoric woodlands into prairies. I can't be accurate about geology and such things if history and the Scriptures are silent on these fine points."

Joe Thomson still stood leaning against the oak limb. The confusion of meeting this handsome stranger had passed. He was in his own territory now, talking of things of which he knew. He knew, too, how to put his thoughts into good, expressive English.

"There are beautiful farms up the river--ranches, I mean. What has changed this prairie to such an awful place?" Jerry questioned, eagerly.

"Eastern capital and lack of brains and energy," Joe answered her. "It is just a blowout, that's all. It began in that sandy strip in that low place along over there by the railroad, where, as I say, some old river-bed, maybe the Sage Brush, might have been long ago before it made that big bend in its course up by my buildings. A crazy, money-mad fool from back East came out here and plowed up all this ground one dry season, a visionary fellow who dreamed of getting a fortune from the land without any labor. And when the thing began to look like real work he cut the whole game, just like a lot of other fools have done, and went back East, leaving all these torn, unsodded acres a plaything for the winds. There were three or four dry seasons right after that, and the soil all went to dust and blew away. But the sand grew, and multiplied, and surged over the face of this particular spot of the Lord's earth until it has come to be a tyrant of power, covering all this space and spreading slowly northward up over the next claim. That's mine."

"What is it doing to your land?" Jerry asked.

"Ruining it," Joe replied, calmly.

"And you don't go mad?" the girl cried, impulsively.

"We don't go mad on the Sage Brush till the last resort, and we don't often come to that. When we can't do one thing, out West, we do another. That's all there is to it." The smile was in his eyes again as Joe said this.

"Do you know who owns this ground now?" Jerry tried to ask as carelessly as possible.

"An estate back in Pennsylvania, I believe," Joe replied.

"What is it worth?" Jerry's voice was hardly audible.

"Look at it. What do _you_ think it is worth, as a whole, or cut up into town lots for a summer resort?" Joe demanded.

In spite of his calmness there was a harshness in his voice, and his eyes were stern.

Jerry twisted her white hands helplessly. "I don't know--anything worth knowing," she said, faintly, looking full into the young man's face for the first time.

Afterward she remembered that he was powerfully built, that his eyes were dark, and that his teeth showed white and even, as he repeated, with a smile:

"You don't know anything worth knowing. You don't quite look the part."

"Why don't you answer my question?"

Back of the light in Jerry's eyes Joe saw that the tears were waiting, and something in her face hurt him strangely.

"I think this claim is not worth--an effort," he declared, frankly, looking out at the wind-heaved ridges of sand.

"What brought you here to look at it, then?" Jerry demanded.

"Partly to despise the fool who owned it and let it become a curse."

"Do you know him?" the girl inquired.

"No. But if I did I should despise him just the same," Joe Thomson declared.

"What if he were dead?" Jerry asked.

"Pardon me, but may I ask what brought you down here to look at such a place?" Joe interrupted her.

"I came down here to find out its value. It belongs to me. My only inheritance. I have always lived in a big city until now, and I know little of country life except its beauty and comfort, and nothing at all of the West. But I can understand you when you say that this claim is not worth an effort. I hope I shall never, never see it again. Good-by."

The firm, red lips quivered and the blue eyes looked up through real tears as Jerry Swaim drew on her gloves and fitted the soft blue hat down on the golden glory of her hair. Then without another word she turned her car about and sped away.

II

JERRY AND JOE

VII

UNHITCHING THE WAGON FROM A STAR

How long is a mid-June day? Ticked off by the almanac, it is so much time as lies between the day-dawn and the dark of evening. But Jerry Swaim lived a lifetime in that June day in which she went out to enter upon her heritage. From the moment she had turned away from the young farmer under the oak-trees until she reached the forks of the road again she did not take cognizance of a single object. The three big cottonwood sentinels, the vine-covered ranch-home, the deep bend of the Sage Brush to the eastward, were passed unnoted. Ponk's gray gadabout seemed to know the way home like a faithful horse.

There was no apparent reason why the junction of the two highways should have momentarily called the bewildered disappointed girl to her calmer self. No more was there anything logical in her choosing to turn again down the narrow river road. The lone old fisherman was the farthest down in the scale from Geraldine Swaim of any human being who had ever shown her a favor. He could not have had any interest for her.... But York Macpherson was correct in his estimate of Jerry. She was a type in herself alone. She drove far beyond the narrow place by the deep hole where, with accurate eye and clear skill, she had played a game of chance with the river and fate and guardian angels. Her tires had cut a wide, curving gash across the sand of the road.

"My gracious alive! that was a close turn!" she exclaimed, as she caught sight of her wheel-marks. "No wonder the old Teddy Bear looked scared. One inch or less! Well, there was that inch. But what for? To enter on my vast landed--vast sanded--estate in the kingdom of Kansas!"

Jerry smiled grimly in ridicule of her foolish, defrauded self. Then in a desperate effort to blot out of mind what she had seen she hurled the gray car madly forward. With the bewildered gropings of a shipwrecked landsman she was struggling to get her bearings, she for whom the earth had been especially designed. As the hours passed the road became dry and sunny, with the north breeze tempering the air to the coolness of a rare Kansas June day, entirely unlike the hot and windy one on which Jerry had first come up this valley. She did not, in reality, cover many miles now, because she made long stops in sheltered places and at times let the gray machine merely creep on the sunny stretches, but in her mind she had girdled the universe.

In the late afternoon she turned about wearily, as one who has yet many leagues of ground to cover before nightfall. The sunlight glistened along the surface of the river and a richer green gleamed in what had been the shadowy places earlier in the day; but the driver in the car paid little heed to the lights and shadows of the way.

"If a man went right with himself." Cornelius Darby's words came drifting across the girl's mind. "Poor Uncle Cornie! He didn't begin to live, to me, until he was gone. Maybe he knew what it meant for a man _not_ to go right with himself. And if a woman went right with herself!"

Jerry halted her car again by the deep hole and looked at nothing where the Sage Brush waters were rippling over the rough ledge in its bed. For the first time since she had sat under the oak-trees and looked at the acres that were hers, Jerry Swaim really found herself on solid ground again. The bloom came slowly back to the ashy cheeks, and the light into the dark-blue eyes.

"If I can only go right with myself, I shall not fail. I need time, that's all. There will be a letter from Eugene waiting when I get back to town, and that will make up for a lot. There must be some way out of all the mistakes, too. It wasn't my land that I saw. Mr. Ponk must have directed me wrongly. That country fellow may not know the facts. I'll go back and ask York Macpherson right away. Only, he's gone out of town for two days. Oh dear!"

She wrung her hands as the picture of that oak-grove and all that lay beyond it came vividly before her. She tried to forget it and for a moment she smiled to herself deceivingly, and then--the smile was gone and by the determined set of her lips Jerry was her father's own resolute child again.

"I don't exactly know what next, except that I'm hungry. Why, it is five o'clock! Where has this day gone, and where am I, anyhow?"

Her eyes fell on the broad ruts across the road. Then back in the bushes she caught a glimpse of a low roof.

"I smell fish frying. I'll starve to death if I wait to get back to the Commercial Hotel!" Jerry exclaimed. "Here's the wayside inn where I find comfort for man and beast."

She called sharply with her horn. In a minute the fuzzy brown fisherman came shuffling along the narrow path through the bushes.

"I'm dreadfully hungry," Jerry said, bluntly.

It did not occur to her to explain to this creature why she happened to be here and hungry at this time. She wanted something; that was sufficient.

"Can't you let me have some of your fish? I am desperate," she went on, smiling at the surprised face of the man who stared up at her in silence.

"Yes'm, I can give you what I eat. Just a minute," he squeaked out, at last. Then he shuffled back to where the bit of roof showed through the leaves.

While the girl waited a tall, slender woman came around the brushy bend ahead. She halted in the middle of the road and stared a moment at Jerry; then she came forward rapidly and passed the car without looking up. She wore a plain, grayish-green dress, with a sunbonnet of the same hue covering her face--all very much like the bushes out of which she seemed to have come and into which she seemed to melt again. In her hand she carried a big parcel lightly, as if its weight was slight. As Jerry turned and looked after her with a passing curiosity, she saw that the woman was looking back also. The young city-bred girl had felt no fear of the strange country fellow in the far-away oak-grove; she had no fear of this uncouth fisherman in this lonely hidden place; but when she caught a mere glimpse of this woman's eyes staring at her from under the shadows of the deep sunbonnet a tremor of real fright shook her hands grasping the steering-wheel. It passed quickly, however, with the reappearance of the host of the wayside inn.

"This is delicious," Jerry exclaimed, as the hard scaly hands lifted a smooth board bearing her meal up to her.

Fried fish, hot corn-bread, baked in husks in the ashes, wild strawberries with coarse brown sugar sprinkled on them, and a cup of fresh buttermilk.

The girl ate with the healthy appetite that youth, a long fast, a day in the open, and a well-cooked meal can create. When she had finished she laid a silver half-dollar on the board beside the cracked plate.

"'Tain't nuthin'; no, 'tain't nuthin'. I jis' divided with ye," the fisherman insisted, shrilly.

"Oh, it is worth a dollar to drink this good buttermilk!"

Jerry lifted the cup, a shining silver mug, and turned it in the light. It was of an old pattern, with a quaint monogram on one side.

"This looks like an heirloom," she thought. "Why should a bear with cracked plates and iron knives and forks offer me a drink in a silver cup? There must be a story back of it. Maybe he's a nobleman in disguise. Well, the disguise is perfect. After all, it's as good as a novel to live in Kansas."

Jerry slowly sipped the drink as these thoughts ran through her mind. The meal was helping wonderfully to take the edge off of the tragedy of the morning. It would overwhelm her again later, but in this shady, restful solitude it slipped away.

She smiled down at the old man at the thought of him in a story. _Him!_ But the smile went straight to his heart; that was Jerry's gift, making him drop his board tray and break the cracked plate in his confusion.

"Here's another quarter. That was my fault," Jerry insisted.

"Oh no'm, no'm! 'Tain't nobody's fault." The voice quavered as the scaly brown hand thrust back the proffered coin.

Jerry could not understand why this creature should refuse her money. Tipping, to her mind, covered all the obligations her class owed to the lower strata of the earth's formation.

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At sunset York Macpherson drove into Ponk's garage.

"Hello, fellow-townsman! You look like a sick man!" he exclaimed, as the owner met him in the doorway.

"I'd 'a' been a dead man if you hadn't come this minute," Ponk growled back.

"Congratulations! The good die young," York returned. "I failed to get through to the place I wanted to see. That Saturday rain filled the dry upper channels where a bridge would rot in the tall weeds, but an all-day rain puts a dangerous flood in every ford, so I came back in time to save your life. What's your grievance?"

Ponk's face was agonizing between smiles and tears. "Well, spite of all I, or _anybody_ could do, Miss Swaim takes my little gadabout this morning and makes off with it."

"And broke the wind-shield? I told you to keep her at home."

York still refused to be serious.

"I don't know what's broke, except my feelin's. You tried yet to _keep_ her anywhere? She would go off to that danged infernal blowout section of the country, _and she ain't back yet_."

York Macpherson grasped the little man by the arm. "Not back yet! Where is she, then?"

"She ain't; that's all I know," Ponk responded, flatly. "Yes, yes, yonder she is just soarin' into the avenue up by 'Castle Cluny' this minute. Thank the Lord an' that Quaker-colored gadabout!"

"Tell her I'll see her at the hotel as soon as I get my mail," York said, and he hurried to his office.

A few minutes later Jerry Swaim brought the gray runabout up to the doorway of the garage.

Ponk assisted her from it and took the livery hire mechanically.

"Thank you, Miss Swaim. Hope you had a safe day. No'm, that's too much," handing back a coin of the change. "That's regular. Yes'm." Then, as an afterthought, he added, with a bow, "York Macpherson he's in town again, an' he's waitin' to see you in the hotel 'parlor.'"

"Oh!" a gasp of surprise and relief. "Thank you, Mr. Ponk. Yes, I have had a safe day." And Jerry was gone.

The little man stared after her for a full minute. Then he gave a long whistle.

"She's a Spartan, an' she's goin' to die game. I'll gamble on that with Rockefeller. This is the rummiest, bummiest world I ever lived in," he declared to himself. "Why _the_ dickens does the blowouts have to fall on the just as well as the unjust 's what I respectfully rise to ask of the Speaker of all good an' perfect gifts. An' I'm goin' to keep the floor till I get the recognition of Chair."

York Macpherson was standing with his back to the window, so that his face was in the shadow, when Jerry Swaim came into the little parlor. Her eyes were shining, and the pink bloom on her cheek betokened the tenseness of feeling held in check under a calm demeanor.

"Pardon me for keeping you waiting, Mr. Macpherson. I've been away from town all day and I wanted to get my mail before I came in. I'm a long way from everybody, you know."

There may have been a hint of tears in the voice, but the blue eyes were very brave.

"And you got it?"

That was not what York meant to say. It was well that his face was in the shadow while Jerry's was in the light. There are times when a man's heart may be cut to the quick, and because he is a man he must not cry out.

"No, not to-day. I don't know why," Jerry replied, slowly, with a determined set of her red lips, while the fire in her blue-black eyes burned steadily and the small hands gripped themselves together.

"I haven't had a word since I left home, and I had hoped that I might find a letter waiting for me here."

"Letters are delayed, and letter-writers, too, sometimes. Maybe they are all busy with Mrs. Darby's affairs. I remember when I was a boy up on the Winnowoc she could keep me busier than anybody else ever did," York offered.

"It must be that. Of course it must. Aunt Jerry is as industrious as I am idle." Jerry gave a sigh of relief.

After the strain of this day, it was vastly comforting to her to stop thinking _forward_, and just remember how beautiful it must be at "Eden" now; and Eugene was there, and it was twilight. But like a hot blast the memory of the hot sand-heaps of her landed estate came back.

"Did you want to see me about something?" she asked, suddenly. "Mr. Ponk said you did."

"Yes, Jerry. I came here to see you because my sister and I want you to come out to our house at once, and I have orders from Laura not to come home without you."

"You are very kind. You know where I have been to-day?"

York smiled. Even in her abstraction Jerry felt the genial force of that smile. How big and strong he was, and there was such a sense of protection in his presence.

"Yes. You denied me the privilege of escorting you on this journey. I had written a full description of your property to Cornelius Darby, in reply to some questions of his, but his death must have come before the letter reached Philadelphia. In the mass of business matters Mrs. Darby may have missed my report."

"She may have," Jerry echoed, faintly. "I cannot say. Then it is my estate that is all covered with sand, barren and worthless as a desert? I thought I might have been mistaken."

The hope died out of Jerry's face with the query.

"I wish I could have saved you this surprise," York said, earnestly. "Come home with me now. 'Castle Cluny' must be your castle, too, as long as you can put up with us. And you can take plenty of time to catch your breath. The earth is a big place, and, while most of it is covered with water, very little of it is covered entirely with sand."

How kind his tones were! Jerry remembered again that both his sister and Mr. Ponk had urged her to wait for his coming. But she was not accustomed to waiting for anybody. A faint but persistent self-blame gripped her.

"May I stay with you until I find where I really am? Just now I'm all smothered in bewildering sand-dunes." She smiled up at the tall man before her with a confiding, appealing earnestness.

Many women smiled upon York Macpherson. Many women confided in him. He was accustomed to it.

"Laura will consider it a boon, for you must know that she sometimes gets a trifle lonely in New Eden. We'll call the compact finished." Only a gracious intuition could have turned the favor so graciously back to the recipient. But that was York's gift.

In the dining-room at "Castle Cluny" that evening Jerry noticed a silver cup with a quaintly designed monogram on one side.

"That's an old heirloom," Laura said, as she saw her guest's eyes fixed on it. "Like everything else in this house, it is coupled up with some old Macpherson clan tradition, as befitting an old bachelor and old maid of that ilk."

"We used to have two of them," York said.

"We have yet somewhere," Laura replied. "I hadn't missed one from the sideboard before. It must be back in the silver-closet, with other old silver and old memories."

Jerry's day had been full of changes, up and down, from hope to bitter disappointment, from reality to forgetfulness, from clear conception to bewildered confusion, her mind had run since she had left the oak-grove in the forenoon. When she had occasion to remember that silver cup again, she wondered how she could have passed it over so lightly at this time.

Although Jerry's problem was very real, and she brought to its solution neither experience nor discipline, unselfish breadth nor spiritual trust, there was something in the homey atmosphere of "Castle Cluny" that seemed to smooth away the long day's wrinkles for her. Out in the broad porch in the twilight she nestled down like a tired child among the cushions, and gazed dreamily out at the evening landscape. York had been called away by a neighbor and Laura and her guest were alone.

"How beautiful it is here!" Jerry murmured, as the afterglow of a prairie sunset flooded the sky with a splendor of rose and opal and amethyst. "I saw a sunset like that not long ago in an art exhibit in Philadelphia. I thought then there couldn't be such a real sunset. It was in a landscape all yellow-gray and desert-like. I thought that was impossible, too. I've seen both--land and sky--to-day, and both are greater than the artist painted them."

"The artist never equals the thing he is trying to copy, neither can he create anything utterly unreal. I missed the exhibits very much when I first came West, but this is some compensation," Laura said, meditatively.

"Do you ever get lonely here? I suppose not, for you didn't come to find a great disappointment when you came to New Eden," Jerry declared, watching the tranquil face of her hostess.

"No, Jerry, I brought my disappointment with me," Laura said, with a smile that made her look very much like her brother. And Jerry realized that Laura Macpherson's maimed limb had not broken her heart. Laura was a very new type to her guest.

"Oh, I get lonely sometimes and resentful sometimes," Laura went on, "but we get over a good many little things in the day's run. And then I have York, you know, and now and then a guest who means a great deal to me. I have so many interests here, too. You'll like New Eden when you really know us. And up here this porch has become my holy of holies. There is something soothing and healing in the breezes that sweep up the Sage Brush on summer evenings. There is something restful in the stretch of silent prairie out there, and the wide starlit sky above it. Kansas sooner or later always has a message for the sons and daughters of men."

"And something always interesting in our neighbors. See who approaches." York, who had just come up the side steps, supplemented his sister's remark.

"Oh, that is Mrs. Stella Bahrr, the Daily Evening News. Jerry, York can always unhitch your wagon from its star. She really is his black beast, though; but you can't expect mere men to take an interest in milliners, make-overs, at that, however much interest they take in millinery and what is under it."

"And millinery bills, with or without interest," York interfered again.

"Mrs. Bahrr will want a full report of Jerry, with the blank spaces for remarks filled out," Laura went on. "Why, she has changed her course and is tacking away with the wind."

"Going over to the Lenwells', I suppose. They are in some way sort of distantly related to her. Just near enough, anyhow, to listen to all her stories, and then say: 'For goodness sake don't say I told it; I got it from Stellar, you know.' She will put into any port right now. I'm her lighthouse warning," York declared. "She never approaches when I'm present."

York had risen and was standing in the doorway, where the growing moon revealed him clearly. Mrs. Bahrr, coming up the walk toward the Macpherson drive, suddenly turned about and hurried away, her tall, angular form in relief against the sky-line in the open space that lay between the Macpherson home and the nearest buildings down the slope toward the heart of the town.

"Coming back to common things," York continued, dropping into his favorite chair. "My sister scandalizes me on every occasion. Whether or not you hitch your wagon to a star, Jerry, is not so important, after all. The real test is in just what kind of a star you hitch to. That will tell whether you are going to ride to glory or cut such a figure as the cow did that jumped over the moon."

"It is not always that lawyers give counsel for nothing, Jerry," Laura began, but the line of talk was again interrupted.

The coming of callers led to many lines of discussion during the long summer evening, in which Jerry took little part. In this new hemisphere in which she was trying to find herself, where east seemed south and her right hand her left, there was so much of the old hemisphere against which she had partly burnt her bridges. The friendly familiarity of New Eden neighbors was very different from the caste exclusiveness of the Darby-Swaim set in Philadelphia. With the Winnowoc Valley people the rich landholders had no social traffic. But the broad range of conversation to-night, token of general information, called up home memories in Jerry's mind and the long evenings when Jim Swaim's friends gathered there to discuss world topics with her father, while she listened with delight to all that was said. Her mother didn't care for these things and wondered why her artistic daughter could be so interested in them. But when the Macphersons and their guests spoke of the latest magazines and the popular fiction and the recent drama it brought up Lesa Swaim in her element to the listening young stranger. It seemed so easy for the Macphersons to entertain gracefully, to make everybody at home in the shadowy comfort of that big porch, to bring in limeade and nut-cakes in cut-glass and fine china service, to forget none of the things due to real courtesy, and yet to envelop all in the genuine, open-hearted informality of the genial, open-hearted West.

Long after the remainder of the Macpherson household was asleep Jerry Swaim lay wide awake, her mind threshed upon with the situation in which she had suddenly found herself. And over and over in the aisles of her thoughts what York Macpherson had said about unhitching from a star ran side by side with Uncle Cornie's words, "If a man went right with himself."

VIII

IF A MAN WENT RIGHT WITH HIMSELF

There were two of a kind of the Swaim blood, Geraldine Swaim, who had always had her own way, and Jerusha Swaim Darby, who had always had her own way. When the wills and the ways of these two clashed--well, Jerusha had lived many years and knew a thing or two by experience that niece Geraldine had yet to learn.

On the very day that Jerry Swaim left "Eden" Mrs. Darby had gone into the city for a conference with her late husband's business associates. Sloth in action never deprived her of any opportunities; and quick action now meant everything in the accomplishment of the purpose she had before her.

"Cornelius was such a quiet man, he was never very much company. He really did not care for people, like most men," Mrs. Darby said to her business partners, who had known her husband intimately. "Eugene Wellington has already surpassed him in getting hold of some things he never quite reached to, being an older man. And now that Eugene is proving such splendid help in taking up the less important details in my affairs he ought to do fine clerical work in the House here. There is no telling how much ability he may have for being useful to all of us along the lines that Cornelius has developed. He has proved that he is equal to a lot of things besides painting. People of little brain power and financial skill ought to paint the pictures and not rob our big affairs of business ability."

Mrs. Darby held a controlling interest in the House, so the outcome of the conference was that an easy berth on more than moderate pay, with possible prospects--just possible, of course--was what Mrs. Darby had to take back to "Eden" to serve up to Eugene Wellington when he should return from his brief errand up in the Winnowoc country. And as that was what Mrs. Darby wished to accomplish, her day's journey to the city was a success.

Only, that Winnowoc local was uncomfortably hot and crowded. Her trusty chauffeur had resigned his position on the day after Cornelius was buried, and Mrs. Darby was timid about the bluff road, anyhow. If only Jerry had been here to drive for her! With all Jerry's dash and slash, she was a fearless driver and always put the car exactly where she wanted it to be. There was some satisfaction in having a hand like Jerry's on the steering-wheel. So, pleased as to one horn of her dilemma, but tired and perspiring, Mrs. Darby came home determined more than ever to bring about her other purpose--to have Jerry Swaim in her home, because she, Jerusha Darby, wanted her there.

Jerry always filled the place with interest. And Jerry was gone, actually gone, bag and baggage. She had cleared out that morning early on a fool's errand to Kansas. What right had Jerry to go off to earn a living when a living was here ready-made merely for her subjection to a selfish old woman's wishes? Mrs. Darby did not think it in such words, because she no more understood her own mind than that pretty girl with her dark-blue eyes and wavy, gold-tinged hair understood her own mind. One thing she did understand--Jerry must come back.

A week later Eugene Wellington dropped off the morning train running down from Winnowoc. It was too early for the household to be astir, save the early feeder of stock and milker of kine, the early man-of-all-odd-jobs who looked after the fowls, and the early maid-of-all-good-things-to-eat who would have big puffy biscuit for breakfast, with tender fried chicken and gravy that would stand alone. All the homey sounds of the early summer morning flitted out from the "Eden" kitchen and barn-yard. But the misty stillness of dawn rested on the "Eden" lawns, whose owner, with the others of the household, was not yet awake.

At the rose-arbor the young artist paused to let the refreshing morning zephyrs sweep across his face. He wondered if Jerry was awake yet. Ever since he had left "Eden" the hope had been growing in him that she would change her mind. After all, Aunt Jerry might be right about it. This was too beautiful a house to throw aside for a whim--an ideal, however fine, of self-support and all that. Women were made to be cared for, not to support themselves--least of all a pretty, wilful, but winsomely magnetic creature like Jerry Swaim, with her appealing, beautiful eyes, her brown hair all glinted with gold, her strong little white hands, and her daring spirit, exhilarating as wine in its exuberant influence. No, Jerry mustn't go. She belonged to the soft and lovely settings of life.

Eugene leaned against the door of the rose-arbor as these things filled his mind, and a love of the luxuries that surrounded him here drove back for the moment the high purpose of his own life.

In the woodwork of the arbor, where the lightning had left its imprint, he saw a little white envelop wedged in a splintered rift. The rose-vine had hid it from every angle except the one he had chanced to take. He slipped it out and read this inscription:

"To Mr. Eugene Wellington, Artist."

Inside, on Jerry's visiting-card, in her own hand-writing, was the message: "Write me at New Eden, Kansas, Care of Mr. York Macpherson. Don't forget what we are going to do, and when we have done, and won, we'll meet again. Good-by. Jerry."

The young artist dropped the card and stared down the lilac-bordered avenue toward the shadowy gray-blue west whither Jerry Swaim was gone. And all the world seemed gray-blue, a great void, where there was neither top nor bottom. Then he picked up the card again and put it into his pocket, and went into the house to get ready for breakfast.

Mrs. Darby greeted his return as warmly as it was in her repressed nature to do, conveying to him, not by any word, the feeling that he meant more to her now than he had ever meant before.

"Didn't Jerry leave suddenly? I didn't know she was going so soon. I--I was hoping--to find her here," was what he was going on to say.

"That she would be willing to stay here; to give up this scheme of hers." Mrs. Darby finished the sentence for him. "Yes, I hoped so, too. That was the only right thing to do. She chose her own time for leaving, but she will be back soon if we manage right. Don't be a bit discouraged, Eugene, and don't give up to her too much. She loves a resisting force. She always did."

Eugene looked anything but encouraged just then. All "Eden" was but an echo of Jerry Swaim, and the droop of his well-formed lips suggested only a feeble resisting force against her smallest wish.

"She is my own flesh and blood. I know her best, of course," Mrs. Darby went on. "The only way to meet her is to let her meet you. But we will drop that now. After breakfast I want you to look up the men. I have told them to report to you on the crop values, and harvest plans, and fall seeding later. Look over the place well, won't you? Then meet me in the rose-arbor at ten o'clock for a cup of tea and we will counsel together."

Mrs. Darby would have told the late Cornelius to "come in for instructions later." But Eugene Wellington wasn't a sure result. He was only in the process of solution. And Eugene, being very human, was unconsciously flattered by this deference to a penniless young man. It made him pleased with himself and gave him a vague sense of proprietorship which Cornelius Darby, the real-in-law owner of this fine country estate, never dreamed of enjoying.

"I wonder what Jerry is doing this morning," he thought as he rode Cornelius Darby's high-school-gaited horse to the far side of the place.

"The more I see of this farm the finer it looks to me. Not a foot of waste ground, not a nesting-place for weeds, not a broken fence; grove and stream, and tilled fields, and gardens, and lawns, and well-kept buildings. Not an unpainted board nor broken hinge--everything in perfect repair except that splintered framework at the rose-arbor." He paused on a little ridge above the Winnowoc from which the whole farm lay in full view. His artistic eye noted the peaceful beauty of the scene, the growing crops, the yellowing wheat, the black-green corn, the fertile meadows swathed in June sunshine, the graceful shrubbery and big forest trees through which the red-tiled roofs of the buildings glowed, the pigeons circling about the cupolas of the barn. And not the least attractive feature of the picture, although he was unconscious of it, was the young artist himself, astride a graceful black horse, in relief against a background of wooded border of the bluff above the clear gurgling Winnowoc. Eugene looked well on horseback, although he was no lover of horses, and preferred the steady, sure mounts to the spirited ones.

"I wonder if Jerry's big estate can be as well appointed as this. I wish she were here with me now." The rider fell to dreaming of Jerry, trying to put her in a picture of this "Eden" six times enlarged.

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At this same hour Jerry Swaim was sitting in Junius Brutus Ponk's gray runabout under the shade of the low oak-grove, gazing with burning eyes at her own kingdom built out of Kansas sand.

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Mrs. Darby had hot coffee and cold chicken and cherry preserves and cake with blackberry wine all daintily served for a hungry man to enjoy after a long three hours on horseback in the sunshine. The rose-arbor was odorous with perfume from the sweet-peas, clinging to the trellis that ran between the side lawn and the grape-arbor.

What took place in that council had its results in the letter that Eugene Wellington wrote that night to Jerry Swaim. He did not mail it for several days, and when he went to his tasks on the morning after his fingers had let go of it at the lip of the iron mail-box, the artist in him said things to him that to the day of his death he would never quite forget.

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Late one afternoon, a fortnight after the day of Jerry's visit to her claim, Ponk, of the Commercial Hotel and Garage, slipped into the office of the Macpherson Mortgage Company.

"York, what happens to folks that tends to other folks's affairs?" he asked, as he spread his short proportions over a chair beside York's desk.

"Sometimes they get the gratitude of posterity. More generally their portion is present contempt and future obscurity. Are you in line for promotion on that, Ponk?" York replied.

"I'm 'bout ready to take chances," Ponk said, with a good-natured grin.

"All right. Am I involved in your scheme of things?" York inquired.

"You bet you are," Ponk assured him. "And, to be brief, knowin' how valuable your time is for gougin' mortgages out of unsuspectin' victims--"

"Well, we haven't foreclosed on the Commercial Hotel and Garage yet," York interrupted.

"No, but you're likely to the minute my back's turned. That's why I have to go facin' south all the time. But to get to real business now, York--"

"I wish you would," York declared.

His caller paid no heed to the thrust, and continued, seriously, "I can't get some things off my mind, and I've got to unload, that's all."

"Go ahead. I'm your dumping-ground," York said, with a smile.

"That's what you are, you son of a horse-thief. I mean the tool of a grasping bunch of loan sharks known as the Macpherson Mortgage Company. Well, it's that young lady at your house."

"I see. We robbed you of a boarder," York suggested.

"Aw, shut up an' listen, now, will you? You know I'm a man of affairs here. Owner and proprietor and man-of-all-work at the Commercial Hotel an' Gurrage, bass soloist in the Baptist choir, and--by the removal of the late deceased incumbent--also treasurer of the board of education of the New Eden schools--"

"All of which has what to do with the young lady from Philadelphia?" York inquired, blandly.

"Well, listen. Here's where tendin' to other folks's business comes in. A good-lookin' but inexperienced young lady comes out here from Philadelphia to find a claim left her by her deceased father. Out she goes to see said claim, payin' me good money for my best car--to ride in state over her grand province--of sand. And there wasn't much change but a pearl-handle knife an' a button-hook in her purse when she pays for the use of the car, even when I cut down half a buck on the regular hire. Her kind don't know rightly how to save money till they 'ain't none to save. But the look in her eyes when she come steamin' in from that jaunt was more 'n I could stand. York, she ain't the first Easterner to be fooled by the promise of the West. Not the real West, you understand, but the sham face o' things put up back East. An' here she be in our midst. Every day she goes by after the mail gets in, looking like one of them blue pigeons with all the colors of a opal on their necks, and every day she goes back with her face white around the mouth. She's walkin' on red-hot plowshares and never squealin'." Ponk paused, while York sat combing his fingers through his hair in silence.