“So we parted until morning came. But I made up my mind that if she wouldn’t consent, I’d simply kidnap her and bring her up here to Mrs. Kingdon.
“I was on hand bright and early at the park next morning, and after a while a slovenly slip of a girl came up to me and asked my name. I told her. She gave me a note and then started off like a skyrocket, but I’m some spry myself and I caught her and held her till I’d read the note. It was from her and she said she couldn’t give me the worst of the bargain. That she was going to try hard to see if she could make good and live without stealing, and when she was sure, she’d send word to me through Mr. Reilly, and if I never heard, I could know she had failed and for me to forget her.
“‘Where is she?’ I asked the girl, who was squirming like an eel.
“‘I dunno,’ she said. ‘She’s left town.’
“‘I don’t believe it!’ I said.
“‘Yes, she has,’ said the girl. ‘She pawned all her togs – that new white dress and the swell shoes and her new suit and hat to get money to make a getaway.’
“I might as well have tried to hang on to a fish as to hold that slippery little street Arab. She broke away and ran. I was after her, but it was no use. She knew the ins and outs of the alleys like a rat and I lost her. You see, I didn’t know my girl’s last name. When I asked her, she said: ‘Call me Marta.’ I didn’t care about knowing her last name then, because I was so keen to give her my own name.
“I was just about crazy. I hunted all over the part of the city where I’d left her the first night. Then I went to see Reilly, but he didn’t know who she was. I made him see what it meant to me to find her, and he promised to try his best and to forward at once any letter that came to him. If I don’t hear after a while, when work gets slack so you can spare me, I’m going to Chicago and go through it with a fine tooth comb. Reilly will help me follow every girl by the name of Marta that’s ever lived there.”
Kurt’s eyes, full of infinite pity and regret, turned to Jo as he broke the little pause that followed.
“She is doubtless a poor little stray of a girl and luck has been against her, but, Jo, put all thoughts of marrying her away, just as she has. Wait – ” he hurried on, seeing the anger kindling in the lad’s eyes – “if it were any other offense – But a thief! ‘Once a thief, always a thief,’ is the truest saying I know. Your love couldn’t – ”
“It didn’t make any change in my feelings when she told me,” said Joe staunchly. “She could steal anything I had.”
“It might not change your feelings, but it should change your intentions. Do you mean you’d marry – ” Kurt had an incredulous expression on his face.
“In a second, if she’d have me. I’d buy her everything she wanted so she wouldn’t have to steal.”
“But after you were married and people found out what she was, you’d be ashamed – ”
“Ashamed! I’d put my little thief on a throne, and whoever dared to try to take her off would get it in the neck.”
The car speeded up again. The man at the wheel saw the utter futility of further expostulation.
“I’ll leave it to time and cow-punching,” he thought sagely. “Time and work are the best healers, especially for the young. Preaching is of no avail.”
Night came on. Jo looked up at a little lone star which was trying to make its light shine without a properly darkened background.
“That’s a poor little orphan star – like her. I’ll look for it every night now. I wish I hadn’t blabbed to Kurt. He hasn’t a nose for orange blossoms.”
In the fortnight that followed, Jo worked indefatigably, but his heart and his thoughts were back in Chicago, except when now and then his eyes turned to a fertile little beauty-spot valleyed between the hills. For here he had located an imaginary cottage – his cottage and hers. This mirage, of course, always showed a little slip of a girl standing in the doorway. To the surprise and dismay of his associates Jo the spender became Jo the saver that his dream might come true.
He offered no addendum to the revelation he had made to Kurt. They met often, but in ranch life discourse is not frequent, and Jo instinctively felt that his recital of Love’s Young Dream had fallen upon unsympathetic ears, while the foreman, unversed in the Language of Love, was mystified by the lad’s silence.
Three weeks later the “man without a nose for orange blossoms” was again in town. As acting sheriff of the county lately, Kurt had dropped in to see the jailer.
“How’s business, Bender? Any new boarders?” he asked.
“Yes; a gal run in for stealing. Didn’t find the goods on her; but she’s a sly one with the record of being a lifelong thief. She strayed up here from Chicago.”
“What’s her name?” he asked casually.
“Marta Sills.”
“I wonder if it could be Jo’s Marta,” the acting sheriff thought suddenly. “She may have followed him up here.”
He walked back to the hotel, trying to decide whether he should tell Jo. If she should prove to be his girl, her arrest up here should show him that his love hadn’t worked the miracle he expected. Jo had been a little more quiet since his return, but he gave no signs of pining away, and maybe if nothing revived his interest, it might die a natural death. The story Jo had told him of the little waif had made a deep impression upon him, however.
“Poor little brat!” he thought. “What chance does her kind have? I suppose I ought to give her one. There is one person in the world who might be able to reform her, and I’d put her in that person’s charge if it weren’t for wrecking Jo’s life.”
All through the afternoon while transacting the business that had brought him to town, his heart and his head were having a wrestling match, the former being at the disadvantage of being underworked.
“I’ll go up and take a look at her,” he suddenly decided. “Maybe I can tell from Jo’s description whether she is his Marta or not.”
On his way to the jail he was accosted by a big, jovial man.
“Don’t know where I can get an extra helper, do you, Kurt? Simpson, my right-hand, has gone back to Canada to enlist.”
“How providential!” thought Kurt.
“Why, yes; Mr. Westcott,” he replied: “We’re well up with our work, and I could spare Jo Gary for a few weeks.”
“Jo Gary! May Heaven bless you! When can I get him?”
“Going out home now?”
“Yes; on my way.”
“Stop at the ranch and take him along with you. Tell him I said to go. It’ll be all right with Kingdon.”
Westcott renewed his blessings upon Kurt and drove on.
At the jail Kurt looked in on the latest arrival. She was sitting at a table in Bender’s back office, her head bowed in her hands. There was something appealing in the drooping of her shoulders and in her shabby attire.
“Now Jo is disposed of, she shall have her chance, anyway,” he decided.
Without speaking to the girl, he sought Bender and they held a brief consultation.
CHAPTER II
“Aren’t we going to stop at all, Mr. Sheriff Man?”
A soft, plaintive note in the voice made Kurt Walters turn the brake of an old, rickety automobile and halt in the dust-white road, as he cast a sharply scrutinizing glance upon the atom of a girl who sat beside him. She was a dejected, dusty, little figure, drooping under the jolt of the jerking car and the bright rays of hills-land sunshine. She was young – in years; young, too, in looks, as Kurt saw when she raised her eyes which were