The Reclaimers

"Not to-day. I want you to spend the day with me, and you don't know the road. You haven't any way to go. York will be home soon. He wants to take you there himself. He understands land values, and, anyhow, you oughtn't go alone," Laura Macpherson said, emphatically.

"That is just what Mr. Ponk said at the garage, but I want to go alone."

That "I want" settled everything with Jerry Swaim in the Kansas New Eden as in the old "Eden" in the green valley of the Winnowoc.

"I have hired a runabout of Mr. Ponk. He gave me directions so I can't miss the way. Good-by."

The trail down the Sage Brush was full of delight this morning for the young Eastern girl who sent her car swiftly along the level road, almost forgetting the landmarks of the way in the exhilaration of youth and June-time. And, however out of place she might seem on the Western prairie, no one could doubt her ability to handle a car.

"'Where the stream bends sharp to the east away from a ranch-house,'" Jerry was quoting Ponk. "I'm sure I can't miss it if I follow his directions and the stream and bend and house and cottonwood-trees and oak-grove are really there. I love oaks and I hope my woodland is full of them. There must be a woodland on my farm, even if the trees are few and small and scattered here, so far as I have seen. But there was really something pitiful in the little man's eyes when he was talking to me. Maybe he is a wee bit envious of my possessions. Some men are jealous of women who have property. No doubt my workmen will need managing, and some adjusting to a new head of affairs. I'll be very considerate with them, but they must respect my authority. I wish Gene was with me this morning."

Then she fell to musing.

"I wonder what message Gene will send me, and whether he will write it himself, or, as he suggested, will send it through Aunt Jerry's letters to York. It was his original way of doing to say I'd find things out through Aunt Jerry, when she probably won't write me a line for a long time. I know Gene will choose nobly, and I know everything will turn out all right at last… I wonder if my place is as beautiful as this. How I wish Gene could see it with his artist eyes."

Jerry brought her engine down to slow speed as she passed a thrifty ranch-house where barns and clustering silos, and fields of grain and cattle-dotted prairies outlying all, betokened the possibilities of the Sage Brush Valley. The blue eyes of Lesa Swaim's daughter were full of dreamy light as she paused to picture here the possibilities of her own possessions.

At the crest of a low ridge the road forked, one branch wandering in and out among the small willow-trees along the river, and the other cutting clean and broad across the rougher open land swelling away from the narrowed valley.

"Here's something Mr. Junius Brutus Ponk left out of his map. I'll take the rim road; it looks the more inviting," Jerry decided, because the way of least resistance had been her life-road always.

This one grew narrow and clung close to the water's side. Its sandy bed was damp and firm, and the slender trees on either side here and there almost touched branches overhead. Mile after mile it seemed to stretch without another given landmark to show Jerry her destination. Beyond where the road curved sharply around a thicket of small trees and underbrush Jerry halted her car. Before her the waters of the river rippled into foam against a rocky ledge that helped to form a deep hole above it. Below, the stream was shallow, and in dry midsummer here offered rough stepping-stones across it. It was a lonely spot, with the river on one side and a tangle of bushes and tall weeds on the other, and the curves along the roadway, filled with underbrush and low timber shutting off the view up-stream and down-stream.

At the coming of Jerry's car a man who had been kneeling over some fishing-lines at the river's edge rose up beside the road, brushing the wet sand from his clothes, and staring at her. He was small and old and stooped and fuzzy, and thoroughly unpretty to see.

"It's the Teddy Bear who 'sat in the sand and the sun' coming up from that horrid railroad junction. Who's afraid of bears? I'll ask him how to find my lost empire."

Jerry did not reflect that it was the unconscious effect of this humble creature's thoughtfulness for her that made her unafraid of him in this lonely spot. Reflection was not yet one of her active psychological processes.

"I want to find a ranch-house by a big bend in the river where it turns east," Jerry said, looking at the man much as she would look at the bend in the river – merely for the information to be furnished. He pushed his brown cap back from his forehead and rubbed his fingers thoughtfully through his thin sunburnt hair.

"It's Joe's place, eh?" the high, quavering voice squeaking like an unused machine afraid of itself. "You'd ought to took the t'other fork of the road back yander. It's a goodish mile on down this way now to where you das to turn your cyar round. When you get where you kin turn, then go back and take the t'other fork. It'll take you right to Joe's door about."

The words came hesitatingly, as if the speaker had little use for sounding them in his solitary, silent life. Fishermen don't catch fish by talking to them.

"A mile! I think I'll turn right here," Jerry declared.

Then, as the meek unknown watched her in open-mouthed wonder, she swung her car deftly about, the outer wheels barely keeping a toe-hold on the edge of the river-bank, with hardly more than an inch of space between them and the crumbling sand above the water. As she faced the way over which she had come she reached out to drop a piece of silver into the man's hand. He let it fall to the ground, then picked it up and laid it on the top of the car door.

"I ain't workin' for the gov'mint," he quavered. "I thankee, but I don't have no knowin's to sell. Ye're welcome to my ketch of information any day ye're on the river."

He made an odd half-military salute toward his old yellow-brown cap and shuffled across the road toward a narrow path running back through the bushes.

At the bend in the river Jerry found herself.

"That must be the ranch-house that Mr. Ponk gave me for a landmark, for there goes the river bending east, all right. What a quaint, picturesque thing that is, and built of stone, too, with ivy all over it! It must have been here a long time. And how well kept everything is! The old Teddy Bear said it was 'Joe's place.' Well, Joe keeps it looking as different from some of the places I've passed as 'Eden' differs from other country-places back in Pennsylvania."

The long, low, stone ranch-house, nestling under its sheltering vines, had an old and familiarly homey look to Jerry.

"That wide porch is a dream. I'll have one just like it on my place. I wonder if this farm has any name. I suppose not. What shall I call mine? 'New Eden' wouldn't do, of course. I might call it 'Paradise Prairie.' That's pretty and smooth. Gene would like that, and talk a lot about going 'from Nature up to Nature's God.' I don't care a whiff about all his religious talk, somehow. That's just one thing wherein we will never agree. If I can go from nature to the finished produce I'll be satisfied. Oh, yonder are my three trees."

At the bend of the Sage Brush Jerry left the stream road and sped across a long level swell toward three cottonwood-trees standing sentinel on a small rise of the prairie. From there she was to see the oak-grove, the center of her own rich holdings. Oh, Jerry!

Down under the spreading oaks a young man in rough ranchman's dress stood leaning against a low bough, absorbed in thought. He was tall, symmetrically built, and strong of muscle, without a pound of superfluous fat to suggest anything of ease and idleness in his day's run. Some of the lines that mark the stubborn will were graven in his brown face, but the eyes were all-redeeming. Even as he stared out with unseeing gaze, lost in his own thoughts, the smile that lighted them hovered ready to illuminate what might otherwise have been a severe countenance.

In all the wide reach of level land there was no other living creature in sight. The breeze pulsing gently through the oak boughs poured the sunlight noiselessly down on the shadow-cooled grass about the tree-trunks. The freshness of the morning lingered in the air of the grove.

Suddenly the young man caught the sound of an automobile coasting down the long slide from the three cottonwoods, and turned to see a young girl in a shining gray car gliding down into the edge of the shade. A soft hat of Delft-blue, ornamented, valkyrie-wise, with two white wings; golden-gleaming hair overshadowing a face full of charm; blue eyes; cheeks of peach-blossom pink; firm, red lips; a well-defined chin and white throat; a soft gown, Delft-blue in color; and white gauntlet gloves – all these were in the blurred picture of that confused moment.

As for Jerry Swaim, all farmer folk looked alike to her. It was not the sudden appearance of a stranger, but the landscape beyond him, that held her speechless, until the shrill whistle of a train broke the silence.

"Is that the Sage Brush Railroad so near?" she asked, at last, with no effort at formal greeting.

"Yes, ma'am. It is just behind the palisades over there. You can't see it from here because the sand-drifts are so high. That's the morning freight now."

The light died out of Jerry Swaim's eyes, the pink bloom faded to ivory in her cheeks, even the red lips grew pale, as she stared at the scene before her. For the oak-grove stood a lone outpost of greenness defending a more or less fertile countryside from a formless, senseless monster beyond it. Jerry had pictured herself standing in the very center of her heritage, where she might "run her eyes around," as Ponk had said, "and figure how many acres she could see, and they were all hers." And now she was here.

Wide away before her eyes rippled acre on acre, all hers, and all of billowing sand, pointed only by a few straggling green shrubs. The glare of the sunlight on it was intolerable, and the north wind, sweeping cool and sweet under the oak-trees, brought no comfort to this glaring desert.

Suddenly she recalled the pitying look in Ponk's eyes when he had begged her to wait for York Macpherson to come with her to this place, and she had thought he might be envious of her good fortune. And then she remembered that Laura Macpherson had put up the same plea for York. He was the shield and buckler for all New Eden, it would seem. And the three, Laura and York and Ponk, all knew and were pitying her, Jerry Swaim, who had been envied many a time, but never, never pitied. Even in the loss of the Swaim estate in Philadelphia, Mrs. Jerusha Darby had made it clear to every one that her pretty niece was still to be envied as a child of good fortune.

Flinging aside her hat and gloves, unconscious of the stray sunbeams sifting down through the oak boughs on her golden hair, Jerry Swaim gazed toward the railroad with wide-open, burning eyes, and her white face was pitiful to see. At length she turned to the young man who still stood leaning against the oak bough beyond her car, waiting for her to speak.

"Can I be of any service to you?" he asked, courteously.

"Who are you?" Jerry questioned, with unconscious bluntness.

"My name is Joe Thomson." The smile in his eyes lighted his face as he spoke.

"Tell me all about this place, won't you?" Jerry demanded, pointing toward the gleaming sands. "Was it always like this, here? I thought when the Lord finished the earth He looked on His work and found it good. Did He overlook this spot?"

Surprise and sarcasm and bitter disappointment were all in her tone as she asked these questions.

Joe Thomson frowned as he replied:

"It wasn't an oversight at all. There was a fine piece of prairie here until a few years ago, with only one little sandy strip zigzagging across it. Ages back, there may have been a stream along that low place yonder that dried up and blew away some time, when the forest fires changed the prehistoric woodlands into prairies. I can't be accurate about geology and such things if history and the Scriptures are silent on these fine points."

Joe Thomson still stood leaning against the oak limb. The confusion of meeting this handsome stranger had passed. He was in his own territory now, talking of things of which he knew. He knew, too, how to put his thoughts into good, expressive English.

"There are beautiful farms up the river – ranches, I mean. What has changed this prairie to such an awful place?" Jerry questioned, eagerly.

"Eastern capital and lack of brains and energy," Joe answered her. "It is just a blowout, that's all. It began in that sandy strip in that low place along over there by the railroad, where, as I say, some old river-bed, maybe the Sage Brush, might have been long ago before it made that big bend in its course up by my buildings. A crazy, money-mad fool from back East came out here and plowed up all this ground one dry season, a visionary fellow who dreamed of getting a fortune from the land without any labor. And when the thing began to look like real work he cut the whole game, just like a lot of other fools have done, and went back East, leaving all these torn, unsodded acres a plaything for the winds. There were three or four dry seasons right after that, and the soil all went to dust and blew away. But the sand grew, and multiplied, and surged over the face of this particular spot of the Lord's earth until it has come to be a tyrant of power, covering all this space and spreading slowly northward up over the next claim. That's mine."

"What is it doing to your land?" Jerry asked.

"Ruining it," Joe replied, calmly.

"And you don't go mad?" the girl cried, impulsively.

"We don't go mad on the Sage Brush till the last resort, and we don't often come to that. When we can't do one thing, out West, we do another. That's all there is to it." The smile was in his eyes again as Joe said this.

"Do you know who owns this ground now?" Jerry tried to ask as carelessly as possible.

"An estate back in Pennsylvania, I believe," Joe replied.

"What is it worth?" Jerry's voice was hardly audible.

"Look at it. What do you think it is worth, as a whole, or cut up into town lots for a summer resort?" Joe demanded.

In spite of his calmness there was a harshness in his voice, and his eyes were stern.

Jerry twisted her white hands helplessly. "I don't know – anything worth knowing," she said, faintly, looking full into the young man's face for the first time.

Afterward she remembered that he was powerfully built, that his eyes were dark, and that his teeth showed white and even, as he repeated, with a smile:

"You don't know anything worth knowing. You don't quite look the part."

"Why don't you answer my question?"

Back of the light in Jerry's eyes Joe saw that the tears were waiting, and something in her face hurt him strangely.

"I think this claim is not worth – an effort," he declared, frankly, looking out at the wind-heaved ridges of sand.

"What brought you here to look at it, then?" Jerry demanded.

"Partly to despise the fool who owned it and let it become a curse."

"Do you know him?" the girl inquired.

"No. But if I did I should despise him just the same," Joe Thomson declared.

"What if he were dead?" Jerry asked.

"Pardon me, but may I ask what brought you down here to look at such a place?" Joe interrupted her.

"I came down here to find out its value. It belongs to me. My only inheritance. I have always lived in a big city until now, and I know little of country life except its beauty and comfort, and nothing at all of the West. But I can understand you when you say that this claim is not worth an effort. I hope I shall never, never see it again. Good-by."

The firm, red lips quivered and the blue eyes looked up through real tears as Jerry Swaim drew on her gloves and fitted the soft blue hat down on the golden glory of her hair. Then without another word she turned her car about and sped away.

II

JERRY AND JOE

VII

UNHITCHING THE WAGON FROM A STAR

How long is a mid-June day? Ticked off by the almanac, it is so much time as lies between the day-dawn and the dark of evening. But Jerry Swaim lived a lifetime in that June day in which she went out to enter upon her heritage. From the moment she had turned away from the young farmer under the oak-trees until she reached the forks of the road again she did not take cognizance of a single object. The three big cottonwood sentinels, the vine-covered ranch-home, the deep bend of the Sage Brush to the eastward, were passed unnoted. Ponk's gray gadabout seemed to know the way home like a faithful horse.

There was no apparent reason why the junction of the two highways should have momentarily called the bewildered disappointed girl to her calmer self. No more was there anything logical in her choosing to turn again down the narrow river road. The lone old fisherman was the farthest down in the scale from Geraldine Swaim of any human being who had ever shown her a favor. He could not have had any interest for her… But York Macpherson was correct in his estimate of Jerry. She was a type in herself alone. She drove far beyond the narrow place by the deep hole where, with accurate eye and clear skill, she had played a game of chance with the river and fate and guardian angels. Her tires had cut a wide, curving gash across the sand of the road.

"My gracious alive! that was a close turn!" she exclaimed, as she caught sight of her wheel-marks. "No wonder the old Teddy Bear looked scared. One inch or less! Well, there was that inch. But what for? To enter on my vast landed – vast sanded – estate in the kingdom of Kansas!"

Jerry smiled grimly in ridicule of her foolish, defrauded self. Then in a desperate effort to blot out of mind what she had seen she hurled the gray car madly forward. With the bewildered gropings of a shipwrecked landsman she was struggling to get her bearings, she for whom the earth had been especially designed. As the hours passed the road became dry and sunny, with the north breeze tempering the air to the coolness of a rare Kansas June day, entirely unlike the hot and windy one on which Jerry had first come up this valley. She did not, in reality, cover many miles now, because she made long stops in sheltered places and at times let the gray machine merely creep on the sunny stretches, but in her mind she had girdled the universe.

In the late afternoon she turned about wearily, as one who has yet many leagues of ground to cover before nightfall. The sunlight glistened along the surface of the river and a richer green gleamed in what had been the shadowy places earlier in the day; but the driver in the car paid little heed to the lights and shadows of the way.

"If a man went right with himself." Cornelius Darby's words came drifting across the girl's mind. "Poor Uncle Cornie! He didn't begin to live, to me, until he was gone. Maybe he knew what it meant for a man not to go right with himself. And if a woman went right with herself!"

Jerry halted her car again by the deep hole and looked at nothing where the Sage Brush waters were rippling over the rough ledge in its bed. For the first time since she had sat under the oak-trees and looked at the acres that were hers, Jerry Swaim really found herself on solid ground again. The bloom came slowly back to the ashy cheeks, and the light into the dark-blue eyes.

"If I can only go right with myself, I shall not fail. I need time, that's all. There will be a letter from Eugene waiting when I get back to town, and that will make up for a lot. There must be some way out of all the mistakes, too. It wasn't my land that I saw. Mr. Ponk must have directed me wrongly. That country fellow may not know the facts. I'll go back and ask York Macpherson right away. Only, he's gone out of town for two days. Oh dear!"

She wrung her hands as the picture of that oak-grove and all that lay beyond it came vividly before her. She tried to forget it and for a moment she smiled to herself deceivingly, and then – the smile was gone and by the determined set of her lips Jerry was her father's own resolute child again.

"I don't exactly know what next, except that I'm hungry. Why, it is five o'clock! Where has this day gone, and where am I, anyhow?"

Her eyes fell on the broad ruts across the road. Then back in the bushes she caught a glimpse of a low roof.

"I smell fish frying. I'll starve to death if I wait to get back to the Commercial Hotel!" Jerry exclaimed. "Here's the wayside inn where I find comfort for man and beast."

She called sharply with her horn. In a minute the fuzzy brown fisherman came shuffling along the narrow path through the bushes.

"I'm dreadfully hungry," Jerry said, bluntly.

It did not occur to her to explain to this creature why she happened to be here and hungry at this time. She wanted something; that was sufficient.

"Can't you let me have some of your fish? I am desperate," she went on, smiling at the surprised face of the man who stared up at her in silence.

"Yes'm, I can give you what I eat. Just a minute," he squeaked out, at last. Then he shuffled back to where the bit of roof showed through the leaves.

While the girl waited a tall, slender woman came around the brushy bend ahead. She halted in the middle of the road and stared a moment at Jerry; then she came forward rapidly and passed the car without looking up. She wore a plain, grayish-green dress, with a sunbonnet of the same hue covering her face – all very much like the bushes out of which she seemed to have come and into which she seemed to melt again. In her hand she carried a big parcel lightly, as if its weight was slight. As Jerry turned and looked after her with a passing curiosity, she saw that the woman was looking back also. The young city-bred girl had felt no fear of the strange country fellow in the far-away oak-grove; she had no fear of this uncouth fisherman in this lonely hidden place; but when she caught a mere glimpse of this woman's eyes staring at her from under the shadows of the deep sunbonnet a tremor of real fright shook her hands grasping the steering-wheel. It passed quickly, however, with the reappearance of the host of the wayside inn.

"This is delicious," Jerry exclaimed, as the hard scaly hands lifted a smooth board bearing her meal up to her.

Fried fish, hot corn-bread, baked in husks in the ashes, wild strawberries with coarse brown sugar sprinkled on them, and a cup of fresh buttermilk.

The girl ate with the healthy appetite that youth, a long fast, a day in the open, and a well-cooked meal can create. When she had finished she laid a silver half-dollar on the board beside the cracked plate.

"'Tain't nuthin'; no, 'tain't nuthin'. I jis' divided with ye," the fisherman insisted, shrilly.

"Oh, it is worth a dollar to drink this good buttermilk!"

Jerry lifted the cup, a shining silver mug, and turned it in the light. It was of an old pattern, with a quaint monogram on one side.

"This looks like an heirloom," she thought. "Why should a bear with cracked plates and iron knives and forks offer me a drink in a silver cup? There must be a story back of it. Maybe he's a nobleman in disguise. Well, the disguise is perfect. After all, it's as good as a novel to live in Kansas."

Jerry slowly sipped the drink as these thoughts ran through her mind. The meal was helping wonderfully to take the edge off of the tragedy of the morning. It would overwhelm her again later, but in this shady, restful solitude it slipped away.

She smiled down at the old man at the thought of him in a story. Him! But the smile went straight to his heart; that was Jerry's gift, making him drop his board tray and break the cracked plate in his confusion.

"Here's another quarter. That was my fault," Jerry insisted.

"Oh no'm, no'm! 'Tain't nobody's fault." The voice quavered as the scaly brown hand thrust back the proffered coin.

Jerry could not understand why this creature should refuse her money. Tipping, to her mind, covered all the obligations her class owed to the lower strata of the earth's formation.

At sunset York Macpherson drove into Ponk's garage.

"Hello, fellow-townsman! You look like a sick man!" he exclaimed, as the owner met him in the doorway.