The Reclaimers Part 23

"I have a special-delivery letter for you which came this afternoon.

While you read it I'll go out to the gate and speak to the Ekblads, coming yonder."

Jerry read her letter--the one Eugene had written after his conference with Jerusha Darby in the rose-arbor. In it he had been faithful to the old woman's smallest demands, but the message itself was a masterpiece.

It was gracefully written, for Eugene Wellington's penmans.h.i.+p was art itself; and gracefully worded, and it breathed the perfumes of that lovely "Eden" on every page.

Jerry closed her eyes for a moment in the midst of the reading, and the wind-swept cemetery and all the summer-seared valley of the Sage Brush vanished. The Macphersons; Ponk; Thelma Ekblad in the automobile by the cemetery gate, holding something in her arms, and her fair-haired brother, Paul; Joe Thomson (why Joe?)--all were nothing. Before her eyes all was Eugene--Eugene and "Eden." Then she read on to the end. One reading was enough. When York came back she was sitting with the letter neatly folded into its envelope again, lying in her lap.

York had a shrewd notion of what that letter contained, but there was nothing in Jerry's face by which to judge of its effect on her. Two things he was learning about her--one, that she didn't tell all she knew, after the manner of most frivolous-minded girls; the other, that she didn't tell anything until she was fully ready to do so. He admired both traits, even though they baffled him. In his own pocket was Jerusha Darby's letter, also specially delivered. He sat down by Jerry and waited for her to speak.

"Were those the people we saw on the south border of 'Kingussie'?" she asked.

"Yes," York replied.

"Do they interest you?" she questioned.

"Very much."

"Why?" Jerry was killing something--time, or thought.

"Because, as I told you the other day, the same life problems come to all grades. And life problems are always interesting," York declared.

"Has Thelma Ekblad a blowout farm, too?" Jerry's face was serious, but her eyes betrayed her mood.

"Better a blowout farm than a blowout soul," York thought. "No. I wonder what she would do with it if she had," he said, aloud.

"Just what I am doing, no doubt, since all of us, 'Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady,' are alike. Tell me more about her," Jerry demanded.

"She's talking against time now, I know, but I'll tell her a few things," York concluded.

"Jerry, there are not many women like this Norwegian farmer girl who is working her way through the State University down at Lawrence. A few years ago her brother Paul was in love with a girl up the Sage Brush, the daughter of a prosperous, stupid, stingy old ranchman. Paul was chewed up in a mowing-machine one day when the horses got scared and ran away, but his girl was true to him in spite of her father's objections to him. Then came a woman--a sharp-tongued gossip (she's over yonder now by the side gate)--who managed to stir up trouble purely for the infernal joy of gossip, I suppose, between this girl and Thelma. I needn't go into detail; you probably do not care much for the general outline."

"Go on," Jerry commanded.

"Well, it was the rough course of true love over again. Between the father and the sister the match was broken off, and before things could be reconciled the girl's father forced the marriage of his daughter to a worthless scamp who posed as a rich man, or an heir expectant to riches.

The Ekblads are hard-working farmer folk. When it was too late the misunderstanding was cleared up. The rich fellow soon proved a fraud and a rascal and a wife-deserter. And the girl came home with her baby.

Her father, as I said, was too stingy to hire help. So this girl-mother overworked in thres.h.i.+ng-time, and--was buried this afternoon up the Sage Brush--old man Poser's daughter, Nell Belkap. The Ekblads have just come from the funeral. Old Poser has refused to care for Nell's baby and intended to put it in an orphan asylum. Thelma Ekblad brought it home with her. It was in her arms just now, and she's going to keep it and adopt it. When she's away at school--she has a year yet before she graduates--that crippled brother, Paul, will take care of it. All of which is out of your line, Jerry, but interesting to us in the valley here."

As York paused and looked at Jerry, all that Stellar Bahrr had said of him and the Poser girl swept through her mind. Not the least meanness of a lie is in its infectious poisoning power.

"It is very interesting. I wonder how she can take care of that baby.

Babies are so impossible," Jerry said, musingly.

"We were all impossibles once. Some of us are still improbables," York replied.

Jerry looked up at him quickly. "Not altogether hopeless, maybe. Thelma is doing this for her brother's sake, I can see that. And the story has a sweeter side than if she were doing it just for herself. It makes it more worth while."

It was the first time that York had caught the note of anything outside of self in Jerry's views of life.

He involuntarily pressed his hand against the specially delivered letter he himself had received that afternoon, and his lips were set grimly.

The plea of the old woman, and the soul of the young woman, which called loudest now?

"Will this young Ekblad go up to his sweetheart's grave every Sunday, like Mr. Ponk comes here?" Jerry asked, after a pause.

"No, he will probably never go near it," York replied.

"Why not? I thought that was the customary way of doing here," Jerry declared.

"Because it isn't his grave. It belongs to Bill Belkap, who doesn't care for it. Paul Ekblad will find his solace in caring for Nell Poser's child and in knowing it was her wish that he is fulfilling. That is the real solace for the loss of loved ones."

Jerry remembered Uncle Cornie and his withered yellow hand under her plump white one as he told her of Jim Swaim's wish for his child.

"If I carry out that wish I will be true to my father--and--he will be happier," she thought, and a great load seemed lifting itself from her soul.

"Oh, father, father! You are not in the 'Eden' burial-plot. You are here with me. I shall never lose you." The girl's face was tenderly sweet with silent emotion as she turned to the man beside her.

"I'm glad you told me that story. May I come down to your office in the morning for a little conference? I can come at ten."

"Certainly. Come any time," York a.s.sured her, wis.h.i.+ng the while that the plea of Jerusha Darby's that lay in his pocket was in the bottom of Fis.h.i.+ng Teddy's deep hole down the Sage Brush.

The next morning Jerry Swaim came into the office of the Macpherson Mortgage Company promptly at the stroke of ten by the town clock.

"If I were only a younger man," York Macpherson thought, feeling how the presence of this girl transformed the room she entered--"if I were only younger I would fall at her shrine, without a question. Now I keep asking myself how a woman can be so charming, on the one hand, and so characterless maybe, shallow anyhow, on the other. But the test is on for sure now."

No hint of this thought, however, was in his face as he laid aside his pen and asked, in his kindly, stereotyped way:

"What can I do for you?"

"You can be my father-confessor for a minute or two, and then make out my last will and testament for me," Jerry replied, with a demure smile.

"So serious as all that?" York inquired, gravely, picking up a blank lease form as if to write.

"So, and worse," Jerry a.s.sured him. But in an instant her face was grave. "You know my present situation," she began, "and that I must decide at once what to do, and then _do_ it. I'm so grateful that you understand and do not try to offer me friends.h.i.+p for service."

York looked at her earnest face and glowing dark-blue eyes wonderingly.

This girl was forever surprising him, either by flippant indifference or by unexpected insight.

"You know a lot about my affairs, of course," Jerry went on, hurriedly.

"Aunt Darby offered both of us--me, I mean, a home with her, a life of independent dependence on her--charity--for that, at bottom, was all that it was. And when I refused her offer she simply cut me until such time as I shall repent and go back. Then the same thing would be waiting for me. I know now that it was really wilfulness and love of adventure that most influenced me to break away from Philadelphia and--and its flesh-pots. But, York, I don't want to go back--not yet awhile, anyhow."

It was the first time she had ever called him by that name, and it sent a thrill through her listener.

"Is it wilfulness and love of adventure still, or something else, that holds you here 'yet awhile'?" York asked, with kindly seriousness.

"Oh, wait and see!" Jerry returned.

"She is not going to be _led_, whichever way she goes. I told Laura so," was York's mental comment.

"Does this finish your 'confession'?" he asked.