Joe Thomson looked out to where the open prairie, swathed in silvery mist, seemed to flow up to the indefinite bounds of the town. All the earth was beautiful in the stillness of the June night.
"I don"t know how to advise you," he said, at length. "If you were one of us--a real Western girl--it would be different."
To Jerry this sincerity outweighed any suggestion he could have offered.
From the point of romance this young man was impossible to Lesa Swaim"s child. Yet truly n.o.body before, not even York Macpherson, had ever seemed like such a real friend to her, and the chance acquaintance was reaching by leaps and bounds toward a genuine comradeship.
"Why do you stay here? You weren"t born here, were you? Tell me about yourself," Jerry demanded.
"There"s a big difference between our cases," Joe replied, wondering how this girl could care anything for his life-story. "I was the oldest child of our family. My father came out here on account of his health, but he came too late, and died, leaving me the claim on the Sage Brush and my pledge on his death-bed never to leave the West, for fear I, too, would become an invalid as he had been. There seems to be little danger of that, and I like the West too well to leave it now. And then, besides, I"m like a lot of other fellows who claim to love the Sage Brush. I haven"t the means to get away and start life anywhere else, anyhow. You see, we are as frank out here about our conditions as you Philadelphians are."
He smiled and looked down at his strong hands and st.u.r.dy arms. It would be difficult to think of Joe Thomson as an invalid.
"I inherited, besides my claim and my promise, the provision for two younger sisters, housed with relatives in the East, but supported by contributions from this same Sage Brush claim on which I have had to wrestle with the heat and drought that sear the prairies. And now, when both my sisters, who married young, are provided for and settled in homes of their own, and I can begin to live my own life a little, comes my enemy, the blowout--"
"Oh, I never want to think of that awful thing!" Jerry cried. "I shall give the Macpherson Mortgage Company control of the entire sand-pile.
I"ll never play there again, never!"
In the silence that followed something in the beauty of the midsummer night seemed to fall like a benediction on this man and this woman, each facing big realities. And, however different their equipment for their struggles had been in previous years, they were not so far apart now as their differing circ.u.mstances of life would indicate.
"I must be going now. I did not mean to take so much of your time. I came only to a.s.sure you that I am not always so rude as the mood you found me in the other day would indicate." Joe rose to go with the words.
Jerry"s mind had run back again, dreamily, to Gene Wellington, of Philadelphia, the Gene as she knew and remembered him. It was not until afterward that she recalled her surprise that this ranchman of the Western prairies should have such a simple and easy manner whose home life had evidently been so unlike her own.
"You haven"t stayed too long," she said, frankly. "And you haven"t yet suggested what an undertrained Philadelphia girl can do to keep the coyote from her dugout portal."
If only she had been a little less bewitchingly pretty, a little less sure that the distance of planet from planet lay between them, a strange sense of sorrow, and a strange new purpose would not have found a place in Joe Thomson"s heart then. With a perception much keener than her own, he read Jerry"s mind that night as she had never tried to read it herself.
"I"m better up on soils and farm products than on civic problems and social economy and such. Dry farming, clerking, sewing, household economics in somebody"s cook-shack, teaching school, giving music lessons, canva.s.sing for magazines--the Sage Brush girls do things like these. I wish I could name a calling more suitable for you, but this is the only line I can offer," Joe said, thinking how impossible it would be for the girl beside him to fit into the workaday world of the Sage Brush Valley. On the next ranch to his own up the river a fair-haired, sun-browned girl was working in the harvest-field this season to save the price of a hired hand, toward going to college that fall. Jolly, strong-handed, strong-hearted Thelma Ekblad, whose name was yet to adorn an alumni record of the big university proud to call her its product. Jerry Swaim would never thrive in the same soil with this stout Norwegian.
They were standing on the porch steps now, and the white moonbeams glorified Jerry"s beauty, for the young ranchman, as she looked up at him with a smile on her lips and eyes full of light, a sudden decision giving new character to her countenance. The suddenness of it, that was her mother"s child. The purpose, that was the reflection of Jim Swaim"s mind.
"I"m on the other side of my Rubicon. I"m going to teach mathematics in the New Eden high-school. Will you help me to keep across the river?
There"s an inspiration for me in the things that you can do?"
"You! Teach mathematics! They always have a man to teach that!" Joe exclaimed, wondering behind his words if he only dreamed that she had asked him to help to keep her across her Rubicon, or if she had really said such a beautiful thing to him, Joe Thomson, sand-fighter and general loser, who wouldn"t be downed.
"Oh, I don"t wonder you are surprised! I always jump quickly when I do move. You think I couldn"t teach A, B, C, the known quant.i.ties, let alone x, y, z, the unknown quant.i.ties, don"t you?" Jerry said, gaily.
"When I went to school I was a flunker in languages and sciences. I was weak in boarding-school embroidery, too, because I never cared for those things, nor was I ever made to study anything unless I chose to do it.
But I was sure in trigonometry and calculus, which I might have dodged and didn"t. I reveled in them. My mother was scandalized, and Gene Wellington, an artist, who, by the way, has just given up his career for a good bank clerkship in Philadelphia, a sort of cousin of mine, was positively shocked. It seemed so unrefined and strong-minded. But my father said I was just his own flesh and blood in that line. Yes, I"ll teach school. Mr. Ponk is going to offer me the position, and it"s a whole lot better than the poor-house, or madness, or the East, maybe,"
she added, softly, with a luminous glow in her beautiful eyes.
The old Sage Brush world seemed to slip out from under Joe Thomson"s feet just then.
"Is your friend related to John Wellington, who once lived in Philadelphia?" he asked, after a pause, his mind far away from his query.
"Why, he"s John Wellington"s son! John Wellington was a sort of partner of my father"s once," Jerry said. Even in the soft light Joe saw the pink flush deepen on the girl"s cheek. "Good night." She offered him her hand. "I hope I may see you often. Oh, I hate that blowout, and you ought to hate me on account of it."
"It is a brainless, hateful thing," Joe Thomson declared, as he took her proffered hand. "All my streams seem to be Rubicons, even to the crooked old Sage Brush. I can"t be an inspiration to anybody. It is you who can give me courage. If you can teach mathematics in New Eden, _I believe I can kill that blowout_."
The strength of a new-born purpose was in the man"s voice.
"Oh, no, you can"t, for it"s mostly on my land yet!" Jerry replied.
"Well, what of it? You say you won"t play in that old sand-pile any more. What do you care who else plays there? Good night."
"Good night, Mr. Thomson. Why, what is that?" Jerry"s eyes were on a short, squat figure standing in the middle of the gateway to the Macpherson grounds.
"That"s "Fishing Teddy," an old character who lives a hermit kind of life down the Sage Brush. He comes to town about four times a year; usually walks both ways; but I promised to take him out with me to-night. He"s harmless and gentle. Everybody likes him--I mean of our sort. You wouldn"t be interested in him. His real name is Hans Theodore, but, of course, n.o.body calls him Mr. Theodore. Everybody calls him "Fishing Teddy." Good night, Miss Swaim."
Joe Thomson lifted his hat and walked away.
Jerry saw the old man shuffle out and join him, and the two went down the street together, one, big and muscular, with head erect and an easy, fearless stride; the other, humped down, frowsy, shambling, a sort of half-product of humanity, whose companion was the river, whose days were solitary, who had no part in the moonlight, the perfume of honeysuckle blossoms, the pleasure of companionship, the easy comfort that wealth can bring. His to bear the heat and the cinders on the rear platforms of jerky freight-trains, his to serve his best food to imperious young city girls lost in an impetuous pa.s.sion of disappointment in a new and bewildering land. And yet his mind was serene. Knowing the river would bring him his food in the morning and his commodity of commerce for his needs, he was vastly more contented with his lot to-night than was the stalwart young man who stalked beside him, grimly resolving to go out and do things.
Jerry watched the two until they turned into a side-street and disappeared. The moonlight was wondrously bright and the air was like crystal. A faint, sweet odor from hay-fields came up the valley now and then, and all the world was serenely silent under the spell of night.
The net seemed torn away from about the girl"s feet, the cloud lifted from her brain, the blinding, blurring mists from before her eyes.
"I have crossed my Rubicon," she murmured, standing still in the doorway of the porch trellis, breathing deeply of the pure evening air.
"I"m glad he came. I am free again, and I"m really happy. I suppose I am queer. If anybody should put me in a novel, the critics would say "such a girl never came to Kansas." But then if Gene should paint that blowout, the critics would say "there never was such a landscape in Kansas." These critics know so much. Only Gene will never paint any more pictures--not masterpieces, anyhow. But I"m going to live my life my own way. I won"t go back to idleness and a life of sand at "Eden." I"ll win out here--I will, I will! "If a woman goes right with herself." Oh, Uncle Cornie, I am starting. Whether I hold out depends on the way--and myself."
When Laura Macpherson peeped into Jerry"s room late that night she saw her guest sleeping as serenely as if her mind had never a puzzling question, her sunny day never a storm-cloud. So far Jerry had gone right with herself.
X
THE SNARE OF THE FOWLER
The big dramas of life are enacted in the big centers of human population. Great cities foster great commercial inst.i.tutions; they father great constructive enterprises; they endow great educational systems; they build up great welfare centers; and they reach out and touch and shape great national and international conditions. In them the big tragedies and comedies of life--political, religious, social, domestic--have their settings. And under the power of their combined units empires appear and disappear. But, set in smaller font, all the great dramas of life are printed, without a missing part, in the humbler communities of the commonwealth. All the types appear; all conditions, aspirations, cunning seditions, and crowning successes have their scenery and _persona_ so true to form that sometimes the act itself takes on the dignity of the big world drama. And the actor who produces it becomes a star, for villainy or virtue, as powerful in his sphere as the great star-courted suns of larger systems. Booth Tarkington makes one of his fiction characters say, "There are as many different kinds of folks in Kokomo as there are in Pekin."
New Eden in the Sage Brush Valley, on the far side of Kansas, might never inspire the pen of a world genius, and yet in the small-town chronicle runs the same drama of life that is enacted on the great stage with all its brilliant settings. Only these smaller actors play with the simplicity of innocence, never dreaming that what they play so well are really world-sized parts fitted down to the compa.s.s of their settings.
Something like this philosophy was in York Macpherson"s mind the next morning as he listened to his sister and her guest loitering comfortably over their breakfast. A cool wind was playing through the south windows that might mean hot, sand-filled air later on. Just now life was worth all the cost to York, who was enjoying it to the limit as he sat studying the two women before him.
"For a frivolous, spoiled girl, Jerry can surely be companionable," he thought, as he noted how congenial the two women were and how easily at home Jerry was even on matters of national interest. "I never saw a type of mind like hers before--such a potentiality for doing things coupled with such dwarfed results."
York"s mind was so absorbed, as he sat unconsciously staring at the fair-faced girl opposite him, that he did not heed his sister"s voice until she had spoken a second time.
"York, oh York! wake up. It"s daylight!"
York gave a start and he felt his face flush with embarra.s.sment.
"As I was saying half an hour ago, brother, have you seen my little silk purse anywhere? There was too much of my scant income in it to have it disappear entirely."
"Yes, I took it. I "specially needed the money for a purpose of my own.
I meant to tell you, but I forgot it. I"ll bring back the purse later,"
York replied.