The Reclaimers Part 6

Outside, the river was gone, taking with it all the cool-breathing alfalfa, and elm and cottonwood shade, and leaving in their stead only bare earth-ridges and low dunes. As far as Jerry could see, there was nothing but a hot yellow plain, wrinkled here and there in great barren folds, with wave and crest and hollow of wind-shifted sand crawling endlessly back and forth along the face of the landscape. A few spiny green shrubs struggled through at intervals, but their presence only intensified the barrenness about them.

The train was entering a deep wrinkle not unlike that cut beyond the third crossing of the Winnowoc. Jerry remembered the day she had watched that other train from the bluff road, and her exultation in pounding her big car up the steep way instead of crawling through, as Eugene was doing. Later she had found out that Eugene really preferred that to the more daring climb. Jerry involuntarily gripped the car seat with a subconscious longing to get out and drive over the whole thing. Across the aisle, the smile on the fat man's face was coming outside as he watched the stranger pa.s.senger.

They were deep in now--a valley-like thing that was hotter than any other inch of the whole way they had come. On either side tall slabs of timber, planted upright, closed in the right of way. They were barely moving through this narrow lane. The engine was gasping for breath, and the cars dragged themselves after it by inches. Then all came to a dead stop.

"Everybody turn out and help," somebody in uniformed authority called through the car door, and all the men pa.s.sengers stirred to action.

"_The_ d.i.c.kens!" the short fat man exclaimed to everybody. "Stuck in a sand-drift in that danged blowout. That's what comes of letting this wind go all day. I told 'em up at the junction to stop it, but they wouldn't listen to me. Now we've got to soar out of here and shovel for our lives."

When he laughed everybody else had to laugh, too, and it was a really good-natured company of men that piled down from the train to help the cause of railway transportation.

The fat man had been last to leave the car.

"Let me close all these windows," he urged, strutting from seat to seat.

"It'll be hot with 'em shut, but you'll be buried in sand in here if we leave 'em open, and we men don't want to dig you and the engine all out in one day. We mightn't find all the children, you know, and leave some of 'em in here covered up. He, he! Haw!" He struggled with the last windows until they were sealed down, then turned away to lend his aid in a good cause.

The tow-headed woman and her little perpetual-motion baby, who had been sleeping wearily for a few miles, roused at the jolly man's loud laugh.

"It's the blowout," the mother said, as Jerry looked at her for the first time. "Them timbers is driv in to keep out all that sand. See how it's heaped up ag'in' 'em on the outside. On awfully windy days it blows over and fills the tracks and stops the train, and then the men all get out and help to shovel it off. Gee whiz! but it's hot in here! We'd be just smothered in sand if we left the windows open, though. There!

There!"

The last to the big baby, stirring uneasily, whom the mother patted off to slumber again.

Jerry walked to the rear door and looked out at the narrow s.p.a.ce walled in by palisades, and at glimpses of sand waves on either side of the road beyond them; at the little hot-looking green shrubs clinging for life to their shifting depths, and the heat-quivering air visible above them. In all her life she had never felt so uncomfortable as now; never realized what it means to _endure_ physical misery. She had seen the habitable globe features--lake-sh.o.r.e, and seaside, and mountain resorts; big navigable rivers; big forests; narrow little valleys; sheer cliffs and wonderful waterfalls. She didn't know that the world held such a place as this that anybody but a Hottentot was supposed to inhabit.

Through a long hour and a half the train was held back by the sand of what Jerry heard was a "blowout." She did not know nor care what the term meant. _She wanted to get_ out of it and go on, and what Jerry Swaim _wanted_ she had always had the right to have.

The sun was getting low in the west when the local freight labored up the Sage Brush Valley to its terminal in the yards at New Eden. All of the pa.s.sengers except Jerry tumbled out, much as tired boys rush from the church door after a long doctrinal sermon. The car was stopped at the freight-station, some distance down the line from the pa.s.senger-station, which was itself a long way out from New Eden, after the manner of Western small towns. The middle '80's, when railroad branch lines were building, found road directors and town councils falling out over technicalities, with the result that the railroad seldom secured the ground it wanted and the town was seldom given a convenient station site.

The buses filled rapidly, and the mail and express wagons were rattling off ahead of buses and foot pa.s.sengers, and still the young stranger sat in the car. A sudden sense of loneliness had enveloped her like a cloud.

She was not a novice abroad. She had gone to strange towns alone before.

She knew all the regulations of hotel service. She knew why she had come here and what she had to do, and she had abundant means for all her needs. But with all these points in her favor a helplessness swept over her, and the "what next" for the moment perplexed her. The engine was getting restless again. However long it may require a local freight to get from one given point to another, the engine, like an ill-broken colt, will keep stepping up or pulling back through every halt of the train. Jerry sat inside, watching the last bus, loaded and hung-on-to, swinging off down the dusty road toward the town, a full half-mile across the prairie from the station. Life was getting a trifle too interesting in this foreign clime, and when the short man appeared in the doorway, even the full-moon face and half-moon smile, the profound bow and comical strut, could not out-weigh the genuine comfort his presence seemed to bring.

"Pardon me, Miss--Miss--"

"Miss Swaim," Jerry informed him, sure of herself and unafraid again.

"Oh, Miss Swaim! My name is Ponk--Junius Brutus Ponk. Pardon again if I seem to intrude. This is the Sage Brush terminal. Excuse me if I say thank the Lord for the end of _this_ day's journey! The buses are all gone. May I take you to your destination here in my little gadabout? You want to stop somewhere in New Eden overnight, anyhow."

"Thank you very much."

Jerry looked at him gratefully, even if he was only one of the bunch of grubs she had been forced to ride with all this long afternoon, she who had once repudiated the Winnowoc train and all trains without Pullman accommodations. "The smile on her face was mightily winsome," Ponk declared afterward, "and just took all my ramparts and citadels and moats and drawbridges at one fell swoop."

He gathered up her bags and helped her off the car pompously, saying:

"Here she is, Miss Swaim. Step right in." And then with a flourish of arms he had Jerry and her belongings stored inside a shiny gray runabout and was off down the gra.s.sy road with a dash.

"Where shall I take you to, Miss Swaim?" he inquired, when the little car had glided gracefully around the lumbering buses and rattling wagons.

"To the best hotel, please," Jerry replied. "Do you know which one that is?"

"Yes'm. There isn't but one. The Commercial Hotel and Gurrage. I'm the proprietor, so I know." The smile that broke around the face of the speaker was too good-natured to make his words seem presumptuous.

Jerry smiled, too, finding herself in the grasp of a strange and complete confidence in the pompous little unknown chauffeur.

"Do you know an old gentleman here named York Macpherson, a Mortgage Company man?" she asked, looking at him directly for the first time.

Ponk seemed to gulp down a smile before he replied: "Ye-es, I do know York very well. He's prob'bly older than he looks. His office is right across the street from the Commercial Hotel and Gurrage."

Afterward he declared: "From the minute that girl turned her eyes full on me and I saw how blue them orbs were, I begun to wish I had a gold b.u.t.ton instead of a bone one in the back of my collar. I knew she could see that cheap bone thing right through my neck and I was willing right then to lay down and play dead if she wanted me to, and I'm never going to recover, never."

"Would you do--me a favor?" Jerry asked, hesitatingly.

Asking favors was a new line for her and she followed it prettily.

"Wouldn't I!" Mr. Ponk exclaimed. "Try me."

"Even his voice has a strut in it," Jerry thought. Aloud she said: "I have business with this old gentleman and I would be much obliged if you would tell him that Miss Geraldine Swaim is in the city and would like to meet him."

"Why, I'll soar right over there as soon as we get to the hotel and gurrage."

Junius Brutus Ponk looked slyly at the face of his companion as he spoke. What he was thinking just then it would have been hard to guess.

With a flourish and curve that were wholly Ponkish the fat little man swung the gray car up to the brick-paved porch of the "Commercial Hotel and Gurrage."

"Why, there's York now, reading his mail! I'll go right over and tell him," Mr. Ponk declared. "Here, George, tell Georgette to give Miss Swaim number seven."

George a.s.sisted Miss Swaim to the hotel register and Georgette led her to room No. 7. Georgette wanted to linger a minute, for this guest was so unlike the usual commercial-traveler kind of ladies who sold books, or canva.s.sed for extracts, or took orders for crayon portraits enlarged from little photographs; but Miss Swaim's manner gave no excuse for lingering. Alone, Jerry closed her door and turned, with a smile on her lips, to face her surroundings. The room was clean and cool, with a big window overhanging the street. Jerry sat down before it, realizing how weary the long journey had made her. Across the street, the sign of the Macpherson Mortgage Company in big gold letters hung above a plate-gla.s.s window. Mr.

Ponk, who had just "soared" across, was sitting in his car before it.

Jerry saw a man inside at a desk very much like Uncle Cornie's in the Philadelphia banking-house where Eugene Wellington was busy now helping Aunt Jerry to settle things. This man was reading letters when the Ponk car tooted before the big window. He waved a hand to the tooter, then put his letters away and came leisurely outside. Jerry saw a tall, finely proportioned man, the set of whose clothes had a city air, and there was something in his whole manner that would have distinguished him from every other man in New Eden.

The fat little man talked earnestly, with a flourish of the hand now and then toward the room where Jerry sat watching the two. York Macpherson rested one foot on the running-board, and leaned his arms on the side of the car, listening intently to what Mr. Ponk was saying.

"So that is this York Macpherson who was never responsible for my estate not making any returns. And I called him an old man. The hotel proprietor must be telling him that now." Jerry laughed as she saw the two men chuckling together. "Well, I hope the pompous little fellow tells him I'm an old woman. It would even things up wonderfully."

Ten minutes later Jerry was shaking hands with York Macpherson and promising him to go to his home and meet his sister as soon as she had cleared her eyes of dust sufficiently to see anybody.

It must have been the dust in her eyes, Jerry thought, that made York Macpherson appear so unlike the benevolent, inefficient old gentleman she had pictured to herself. The hotel parlor was in twilight shadows, which helped a little to conceal the surprise of these two when they met there. Jerry knew what she had been antic.i.p.ating. Whether York Macpherson knew or not, he was clearly not expecting what he found in the hotel parlor.

"I'll soar down to your shack with the lady as soon as she has had her supper and got herself rightly in hand," Ponk declared to York when he came into the hotel office. "You see, we got stuck in that danged, infernal blowout, and it was as hard on the womenkind who had to sit inside and swelter as on us men who n.o.bly dug. 'Specially this Miss Swaim. She must have 'wept to see such quant.i.ties of sand,' same as them oysters and walruses and carpenters. We'll be along by and by, though.

Have a cigar. What do you make of her, anyhow, York?"

"I don't make anything. I leave that job to you," York replied, with a smile, as he turned abruptly and left the hotel.

"Unless you see eight per cent. interest coming your way, I see. There might be a bigger interest in this investment than any you ever made in your life," Ponk called after him.

But York only waved off the words without looking back. Outside, the sunset's splendor was filling the western sky--the same old prairie sunset that he had seen many a time in his years in Kansas. And yet, on this evening it did not seem quite the same; nor were the sunsets, New Eden, and the Sage Brush Valley from this evening ever quite as they had been before, to York Macpherson.