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."
Afterward he declared: "From the minute that girl turned her eyes full on me and I saw how blue them orbs were, I begun to wish I had a gold button instead of a bone one in the back of my collar. I knew she could see that cheap bone thing right through my neck and I was willing right then to lay down and play dead if she wanted me to, and I'm never going to recover, never."
"Would you do – me a favor?" Jerry asked, hesitatingly.
Asking favors was a new line for her and she followed it prettily.
"Wouldn't I!" Mr. Ponk exclaimed. "Try me."
"Even his voice has a strut in it," Jerry thought. Aloud she said: "I have business with this old gentleman and I would be much obliged if you would tell him that Miss Geraldine Swaim is in the city and would like to meet him."
"Why, I'll soar right over there as soon as we get to the hotel and gurrage."
Junius Brutus Ponk looked slyly at the face of his companion as he spoke. What he was thinking just then it would have been hard to guess. With a flourish and curve that were wholly Ponkish the fat little man swung the gray car up to the brick-paved porch of the "Commercial Hotel and Gurrage."
"Why, there's York now, reading his mail! I'll go right over and tell him," Mr. Ponk declared. "Here, George, tell Georgette to give Miss Swaim number seven."
George assisted Miss Swaim to the hotel register and Georgette led her to room No. 7. Georgette wanted to linger a minute, for this guest was so unlike the usual commercial-traveler kind of ladies who sold books, or canvassed for extracts, or took orders for crayon portraits enlarged from little photographs; but Miss Swaim's manner gave no excuse for lingering. Alone, Jerry closed her door and turned, with a smile on her lips, to face her surroundings. The room was clean and cool, with a big window overhanging the street. Jerry sat down before it, realizing how weary the long journey had made her. Across the street, the sign of the Macpherson Mortgage Company in big gold letters hung above a plate-glass window. Mr.
Ponk, who had just "soared" across, was sitting in his car before it. Jerry saw a man inside at a desk very much like Uncle Cornie's in the Philadelphia banking-house where Eugene Wellington was busy now helping Aunt Jerry to settle things. This man was reading letters when the Ponk car tooted before the big window. He waved a hand to the tooter, then put his letters away and came leisurely outside. Jerry saw a tall, finely proportioned man, the set of whose clothes had a city air, and there was something in his whole manner that would have distinguished him from every other man in New Eden.
The fat little man talked earnestly, with a flourish of the hand now and then toward the room where Jerry sat watching the two. York Macpherson rested one foot on the running-board, and leaned his arms on the side of the car, listening intently to what Mr. Ponk was saying.
"So that is this York Macpherson who was never responsible for my estate not making any returns. And I called him an old man. The hotel proprietor must be telling him that now." Jerry laughed as she saw the two men chuckling together. "Well, I hope the pompous little fellow tells him I'm an old woman. It would even things up wonderfully."
Ten minutes later Jerry was shaking hands with York Macpherson and promising him to go to his home and meet his sister as soon as she had cleared her eyes of dust sufficiently to see anybody.
It must have been the dust in her eyes, Jerry thought, that made York Macpherson appear so unlike the benevolent, inefficient old gentleman she had pictured to herself. The hotel parlor was in twilight shadows, which helped a little to conceal the surprise of these two when they met there. Jerry knew what she had been anticipating. Whether York Macpherson knew or not, he was clearly not expecting what he found in the hotel parlor.
"I'll soar down to your shack with the lady as soon as she has had her supper and got herself rightly in hand," Ponk declared to York when he came into the hotel office. "You see, we got stuck in that danged, infernal blowout, and it was as hard on the womenkind who had to sit inside and swelter as on us men who nobly dug. 'Specially this Miss Swaim. She must have 'wept to see such quantities of sand,' same as them oysters and walruses and carpenters. We'll be along by and by, though. Have a cigar. What do you make of her, anyhow, York?"
"I don't make anything. I leave that job to you," York replied, with a smile, as he turned abruptly and left the hotel.
"Unless you see eight per cent. interest coming your way, I see. There might be a bigger interest in this investment than any you ever made in your life," Ponk called after him.
But York only waved off the words without looking back. Outside, the sunset's splendor was filling the western sky – the same old prairie sunset that he had seen many a time in his years in Kansas. And yet, on this evening it did not seem quite the same; nor were the sunsets, New Eden, and the Sage Brush Valley from this evening ever quite as they had been before, to York Macpherson.
V
NEW EDEN'S PROBLEM
Because of a broken "culbert" out toward "S'liny" the afternoon train on the Sage Brush branch was annulled for the day. Because of this annulment the mail for the Sage Brush Valley was brought up on the local freight, which is always behind time when it reaches its terminal, which accounted for the late delivery of the mail at the New Eden post-office, which made York Macpherson's dinner late because of a big batch of letters to be read, and an important business call at the Commercial Hotel following the reading and the delivery of Mr. Ponk's message.
Purple shadows were beginning to fold down upon the landscape, while overhead the sky was still heliotrope and gold, but York Macpherson, walking slowly homeward, saw neither the shadows nor the glory that overhung them. It was evident to his sister Laura, who was waiting for him in the honeysuckle corner of the big front porch, that his mind was burdened with something unusual to-night.
York Macpherson was a "leading citizen" type of the Middle West. Wholesome, ruggedly handsome, prosperous, shrewd to read men's minds, quick to meet their needs, full of faith in the promise of the Western prairies, with the sort of culture no hardship of the plains could ever overcome – that was York. Although he was on the front edge of middle life in years, with a few gray streaks in his wavy brown hair, he had the young-looking face, the alert action, and vigorous atmosphere of a young-hearted man just entered into his full heritage of manhood.
"The train was delayed down the river on account of sand drifted over the track by the south wind, and that made the mail late," York explained, when he reached the porch. "I'll bet you have had the house shut up tight as wax and have gone about all day with a dust-cloth in your hand. Given a south wind and Laura Macpherson, and you have a home industry in no time. Let's hurry up the dinner" (it was always dinner to the Macphersons and supper to the remainder of New Eden) "and get outside again as soon as possible. I can't think in shut-up rooms."
"When there is a south wind it makes