The Reclaimers

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 compass. 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 association she had almost forgotten the incident of the porch conversation about her. To Ponk's anxious query, "What will you do?" (nobody 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."

"And if you don't?" Laura asked.

The answer was lost, for Mrs. Bahrr turned and fled across lots, by alley gate and side walk-way and vacant yard, to her own rear door. One of Mrs. Bahrr's strong points was that of being more ready than her antagonist and her habit of thought had made her world an antagonistic one.

York was curious to see how Jerry would meet her Waterloo, for that was what this encounter would become, and he was glad that she had asked him to go with her instead of running off alone, as she had done when she wanted to see her estate.

Seated in the little front parlor, Jerry took her time to survey the place before she came to her errand. It was a very humble home, with a rag carpet, windows without draperies, but with heavy blinds; chairs that became unsettled if one rocked in them; cheap, unframed chromos tacked up on the walls; an old parlor organ; and a stand with a crazy-quilt style of cover on which rested a dusty Bible. York saw a look of pity in Jerry's eyes where three months before he felt sure there would have been only disdain.

Very simply and frankly the girl told the purpose of her call, ending with what might have been a command, but it was spoken in the clear, soft voice that had always won her point in any argument.

"Whether these stories came from you or not you will be sure not to repeat them."

Stella Bahrr bristled with anger. Whatever might have been said behind her back, nobody except York Macpherson and Junius Brutus Ponk had ever spoken so plainly to her face before. And they had never spoken in the presence of a third party. And here comes a pretty, silly young thing with a child's Sunday-school talk to her, right in York's presence, in her own house. Jerry Swaim would pay well for her rudeness.

"I don't know as it's up to me to keep still when everybody's talkin'. I won't promise nothin'. An' I 'ain't got nothin' to be afraid of." Mrs. Bahrr hooked her eyes viciously into her caller.

"I'm afraid of a good many things, but I'm not so very much afraid of people. I was a little afraid of you the first time I saw you. You remember where that was, of course."

Jerry looked straight at Mrs. Bahrr with wide-open eyes. Something in her face recalled Jim Swaim's face to York Macpherson, and he forgot the girl's words as he stared at her.

"When I was a child," Jerry continued, "they used to say to me, 'The goblins 'll git you ef you don't watch out.' Now I know it is the Teddy Bear that gits you ef you don't watch out."

Mrs. Bahrr's lips seemed to snap together and her eyes tore their way out of Jerry and turned to the window. Jerry stepped softly across to her chair and, laying a hand on her shoulder, said, with a smile:

"Hereafter it will be all right between us."

And it was – apparently.

As they walked slowly homeward York and Jerry said little. The girl's mind was busy with thoughts of her new work – the only work she had ever attempted in her life; and York's thoughts were busy with – Jerry.

That night York sat alone on the porch of "Castle Cluny" until far toward morning, beginning at last to fight out with himself the great battle of his life. The big, kindly, practical man of affairs, arrow-proof, bullet-proof, bomb-proof to all the munitions of Cupid, courted and flattered and admired and looked up to by a whole community, seemed hopelessly enmeshed now in the ripples of golden-brown hair, held fast by the beautiful dark-blue eyes of a young lady whose strength to withstand what lay before her he very much doubted.

"If I speak to her now, she'll run away from us and leave Laura lonely. She can't go to the hotel, because I know Ponk has tried and failed. I'm one degree behind him in that. Where would she go? And how would the Big Dipper act? I've no faith in her keeping still if Jerry did use some magic on her to-night. Nobody will ever Rumpelstilskin her out of herself. I'll be a man, and wait and befriend my little girl whenever I can, although I'm forced every day to see how she is growing to take care of herself. When nothing else can decide events, time is sure to settle them."

All this happened at the beginning of the three years whose ending came in a June-time on the Kansas plains. Summer and winter, many a Sabbath afternoon saw the hotel-keeper and the pretty mathematics-teacher strolling out to the cemetery "to call on mother." The quaint, firm faith of the pompous little man that "mother knew" had no place in Jerry Swaim's code and creed. But she never treated his belief lightly, and its homely sincerity at length began to bear fruit.

Not without its lasting effect, too, was the silent influence of Laura Macpherson upon her guest. The bright, happy life in spite of a hopeless lameness, the cheerful giving up of what that lameness denied the having, all unconsciously wrought its beauty into the new Jerry whom the "Eden" of an earlier day had never known. Nobody remembered when the guest and friend of the Macphersons began to be a factor in the New Eden church life, but everybody knew at the close of the third year that the churches couldn't do without her. And neither the Baptist minister, holding tenaciously to salvation by immersion, nor the Presbyterian, clinging to the doctrine of infant damnation, nor the Methodist, demanding instantaneous revival-meeting conversion from sin, asked once that the fair Philadelphian should "become united with the church." That would necessitate the query, "Which church?" And that would mean a loss to two and a gain to only one. As far as the blowout sand differed from "Eden" on the Winnowoc, so far Jerry's religious faith now differed from the disbelief that followed the death of her father. In Kansas where the artistic Eugene Wellington had declared his own faith would perish, she had learned for the first time how to pray.

Letters had long since ceased to come from Aunt Jerry Darby to her niece, although in a friendly and patiently expectant form Eugene Wellington wrote beautiful missives breathing more and more of commercialized ideals and less and less of esthetic dreams, and not at all of the faith that had marked the spiritual refinement of his young manhood.

The third spring brought busy, trying days. A sick teacher made it necessary for the well ones to do double work. The youngest Lenwell boy, leader of the Senior class, started the annual and eternally trivial and annoying Senior-class fuss that seems fated to precede most high-school commencements. For two years it had been Jerry Swaim, whose mathematical mind seemed gifted with a wonderful generalship, who had managed to bring the class to harmony with an ease never known in the New Eden High School before. This year Clare Lenwell was perfectly irreconcilable, and Jerry, overworked, as willing teachers always are, was too busy to bring the belligerents to time before the bitterness of a town-split was upon the community. When she did come to the rescue of the superintendent, his own inefficiency to cope with the case became so evident that he at once turned against the young woman who "tried to run things," as he characterized her to the school board.

That caused an explosion of heavy artillery from the "Commercial Hotel and Garage," which made one member of the board, an uncle of young Lenwell, to rise in arms, and thus and so the fires of dissension crisscrossed the town, threatening to fulmine over the whole Sage Brush Valley. To make the matter more difficult, the town trouble-maker, Stellar Bahrr, for once seemed to have been innocently drawn into the thing, and everybody knew it was better to have Stellar Bahrr's good-will than to start her tongue.

York Macpherson and Junius Brutus Ponk both felt sure that Stellar had really stirred up the Lenwells, for whom she was constantly sewing; and, besides, a distant relative of theirs had married into the Bahrr family back where Stellar came from, "which must have been the Ark," Ponk declared, "and the other one of the pair died of seasickness." Anyhow, the local school row became the local town row, and it was a very real and bitter row.

In these days of little foxes that were threatening the whole vineyard, Jerry turned more and more to Joe Thomson. All of New Eden was tied up in the fuss, took sides, and talked it, except the Macphersons and a few of their friends, and they talked it without taking sides because the thing was in the air constantly. Jerry could not find even in "Castle Cluny" a refuge from what was uninteresting to her and thoroughly distasteful in itself. Ponk, being by nature a rabid little game-cock, was full of the thing, and was no more companionable than the Macphersons. But when the quiet ranchman came up from the lower Sage Brush country, his dark eyes glowing with pleasure and his poised mind unbiased by neighborhood failings, he brought the breath of sweet clover with his coming. When Jerry came home from their long rides up-stream – they never rode toward the blowout region – she felt as if she had a new grip on life and energy and ambition for her work. Joe was becoming, moreover, the best of entertainers, and the comradeship was the one thing Jerry had learned to prize most in her new life in the Middle West.

When the spring had slipped into early May Joe's visits grew less frequent, on account of his spring work. And once or twice he came to town and hurried away without even seeing Jerry. It comforted her greatly – she did not ask herself why – that he did drop a note into the post-office for her, telling her he was in town and regretting that he must hurry out without calling.

It was during this time that Thelma Ekblad came up to New Eden to do some extensive shopping and spend a week with the Macphersons. There were other guests at "Castle Cluny," and Thelma and Jerry shared the same room.

Back in "Eden" the heir apparent would never have dreamed of sharing anything with a Winnowoc grub. How times change us! Or do we change them?

Thelma was sunny-natured, spotlessly neat in her dress, and altogether vastly more companionable to Jerry than the Lenwell girls, who would persist in pleading their little high-school Senior brother's cause; or even the associate teachers, who were troubled and tired and overworked like herself.

Jerry had met Thelma often, and thought of her oftener, in the three years since they had come upon the Sage Brush branch of the local freight together one hot, sand-blown June day, three summers before. She had woven a romance about Thelma. Romances seemed now to belong to other people. They never came to her. She was glad, however, when Thelma's shopping was done and she went back to the farm down the Sage Brush, and her brother Paul, and the growing, joyous Belkap child who filled the plain farm-house with interest.

Stellar Bahrr, in Jerry's presence, had spoken ill of no one since the memorable call three years ago. On the evening after Thelma left town she cork-screwed over to "Castle Cluny" for a friendly chat with Laura.

"I run in to see Thelmy Ekblad. She 'ain't gone home, is she? Got her shopping all done a'ready? Some girls can buy their weddin' finery quicker 'n scat. Did she say who was to make that new white dress she was buyin' yesterday at the Palace Emporium?" This straight at Jerry, who was resting lazily in the porch swing after an unusually annoying day.

"Not to me," Jerry replied, sliding another pillow behind her shoulders and leaning back comfortably.

"Well, well! I s'posed girls always told them things to each other. 'Specially if they slep' together. She's gettin' a mighty fine man, though – Thelmy is – at least, folks says she's gettin' him. He's there a lot, 'specially 'long this spring. His farm's right near her and Paul's. And she's one prince of a girl. Don't you say so, Miss Swaim?"

Jerry smiled in spite of herself, saying: "Yes, she's a prince of a girl. I like her." And then, because she was tired that night, both of Stellar and her topic, and the whole Sage Brush Valley, she turned away that neither Laura nor Stellar might see how much she wanted to cry.

But turning was futile. Mrs. Bahrr's eyes went right through the girl and she knew her shaft had hit home.

Joe had not been to town for weeks. It didn't matter to Jerry. Yet the next day after Stellar's call lacked something – and the next and the next. Not a definite lack, for Jerry's future was settled forever.

Down on the Sage Brush ranches Joe Thomson was trying to believe that things wouldn't matter, too, if they failed to go his way. These were lonely days for the young ranchman, who saw little of Jerry Swaim because every possible minute of his time was given to wrestling with the blowout.

There were many more lonely days, also, for Jerry, who now began to miss Joe more than she thought it could be possible to miss anybody except Gene Wellington, idealized into a sad and beautiful memory that kept alive an unconscious hope. And, with all her energy and her determination, many things combined to make her school-room duty a hard task to one whose training had been so unfitting for serious labor. The flesh-pots of the Winnowoc came temptingly to her memory, and there were weary hours when the struggle to be sure and satisfied was greater than her friends could have dreamed.

The third winter of her stay had seen an unusual snowfall for the Sage Brush, and this spring following was an unusually rainy one. Everywhere rank vegetation flourished, prairies reveled in luxurious growths, and cultivated fields were burdened with the promise of record-breaking harvests.

York Macpherson's business had begun to call him to the East for prolonged trips, and he had less knowledge than formerly of the details of the affairs of New Eden and its community.

One day not long after Thelma's shopping trip Joe Thomson dropped into the office of the Macpherson Mortgage Company.

"How's the blowout?" This had become York's customary greeting.

"Never gentler." Joe's face was triumphant and his dark eyes were shining with hope. "This rainy season and the good old steam-plows are doing their perfect work. You haven't had any sand-storms lately, maybe you have noticed. Well, wheat is growing green and strong over more than half of that land now. There's not so much sand to spare as there used to be."

"You don't mean it!" York exclaimed, incredulously.

"Go and look at it yourself, you doubting old Missourian who must be shown," Joe retorted. "There's a stretch on the northeast toward the bend in the Sage Brush that is low and baked hard after the rains, and shifty and infernally stubborn in the dry weather."

York meditated awhile, combing his heavy hair with his fingers. "The river runs by your place?" he asked, at length.

"Yes, my house is right at the bend, and there is no sand across the Sage Brush," Joe replied.

"Well, the blowout will never stop till it gets up to the south bank of the bend. As I've told you already, you'll have to take the Lord Almighty into partnership to work a miracle. Otherwise this creeping up from behind and beyond the thing will be a never-ending job of time and money and labor. You'll never catch up with it. It's just too everlastingly big, that's all. You'll be gray-bearded, and bald-headed, and deaf, and dim-sighted before you are through."

"I will not," Joe declared, doggedly. "And I've already told you that I've always taken the Lord Almighty into partnership, or I'd have been a derelict on a sea of sand lang syne."

"Joe, your faith in the Lord and faith in the prairies might move mountains, but they haven't yet moved the desert."

"Not entirely," Joe replied, "but if I do my part, who knows what Providence may do?"

As he sat there in the hope and strength of his youth, something in Joe Thomson's expectant face brought a pang to the man beside him.

"Joe, your lease will soon expire. I said to you three years ago that women are shiftier than blowouts. You didn't believe me, but it's the truth."

"Naturally the Macpherson Mortgage Company must acquire much knowledge of such things in the development of their business," Joe responded, jokingly. "Little Thelma Ekblad on the claim above mine has helped to pay off the mortgage your company held, and sent herself to the university, working in the harvest-fields and at the hay-baler to do it. Thelma never seemed shifty to me. She's a solid little rock of a woman who never flinches."

"I'll except Thelma. You ought – " But York went no further, for he knew Joe's spirit would not respond to his thought, and he had no business to be thinking, anyhow. He had known Joe Thomson from childhood. He admired Jerry Swaim greatly for what she had been doing, but he knew much of the Philadelphia end of the game, and his heart ached for the young Westerner, who, he believed, had shouldered a stupendous, tragical burden for the sake of a heart-longing only a strong nature like Joe's could know.

"By the way, Jerry Swaim's aunt, back East, is in a bad way and may die at any time, but she will never forgive Jerry to the point of inheritance. I happen to be in the old lady's confidence that far."

"You are a social Atlas, York," Joe declared. "You hold the world on your shoulders. But what you say doesn't interest me at all. So don't prejudge any of us, maid or man."

"And don't you let your bloomin' self-confidence and ability to work half-miracles be your undoing. A house builded on the sand may fall, where one built on gold dust may stand firm," York retorted.

"Do you believe your own words?" Joe asked, rising to his feet.

"The point is for you to believe them, whether I do or not," York answered, as Joe disappeared through the doorway.

"Why, in the name of fitness, can't that fellow fall in love with that little Thelma Ekblad, a girl who knows what sacrifice on the Sage Brush means and who has a grip on the real values of life? Oh, well, just to watch the crowd run awry ought to be entertainment enough for a bachelor like myself," York thought, as he sat staring after Joe. "I've lived to see a few half-miracles myself in the last decade. Anybody whose lot is cast in western Kansas can see as many of them as the old Santa Fé Trail bull-whackers saw of mirages in the awful 'fifties. There's a lot of reclaiming being done on the Sage Brush, even if that struggle of Joe's with the blowout is a failure. Thelma Ekblad in her splendid victory over ignorance, carrying a university degree; Stellar Bahrr" – York smiled, "Ponk, who would put a flourish after his name if he were signing his own death-warrant, the little hero of a hundred knocks, living above everything but his funny little strut, and he's getting over that a bit; old Fishing Teddy, brave old soul, down in his old shack alone; Jerry, with her luxurious laziness and doubt in God and a hereafter – all winning slowly to better things, maybe; but as to sand and Joe —

"'Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook?' You'll never do it, Joe, never, and you'll never win the goal you've set your heart on. Poor fellow!"

That night, on the silent porch alone, York finished the battle he had begun on the evening after he and Jerry had called on Stella Bahrr.

"It's the artist bank clerk against the field, and we'll none of us bat above his average. Good night, old moon, and good night, York, to what can't be."

He waved a hand at the dying light in the west, and a dying hope, and went inside.