The Reclaimers Part 29

"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 friends.h.i.+p. 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 a.s.sured 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 s.h.i.+eld 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.

XV

DRAWING OUT LEVIATHAN WITH A HOOK

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 pa.s.sing 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 cl.u.s.ter around the young Norwegian and the ranchman. Of course, then, the ranchman, Joe Thomson, could interest Jerry only in a general genial comrades.h.i.+p kind of way. Beginning in a common bond, the presence of a common enemy--the blowout--chance meetings grew into regular and helpful a.s.sociation. 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 s.h.i.+fting sands of the blowout, until slowly broom-corn and other coa.r.s.e 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 compa.s.s. 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 a.s.sociation she had almost forgotten the incident of the porch conversation about her. To Ponk's anxious query, "What will you do?" (n.o.body 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."