The Reclaimers

Behind a sealed tomb of a ticket-window Jerry could hear the "tick-tick, tick-a-tick-tick, tick-tick" of a telegraph-wire. Somebody must be in there who at set times, like a Saint Serapion from his hermit cell, might open this blank wall and speak in almost human tones. Just now the solitude of the grave prevailed, save for that everlasting "tick-a-tick" behind the wall.

When Jerry Swaim gripped her hands on the plow handles, there would be no looking back. She persuaded herself that she wasn't going to die of the jiggermaroos in the empty nothingness here. It would be very different at New Eden, she was sure of that. And this York Macpherson must be a nice old man, honest and easy-going, because he had never realized any income from her big Kansas estate. She pictured York easily – a short, bald-headed old gentleman with gray burnsides and benevolent pale-blue eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, driving a fat sorrel nag to an easy-going old Rockaway buggy, carrying a gold-headed cane given him by the Sunday-school. Jerry had seen his type all her life in the business circles of Philadelphia and among the better-to-do country-dwellers around "Eden."

At last it was only fifteen minutes till the Sage Brush train would be due; then she could find comfort in her Pullman berth. She wondered what Aunt Jerry and Eugene were doing now. She had slipped away from "Eden" on her wild adventure in the early dawn. She had taken leave of Aunt Jerry the night before. Old women need their beauty sleep in the morning, even if foolish young things are breaking all the laws by launching out to hunt their fortunes. Eugene had been hurriedly sent away on Darby estate matters without the opportunity of a leave-taking, two days before Jerry was ready to start for Kansas. Everything was prearranged, evidently, to make this going a difficult one. So, without a single good-by to speed her on her quest, the young girl had gone out from a sheltering Eden of beauty and idleness. But the tears that had dimmed her eyes came only when she left the lilac walk to the station to slip around by Uncle Cornie's grave beside the green-coverleted resting-places of Jim and Lesa Swaim.

"Maybe mother would glory in what I am doing, and father might say I had the right stuff in me. And Uncle Cornie – 'If a man went right with himself' – Uncle Cornie might have said 'if a woman went right with herself,' too. I'm going to put that meaning into his words, even if he never seemed to think much of women. Oh, father! Oh, mother! You lived before you died, anyhow, and I'm going to do the same. Uncle Cornie died before he ever really lived."

Jerry stretched out her hands to the one good-by in "Eden" coming to her from these silent ripples of dewy green sod. Then youth and the June morning and the lure of adventure into new lands came with their triple strength to buoy her up to do and dare. Behind her were her lover to be – for Eugene must love her – her home ties, luxury, dependent inactivity. Before her lay the very ends of the earth, the Kansas end especially. The spirit of Sir Galahad, of Robinson Crusoe, of Don Quixote, combined with the spirit of a self-willed, inexperienced girl, but dimly conscious yet of what lay back of her determination to go forth —because she wanted to go.

Chicago and Kansas City offered easy ports for clearing. And the Kaw Valley, unrolling its broad acres along the way, gave larger promise than Jerry had yet dared to dream of for the New Eden farther west. The train service, after the manner of a Pacific Coast limited, had been perfect in every appointment. And then – this junction episode.

Two eternity-long hours before the Sage Brush branch could take her to New Eden were almost ended.

"It's not so terrifying, after all." Jerry was beginning to "see things again." "It's all in the game – and I am going to be as 'game' as the thing I am playing. Things always come round all right for me. They must."

The square white chin was very much a family feature just now. And the shapely hands had no hint of weakness in their grip on the iron arms of the station seat.

The door which the wind had slammed shut was slammed open again as three prospective passengers for the Sage Brush train slammed through it laden with luggage. At the same time the sealed-up ticket-window flew open, showing the red, grinning face of the tick-tick man behind its iron bars. If Jerry had never paid the slightest heed to the bunch of grubs on the Winnowoc branch, except as they kept down the ventilation, or crowded their odors of Limburger on her offended senses, the Sage Brush grubs were a thousandfold less worthy of her consideration. As the three crowded to the ticket-window, laughing among themselves, she stared through the doorway, unconsciously reading the names on the cars of a freight-train slowly heaving down alongside the station. Who invented freight-cars, anyhow? The most uninteresting and inartistic thing ever put on wheels by the master mechanic of the unbeautiful, created mainly to shut off the view of mankind from what is really worth looking at. Jerry read the dulled lettering mechanically: "Santa Fé" with its symbol of a fat cross in a circle, "Iron Mountain," "Great Northern," "Rock Island," "Frisco," "Union Pacific," "Grand Trunk," came creeping by. "New York Central," "Lehigh Valley," "Pennsylvania Line." These took her back to "Eden" and the Winnowoc country. The station building shook; the ugly old cars slam-banged a bit faster back and forth; the engine, with the breath almost knocked out of it, was puffing down by the switch, and the whole body behind it quivered to a standstill. But Jerry Swaim's tear-blurred eyes were seeing only the green fields of the Darby country-place and the rose-arbor and Eugene Wellington. A voice loud, but not unpleasant, and a laugh, a merry, catching, giggling guffaw, drove the picture of "Eden" and all that belonged to it into "viewless air" that went flapping and flaring across the Kansas landscape.

"You don't mean it! He, he! Haw!" Everybody must smile now. "The old Sage Brush local is locoed 'way up toward S'liny. Engine shortage, car shortage, common sense shortage. He, he! And we must ride in that sunflower de luxe limited standing out there. Come on, Thelmy. You can take lower nothin', car one-half. We'll soar in now while the soarin's good."

Jerry looked at the bunch of grubs for the first time. One had to see where that big gloom-chasing giggle came from. Thelma was a spotlessly clean, well-made country product, wherein the girl had easily given place to the woman, erect, full-bosomed, strong of frame. The hazel eyes were arched over by heavy brown brows. There was no rosebud curve to the rather wide mouth that showed a set of magnificent white teeth. The brown hair wound braid on braid about the head was proof of the glory of Saint Paul's scriptural decree. Not that Jerry Swaim really noted any of these features. She merely saw a country girl – a not offensive native. The native's comrade, he with the big-laugh fixtures, was short and stout, with a round face on the front side of a round head, set on top of a tight-built body. Grub though he was, Jerry involuntarily smiled with him. That far the fat little man controlled everybody. But the funny little strut in his gait as he walked was irresistible. The third passenger, the grubbiest of the three grubs, was a nondescript of whose presence Jerry was not even aware until she heard his voice. It was a thin, high, unused voice, and its pitch wabbled up and down.

"Be you goin' on the Sage Bresh train, lady?"

The questioner had turned back after the country girl and the fat man had passed out.

Jerry looked at him without taking his question to herself. His shoes, draped with wrinkled-down hose, were very much worn. His overalls flapping around his legs, his shirt and neck and face and hair and hat, were all of one complexion, a fuzzy, yellow brown.

"Be you goin' on this train, too?"

It was a humble, kindly voice, and the scaly old hand holding the door open against the high prairie wind was only a fisherman's hand. The deep-set eyes in the yellow-brown old face were trained to read the river; the patient mouth set to wait for the catch of lines and nets.

Jerry had never in her life spoken to such a creature. So far as she was concerned, he did not exist.

"This is the only train on the Sage Bresh to-day, lady. The reg'lar train's busted through a culbert out yander," the high, quavering voice persisted.

A sharp tooting from the engine down the line emphasized the statement, and Jerry saw the grinning red-faced tick-tick man hastily wheeling mail-sacks and sundry other parcels by the door. In a bewildered way she rose and passed out, giving no recognition to the shabby old man who had been thoughtful of her ignorance.

"We gotta go to the last car down yander, lady," the old man squeaked out, as he started down the cinder-paved way with a bearlike, shuffling, sidewise sort of gait.

Jerry followed him slowly to "the last car down yander."

A plain day coach, the sixtieth and last vertebra in this long mechanical spine, was already crowded with a bunch of grubs, none of whom could belong to Jerry Swaim's sphere. Moreover, they were all tightly packed in and wedged down so that it was impossible to detect the leaving off of the full-fare passenger and the beginning of suit-cases, old-style telescopes, baskets, bundles, boxes, half-fare children, bags of fruit, lunch-crates, pieces of farming tools, babes in arms, groceries – everything to cabbages and kings. Jerry wondered where all these things came from. Every object in that car, human being or salt pork, crying baby or kingbolt, was a thing to Jerry Swaim. And all of them were very warm and nervously tense, as if the hot June wind had blown them all inside, that the hot June sun, through the closed windows, might stew them stinkily; or, through the open windows, grime their sweaty faces with hot dust off the hot prairie. There was only one vacant seat left. It was on the shady side, facing the rear of the car, and was half occupied already by the humble grub of the squeaky voice. The girl, Thelma, and the fat little man had taken the seat opposite him. As Jerry entered the car the little man was on his feet, bowing and strutting and insisting that a woman with a babe in arms should exchange seats with him, putting her on the cool side, while he took her place in the sun across the aisle from Thelma. In the transfer he did not see Jerry, who was looking in vain for an opening in that mass of "human various." It was the humble grub who saw her standing there. Evidently his little yellow-green eyes took her measure at a glance, but he did not spread out his effects and stare out of the window as some other men were doing, nor gather himself and his into his own half of the seat to make room for her beside him. He rose, and in a shrill little quaver he bade her take his place. It did not occur to Jerry to tell him that there was room for two, as she saw him shuffle down the aisle with a queer, limping hitch. In the same impersonal way she watched him through the open door, sitting on the rear platform during the long afternoon, humpbacked against the cinders and dust that beat upon him, swaying with the rocking car, jerked along over a sun-baked, treeless prairie at the tail of a long jerky freight-train. He meant nothing to this dainty city product; his kind had never entered her world; no more had the red-faced, tow-headed young mother, with white eyebrows and hat knocked rakishly aslant, with her big, restless, bald-headed baby rolling over her in waves, sprawling about Thelma, and threatening to bump its head off as it overflowed all the narrow space, aimlessly and persistently.

But if Jerry Swaim felt out of her element in this company, her fellow-passengers felt much more embarrassed by her presence. Thelma's neat gingham dress became limp and mussy and common. The tired mother's yellow lawn was rumpled into a dish-rag. And with every jerk of the train she lost a hair-pin from her tow hair that was already stringing down in long wisps on her neck. The baby, really a happy, white, blue-veined infant, became a fussy flushed impossibility.

All this, it seemed, just because of the presence of a faultlessly dressed, fair-faced stranger who awed everybody by not seeing them, but whose very daintiness and beauty drew them hungrily to her. Nobody could be in Jerry Swaim's presence and not feel the spell of her inherent magnetism.

The laughter and complaints of the passengers dulled down to endurance. Only the face of the short man wore a smile. But his mouth was made with that kind of a curve, and he couldn't help it. Breathing deeply and perspiring healthfully, he sat against the heat streaming into his side of the car, and forgot his troubles in his unbreakable good nature. For a long time he and Thelma had talked across the aisle above and through the train's noises. Their talk was all of Paul and Joe's place, and the crops; of how glad Thelma was to be at home again on Paul's account; and how long it would take her yet if the alfalfa and wheat turned out well.

Jerry heard it all without knowing it, as she looked at the monotonous landscape without knowing it. And then the dry prairies began to deepen to a richer hue. Yellow wheat-fields and low-growing corn and stretches of alfalfa broke into the high plains where cattle grazed. And then came the gleam of a river, sometimes shallow along sandy levels, sometimes deep, with low overhanging brush on either side. And there were cottonwood-trees and low twisted elms and scrubby locust and oak saplings, and the faint, fresh scent of moisture livening the air.

The train jerked itself to a standstill, thought better of it, and hunched along again for a rod or two, then jostled itself quiet again.

Jerry was very drowsy now, but she was conscious of hearing the fat man calling out, cheerfully:

"Home at last, Thelmy. There's Paul waiting for you. Well, good-by."

And of Thelma's "Good-by" in a louder tone than was necessary. Of more strutting and bowing and no end of luggage clearing itself away.

Through the window Jerry caught sight of a tall, fair-haired boy, who looked like Thelma, except that in his white face was the pathos of the life-cripple. She saw Thelma kiss him, and then the two started down the sunny, cindery side-track together. In the distance, close to the river, there was a small plain house under a big cottonwood-tree. The glimpse of red about a little porch meant that the crimson ramblers were in bloom there. Oh, the roses of "Eden," and the cool rose-arbor! Jerry must have dreamed then, for "Eden" was about her again. Through it the limping grub came humbly to claim his sundry own from behind and under the seat. Even in "Eden" she thought how much like a clumsy bear his gait was. And when the little man called him "Teddy" she knew he was not a fisherman sort of creature, but a real bear in yellow-brown overalls, and that the general fuzziness of his make-up was fur, and that his stubby, scaly hands were claws. He dropped off somewhere when the freight took a siding very near the river. It was the Sage Brush, but it ran through the "Eden" grounds and Uncle Cornie was throwing his discus beside it. The rose-arbor was just across the aisle. The little fat man was sitting in its doorway, with a new moon of a smile on the smooth side of his round head where his face was, a half-quizzical, half-sympathetic smile with no guile in it. Jerry really liked him for that kind of a smile. It belonged to him. The rose-arbor was very warm, for the man was sweating more copiously than ever… Uncle Cornie was gone. The limping Teddy Bear was gone… It was very, very hot and sunny in "Eden." The big maples and cool lilacs were gone… "Eden" was gone. In its stead came the art exhibit in the cool gallery in the city. And that yellow-gray desert landscape with the flaming afterglow and purple mists. The flames seemed almost real, and the yellow gray almost real, and the art-gallery was getting warmer as "Eden" had done. It was positively hot… And then the Sage Brush freight was laboring slowly and painfully through a desert with clack and roar and cloud of cindery dust… Jerry sat up, wide awake, and looked up at the fat stranger who was looking at her, the smile on the inside of his face, as it were, showing only in the eyes.

Outside, the river was gone, taking with it all the cool-breathing alfalfa, and elm and cottonwood shade, and leaving in their stead only bare earth-ridges and low dunes. As far as Jerry could see, there was nothing but a hot yellow plain, wrinkled here and there in great barren folds, with wave and crest and hollow of wind-shifted sand crawling endlessly back and forth along the face of the landscape. A few spiny green shrubs struggled through at intervals, but their presence only intensified the barrenness about them.

The train was entering a deep wrinkle not unlike that cut beyond the third crossing of the Winnowoc. Jerry remembered the day she had watched that other train from the bluff road, and her exultation in pounding her big car up the steep way instead of crawling through, as Eugene was doing. Later she had found out that Eugene really preferred that to the more daring climb. Jerry involuntarily gripped the car seat with a subconscious longing to get out and drive over the whole thing. Across the aisle, the smile on the fat man's face was coming outside as he watched the stranger passenger.

They were deep in now – a valley-like thing that was hotter than any other inch of the whole way they had come. On either side tall slabs of timber, planted upright, closed in the right of way. They were barely moving through this narrow lane. The engine was gasping for breath, and the cars dragged themselves after it by inches. Then all came to a dead stop.

"Everybody turn out and help," somebody in uniformed authority called through the car door, and all the men passengers stirred to action.

"The dickens!" the short fat man exclaimed to everybody. "Stuck in a sand-drift in that danged blowout. That's what comes of letting this wind go all day. I told 'em up at the junction to stop it, but they wouldn't listen to me. Now we've got to soar out of here and shovel for our lives."

When he laughed everybody else had to laugh, too, and it was a really good-natured company of men that piled down from the train to help the cause of railway transportation.

The fat man had been last to leave the car.

"Let me close all these windows," he urged, strutting from seat to seat. "It'll be hot with 'em shut, but you'll be buried in sand in here if we leave 'em open, and we men don't want to dig you and the engine all out in one day. We mightn't find all the children, you know, and leave some of 'em in here covered up. He, he! Haw!" He struggled with the last windows until they were sealed down, then turned away to lend his aid in a good cause.

The tow-headed woman and her little perpetual-motion baby, who had been sleeping wearily for a few miles, roused at the jolly man's loud laugh.

"It's the blowout," the mother said, as Jerry looked at her for the first time. "Them timbers is driv in to keep out all that sand. See how it's heaped up ag'in' 'em on the outside. On awfully windy days it blows over and fills the tracks and stops the train, and then the men all get out and help to shovel it off. Gee whiz! but it's hot in here! We'd be just smothered in sand if we left the windows open, though. There! There!"

The last to the big baby, stirring uneasily, whom the mother patted off to slumber again.

Jerry walked to the rear door and looked out at the narrow space walled in by palisades, and at glimpses of sand waves on either side of the road beyond them; at the little hot-looking green shrubs clinging for life to their shifting depths, and the heat-quivering air visible above them. In all her life she had never felt so uncomfortable as now; never realized what it means to endure physical misery. She had seen the habitable globe features – lake-shore, and seaside, and mountain resorts; big navigable rivers; big forests; narrow little valleys; sheer cliffs and wonderful waterfalls. She didn't know that the world held such a place as this that anybody but a Hottentot was supposed to inhabit. Through a long hour and a half the train was held back by the sand of what Jerry heard was a "blowout." She did not know nor care what the term meant. She wanted to get out of it and go on, and what Jerry Swaim wanted she had always had the right to have.

The sun was getting low in the west when the local freight labored up the Sage Brush Valley to its terminal in the yards at New Eden. All of the passengers except Jerry tumbled out, much as tired boys rush from the church door after a long doctrinal sermon. The car was stopped at the freight-station, some distance down the line from the passenger-station, which was itself a long way out from New Eden, after the manner of Western small towns. The middle '80's, when railroad branch lines were building, found road directors and town councils falling out over technicalities, with the result that the railroad seldom secured the ground it wanted and the town was seldom given a convenient station site.

The buses filled rapidly, and the mail and express wagons were rattling off ahead of buses and foot passengers, and still the young stranger sat in the car. A sudden sense of loneliness had enveloped her like a cloud. She was not a novice abroad. She had gone to strange towns alone before. She knew all the regulations of hotel service. She knew why she had come here and what she had to do, and she had abundant means for all her needs. But with all these points in her favor a helplessness swept over her, and the "what next" for the moment perplexed her. The engine was getting restless again. However long it may require a local freight to get from one given point to another, the engine, like an ill-broken colt, will keep stepping up or pulling back through every halt of the train. Jerry sat inside, watching the last bus, loaded and hung-on-to, swinging off down the dusty road toward the town, a full half-mile across the prairie from the station. Life was getting a trifle too interesting in this foreign clime, and when the short man appeared in the doorway, even the full-moon face and half-moon smile, the profound bow and comical strut, could not out-weigh the genuine comfort his presence seemed to bring.

"Pardon me, Miss – Miss – "

"Miss Swaim," Jerry informed him, sure of herself and unafraid again.

"Oh, Miss Swaim! My name is Ponk – Junius Brutus Ponk. Pardon again if I seem to intrude. This is the Sage Brush terminal. Excuse me if I say thank the Lord for the end of this day's journey! The buses are all gone. May I take you to your destination here in my little gadabout? You want to stop somewhere in New Eden overnight, anyhow."

"Thank you very much."

Jerry looked at him gratefully, even if he was only one of the bunch of grubs she had been forced to ride with all this long afternoon, she who had once repudiated the Winnowoc train and all trains without Pullman accommodations. "The smile on her face was mightily winsome," Ponk declared afterward, "and just took all my ramparts and citadels and moats and drawbridges at one fell swoop."

He gathered up her bags and helped her off the car pompously, saying:

"Here she is, Miss Swaim. Step right in." And then with a flourish of arms he had Jerry and her belongings stored inside a shiny gray runabout and was off down the grassy road with a dash.

"Where shall I take you to, Miss Swaim?" he inquired, when the little car had glided gracefully around the lumbering buses and rattling wagons.

"To the best hotel, please," Jerry replied. "Do you know which one that is?"

"Yes'm. There isn't but one. The Commercial Hotel and Gurrage. I'm the proprietor, so I know." The smile that broke around the face of the speaker was too good-natured to make his words seem presumptuous.

Jerry smiled, too, finding herself in the grasp of a strange and complete confidence in the pompous little unknown chauffeur.

"Do you know an old gentleman here named York Macpherson, a Mortgage Company man?" she asked, looking at him directly for the first time.

Ponk seemed to gulp down a smile before he replied: "Ye-es, I do know York very well. He's prob'bly older than he looks. His office is right across the street from the Commercial Hotel and Gurrage."