He knew he was talking foolishly. He had felt himself superior to the other young men who obeyed every wish of Jo"s. He had been flattered always by her evident preference for his company, and had not thought of himself as being controlled by her before. He had been too willing to do her bidding. Today, for the first time, her rule was irksome. In spite of his efforts to be agreeable, the drive homeward was not a happy one.
It was twilight when Thaine reached the Cloverdale Ranch and found Leigh waiting for him on the wide porch. All the way down the river he had been calling himself names and letting his conscience stab him unmercifully.
And once when something spoke within him, saying, "You never told Jo you were fond of her. You have not done her any wrong," he stifled back the pleasing voice and despised himself for trying to find such excuse. He was only nineteen and had not had the stern discipline of war that Asher Aydelot had known at the same age.
Jo had offered no further complaint at his refusing her invitation. She played the vastly more effective part of being grieved but not angry, and her quiet good-by was so unlike pretty imperious Jo Bennington that Thaine was tempted to go back and spend the evening in her company. Yet, strangely enough, he did not blame Leigh for being the cause of his discomfort, as he should have done. As he neared her home, his conscience grew less and less noisy, and when he sat at last in Jim Shirley"s easy porch chair with Leigh in a low rocker facing him, while the long summer Sabbath twilight was falling on the peaceful landscape about him, he had almost forgotten Jo"s claim on him.
"Doctor Carey came down to see me," Leigh was saying, "just as you were kind enough to ask him to do. He told me he had no money of his own to loan, but he knew of a fund he might control in a few days. He had to leave Kansas yesterday on a business trip, but he will see me as soon as he comes back."
"Better than gold! Your plans just fall together and fit in, don"t they?"
Thaine exclaimed. "Will he be back in time, though?"
"Yes. But really, Thaine," Leigh"s eyes were beautiful in the twilight, "I never should have thought of Doctor Carey if it hadn"t been for you."
"I am of some use to the community after all," Thaine said with serious face.
"You are a great deal of use to me," Leigh a.s.sured him.
"Oh, anybody else could do all I do for you," he retorted.
"But I wouldn"t ask anybody else," the girl replied.
"Not even my mother? She thinks there is no girl like you this side of heaven, or Virginia, anyhow, and she"d have taken it up with father,"
Thaine declared.
"I thought of her," Leigh answered, "but in things like this, it is impossible. You said yourself that no man on Gra.s.s River would think it a wise plan. Your father won his fight out here, even his fight against the boom. We have a different wilderness to overcome, I guess. Mine is reclaiming that Cloverdale ranch from the Champers Company and the weeds.
I don"t know where your battlefield lies, but you"ll have it, and it"s because you haven"t won yet that I can come to you. You have helped me and you always will."
"I"m glad you came to me, anyhow," Thaine a.s.sured her.
They sat awhile looking out at the prairies and the line of the river glistening in the gloaming. A faint pink tone edged some gray cloud flakes in the southwest sky and all the scene was restful in the soft evening light.
At last Thaine said thoughtfully: "I haven"t heard the bugle trumpet for my call to battle yet. Maybe I"ll find out down at the University and make everybody proud of me some day as I am proud of you in your fight for a weed-covered quarter of prairie soil. Jo Bennington is always ridiculing country life, and yet she"s pretty fond of Todd Stewart, who is more of a farmer every day."
A little smile curved the corners of Leigh"s mouth, and Thaine knew her thoughts.
"You are not a bit alike, you two girls," he exclaimed.
"Does it make any difference? There"s only one of a kind of anything in this world, flower or fruit or leaf or life," Leigh added. "I found that out in painting. There"s only one Jo, and one Pryor Gaines, and one Jane Aydelot as I remember her back in Ohio; one anything or anybody."
"And only one Leigh in all the world."
It was not the usual bantering tone now, and there was something in the expression of Thaine"s handsome face; something looking out from his dark eyes that Leigh did not see, because she was looking out at the lights and shadows of evening.
The sunset"s afterglow had thrown a splendor far up the sky. In its reflected light, softened by twilight shadows, Leigh made a picture herself that an artist might love to paint.
She turned away at his words, and a quiver of pain swept her face as Thaine leaned toward her eagerly.
"Oh, Leigh, I wasn"t joking. You are so unlike anybody else." He broke off suddenly. But Leigh was herself again and, smiling frankly, she added, "Let"s count our blessings, then, and be thankful it"s no worse."
Thaine rose at once.
"I must be going. It is after eight and I ought to be at Bennington"s now.
I am so glad, I am so honored, to have your confidence. Won"t you keep telling me your plans, and if I can help you, will you let me do it?"
He had taken Leigh"s hand in good-by and held it as he put the question.
"I"ll be so glad to have your help, for we will see things alike, not as the older people see for us. It is only at our age that we dare take risks. Your father and Uncle Jim wouldn"t come to Kansas now if it were now like it was when they were twenty-one."
Thaine did not release her hand.
"I"m glad there is only one Leigh," he said softly.
The light of his eyes and the sympathetic tone seemed all unlike the heir of the Sunflower Ranch, yet very much like the spirit of the father who had wrested it from the wilderness, and the mother who had courageously shared his every need.
"I don"t know tonight where my wilderness lies. But I hope, little girl, I hope I"ll fight as good a battle on my frontier as my father has done--as you are doing. Good-night."
He hurried away and, falling into the gay company at Bennington"s, was welcomed by Jo as a penitent, and abundantly forgiven.
While down at Cloverdale, Leigh Shirley sat long alone, looking with unseeing eyes at the twilight into which he had vanished.
CHAPTER XVI
THE HUMANENESS OF CHAMPERS
What is the use of trying to make things worse?
Let"s find things to do, and forget things.
--_The Light That Failed._
On the third day after Darley Champers had closed with Leigh Shirley, Horace Carey walked into his office.
"h.e.l.lo, Champers, how"s business?" he asked, with the cheerful way that drew even his enemies to him.
"Danged bad!" Champers replied. "Rotten world is full of danged fools who want money and ain"t satisfied when you get it for "em."
"Have you made such a sale lately?" Carey inquired.
"Yes; day before yesterday," Champers replied.
"Was it the old Jim Shirley quarter, the Cloverdale Ranch?" the doctor asked.
"The very place, and I"m in a devil of a fix, too," Darley Champers declared. "The trouble is I"m dead sure I"ll not get the other fourteen hundred."
Thomas Smith had been paid the two hundred dollars and had fully released the land to Champers to finish the sale. Unfortunately for Champers, Smith still hung about Wykerton, annoying his agent so much that in a fit of anger, Champers revealed the fact that Leigh Shirley was the buyer of the Cloverdale Ranch. Smith"s rage was the greater because he did not believe the price money could be paid by a girl without resources, and against this girl he was not now ready to move. The burden of the whole matter now was that Darley Champers had taken his life in his own hands by the deal. The bulldog in Champers was roused now, and, while he was a good many things evil, he was not a coward.
But for his anger this morning, he would hardly have been so free in answering Doctor Carey"s query. Carey was a living rebuke to him, and no man loves that force anywhere.