The Reclaimers Part 17

"It's a joke on me bein' so stupid, but you won't give me away to 'em, will you?"

"I'm awfully bored, too," Jerry thought.

"You say you won't tell 'em at all that I come?" Mrs. Bahrr insisted.

"Not if you say so," Jerry replied, with a smile.

"I'm an awfully good friend of Laury's. She's a poor cripple, dependent on her brother for everything, an' if he marries, as he's bound to do, I'd hate to see her turned out of here. This house is just Laury through and through. Don't you think so? 'Course, though, if York marries again--" Stellar Bahrr stopped meditatively. "All the women in the Sage Brush Valley's just crazy about York. He's some flirt, but everybody thought he'd settled his mind once sure. But I guess he flared up again, from what they say. She's too fur away from town a'most. Them that's furtherest away don't have a chance like them that's nearest him.

But it may be all just gossip. There was a lot of talk about him an' a girl down the river that's got a crippled brother--Paul Ekblad's his name; hers is Thelmy--an' some considerable about one of the Poser girls where he was up the Sage Brush to this week. The married one now, I think, an' a bouncin' big baby, but what do you care for all that?"

"Nothing," Jerry replied, innocently.

The steel hooks turned slowly to lacerate deeper.

"Well, I must be goin'. You give me your word you wouldn't cheep about my forgettin' an' runnin' in here. York's such a torment, I'd never hear the last of it. I know you are a honorable one with your promises, an' I like that kind. I'm glad I met you. An' I'll not say a word, neither, 'bout your goin' to see York in his private office. It's a bargain 'tween us two. Laury's an awfully good friend of yours an' she'll keep you here a good long while, she's that hos_pit_able."

The steel hooks tore their way out, and the woman rose and strode quickly away. In a minute she had literally dropped from view in the shaded slope beyond the driveway.

"I might as well punch a stick in water or stick a pin in old Granddad Poser's tombstone out in the cimetery, an' expect to find a hole left, as to do anything with that pink-an'-white-an'-gold critter!" she exclaimed, viciously, as she disappeared in the shadows. "I'm afraider of her than I would be of a real mad-cat, but she can't scare me!"

Out on the lawn the moon just then seemed to cast a weird gleam of light, and to veil rather than reveal the long street beyond it. For a minute after the pa.s.sing of her uninvited caller Jerry Swaim was filled with an unaccountable fright. Then her pulse beat calmly again and she smiled at herself.

"I don't seem to fear these Kansas men--Mr. Ponk, for example, nor that Teddy-bear creature down by the deep hole in the Sage Brush. But these Kansas women, except Laura--anybody would except Laura--are so impossible. That dairy-maid type of a Thelma, and that woman-and-baby combination, for example; and some of the women really scare me. That aborigine down in the brush by the river, in her shabby clothes and sunbonnet eclipse; and now this 'Stellar' comes catfooting out of the house and lands over yonder in the shadows. She needn't have been bored because she didn't find the folks at home, and she needn't frighten me so. I never was afraid of Aunt Jerry. I ought to be proof against anybody else. And yet maybe I am in the way here, even if they drive the very idea away from me. Laura is good to me and her friendliness is genuine. Little as I know, I _know_ that much. And York--oh, that was a village gossip's tale! And she gets me scared--I, whom even Jerusha Darby never cowed."

The poison was working, after all, and Stellar Bahrr's sting had not been against marble, nor into water. With the memory of Jerusha Darby, too, the burden came again to her niece's mind, only to be lifted again, however, in a few minutes. Her memory had run back to her day down the river and the oak-grove and the sand, and the young man whose name was Joe Thomson--Jerry did not remember the name--and the crushing weight of surprise and disappointment. The struggle to decide on a course for herself immediately was rising again within her, when she saw a young man turn from the street and come up the walk toward the porch.

"I can't have leisure to settle anything by myself, it seems, even with the lord and lady of the castle leaving me in full seclusion here. One caller goes and another comes. I wonder what excuse this one has for intruding. He is another type--one I haven't met before."

In the time required for this caller to reach the porch there flashed through Jerry's mind all the types she had seen in the West. Ponk and Thelma and fuzzy Teddy, the woman-and-baby, Laura and York, and that pin-eyed gossip--and the young country fellow whose land lay next to hers. None of them concerned her, really, except these hospitable friends who were sheltering her, and, in a way, in an upright, legal, Jim Swaim kind of way, the young man down the Sage Brush, losing in the game like herself and helpless like herself.

It was no wonder that Jerry did not recognize in this caller the ranchman of the blowout. There was nothing of the clodhopper in this well-dressed young fellow, although he was not exactly a model for advertising high-grade tailoring.

"Is this Miss Swaim?" he asked, lifting his hat. "I am Joe Thomson. You may remember that we met down in the blowout two weeks ago."

"I could hardly forget meeting you. Will you sit down?" Jerry offered Joe a chair with a courtesy very unlike the blunt manner of her first words to him a fortnight before.

But in the far recesses of her consciousness all the while the haunting, ever-recurring picture of a handsome face and a faultlessly clad form, even the face and form of a Philadelphia bank clerk, _ne_ artist, made the reality of Joe Thomson's presence very commonplace and uninteresting at that moment, and her courtesy was of a perfunctory sort.

"I hope I don't intrude. Were you busy?" Joe asked, something of the embarra.s.sment of the first meeting coming back with the question.

"Yes, I was very busy," Jerry replied, with a smile. "Pick-up work, though. I was just thinking. Lost in thought, maybe."

The moonlight can do so much for a pretty woman, but with Jerry Swaim one could not say whether sunlight, moonlight, starlight, or dull gray clouds did the most. For two weeks the memory of her fair face, as he recalled it in the oak shade down beside the blowout, had not been absent from the young ranchman's mind. And to-night this dainty girl out of the East seemed entrancing.

"You were lost in thought when I saw you before. I had an idea that city girls didn't do much thinking. Is it your settled occupation?" Joe inquired, with a smile in his eyes.

"It is my only visible means of support right now; about as profitable, too, as farming a blowout," Jerry returned.

"Which reminds me of my purpose in thrusting this call upon you," Joe declared. "I didn't realize the situation the other day--and--well, to be plain, I came to beg your pardon for my rudeness in what I said about your claim. I had no idea who you were, you know, but that hardly excuses me for what I said."

"It is very rude to speak so slightingly of land that behaves as beautifully as mine does," Jerry said, with a smile that atoned for the trace of sarcasm in her voice.

"It is very rude to speak as slightingly as I did of the former owner.

But you see I have watched that brainless blowout thing creep along, season after season, eating up my acres--my sole inheritance, too."

"And you said you didn't go mad," Jerry interposed.

"Yes, but I didn't say I didn't get mad. I have worn out enough profanity on that blowout to stock the whole Sage Brush Valley."

"But you aren't to the last resort, for you do go mad here then, you told me. I wonder you aren't all madmen and women when I think of this country and remember how different I had imagined it would be."

"When we come to the very last ditch, we really have two alternatives--to go mad and to go back East. Most folks prefer the former. But I say again, it's always a long way to the last ditch out on the Sage Brush, so we seldom do either."

"What should I do now? Won't you tell me? I'm really near my last ditch."

Jerry sat with clasped hands, looking earnestly into Joe's face, as she said this. Oh, fair was she, this exquisite white-blossom style of girl, facing her first life-problem, the big problem of living. Joe Thomson made no reply to her question. What could this dainty, untrained creature do with the best of claims? The frank sincerity of his silence made an appeal to her that the wisest advice could not have made just then.

York Macpherson was right when he said that Jim Swaim's child was a type of her own. If Jerry, through her mother's nature, was impulsive and imaginative, from her father she had inherited balance and clear vision.

Her young years had heretofore made no call upon her to exercise these qualities. What might have been turned to the frivolous and romantic in one parent, and the hard-headed and grasping in the other, now became saving qualities for the child of these two. In an instant Jerry read the young ranchman's character clearly and foresaw in him a friend and helper. But there was neither romance nor selfishness in that vision.

"Mr. Thomson," the girl began, seriously, "you need not apologize for what you could not help feeling about the condition of my estate and the wrong that has been done to you. I know you do not hold me responsible for it. Let's forget that you thought you had said anything unpleasant to me, for I want to ask your advice."

"Mine!" Joe Thomson exclaimed.

This sweet-faced, soft-voiced girl was walking straight into another heart in the Sage Brush Valley. Nature had given her that heritage, wherever she might go.

"Yes, your advice, please." Jerry went on. "You have watched that sand spreading northward over your claim. You have had days, months, years, maybe, to see the blowout doing its work. I awakened suddenly one morning from a beautiful day-dream. My only heritage left of all the fortune I had been brought to expect to be mine, the inheritance I had idealized with all the romantic beauty and prosperity possible to rural life, in a minute all this turned to a desert before my eyes. You belong to the West. Tell me, won't you, what is next for me?"

"What could I tell you, Miss Swaim?" Joe asked.

"Tell me what to do, I mean," Jerry exclaimed. "Tell me quickly, for I am right against the bread-line now."

For a moment Joe stared at the girl in amazement. Her earnestness left no room to misunderstand her. But his senses came back quickly, as one whose life habit it had been to meet and answer hard questions suddenly.

"Why not go back East?" he asked.

"One of your two last resorts; the other one is madness. I won't do it,"

Jerry said, stubbornly. "Shall I tell you why?"

It was a delicious surprise to the young ranchman to be taken into the confidence of this charming, gracious girl. The honeysuckle leaves, stirred by the soft night breeze that came purring across the open plain, gave the moonbeams leave to play with the rippling gold of her hair, and to flutter ever so faintly the soft white draperies of her gown. Her big dark eyes, her fair white throat and shoulders, the faint pink hue of her cheeks, the shapely white arms below the elbow-frilled sleeves, her soft voice, her frank trust in his judgment and integrity, made that appeal that rarely comes to a young man's heart oftener than once in a lifetime.

"My father lived a rich man and died a poor man, leaving me--for mother went first--to the care of his wealthy sister. A half-forgotten claim on the Sage Brush is my only possession after two years of litigation and all that sort of thing." Jerry paused.

"Well?" Joe queried.

"I was offered one of two alternatives: I might be dependent on my aunt's bounty or I could come out West and live on my claim. I chose the West. Now what can I do?"

The pathos of the young face was touching. The question of maintenance is hard enough for the resourceful and experienced to meet; how doubly hard it must be to the young, untried, and untrained!