The Rim of the Desert

by Ada Woodruff Anderson

He was longer than usual filling out the card, and the waiter hesitated thoughtfully when he had read it, then be glanced from the young man to his companion with a comprehensive smile and hurried away. There was chilled grapefruit in goblets with cracked ice, followed by bouillon, oysters, and a delectable young duck with toast. But it was only when the man brought a small green bottle and held it for Jimmie to approve the label that his guest began to arch her brows.

Daniels smiled his ingenuous smile. "It's just to celebrate a little streak of luck," he said. "And I owe it to you. If you hadn't been at Vivian Court to write up the decorations for that bridge-luncheon and happened to make that snap-shot of the Morganstein party, my leading lady would have gone to the paper as Miss Armitage straight, and I guess that would have queered me with the chief. But that headline you introduced about Mrs. Weatherbee's incognito struck him right. 'Well, Jimmie,' he said, 'you've saved your scalp this time.'"

The Society Editor smiled. "You were a gullible kiddie," she replied. "But it's a mystery to me how you could have lived in Seattle three years without knowing the prettiest woman on the boulevard by sight."

Jimmie shook his head. "I haven't the shadow of an excuse, unless it was because another girl was running such a close second she always cut off my view."

"Think," said Miss Atkins quickly, disregarding the excuse, "if that name, Miss Armitage, had been tagged to a picture that half the town would have recognized. Mrs. Weatherbee is the most popular lady, socially, in Seattle. When there's a reception for a new Council, she's always in the receiving line; she pours tea at the tennis tournament, and it was she who led the cotillion at the Charity ball. You would find her name in all the important affairs, if you read the society column."

Daniels nodded meekly. "It was a hairbreadth escape, and I'm mighty grateful."

There was a little silence then, but after the waiter had filled the long-stemmed glasses and hurried away, she said slowly, her gray-blue eyes sifting Jimmie through and through: "It looks like you've been playing cards for money, but I never should have suspected it—of you."

Daniels shook his head gravely. "No get-rich-quick games for me. My luck doesn't come that way. But it cost me nearly two thousand dollars to find it out. I've always meant to tell you about that, sometime. That two thousand dollars was all my capital when I came to Seattle to take my course in journalism. I expected it to see me through. But, well, it was my first week at the University—fortunately I had paid the expenses of the first semester in advance—when one night a couple of fellows I knew brought me down to see the town. I didn't know much about a city then; I had grown up over in the sage-brush country, and I never had heard of a highball. To start with I had two, then I got interested in a game of roulette, and the last I remember I was learning to play poker. But I must have had more high-balls; the boys said afterwards they left me early in the evening with a new acquaintance; they couldn't get me to go home. I never knew how I got back to the dorm, and the next day, when I woke, the stubs of my checkbook showed I had signed practically all of my two thousand away."

There was a brief silence. Out in the main room the orchestra began to play. Miss Atkins was looking at Jimmie, and her scarlet lips were closed like a straight cord.

He drew his hand over his smooth, close-cut, dark hair and took a long draught from his glass of ice-water. "I can't make you understand how I felt about it," he went on, "but that two thousand was the price of my father's ranch over near the Columbia. It stood for years of privation, heart-breaking toil, and disappointment—the worst kind. Two seasons of drouth we saw the whole wheat crop blister and go to ruin. I carried water in buckets from the river up to that plateau day after day, just to keep our home garden and a little patch of grass alive. And mother carried too up that breaking slope in the desert sun. It was thinking of that made me— all in. She worked the same way with the stock. Something lacking in the soil affected the feed, and some of the calves were born without hair; their bones were soft. It baffled my father and every man along that rim of the desert, but not mother. She said doctors prescribed lime for rickety human babies, and she made limewater and mixed it with the feed. It was just the thing. She was a small woman, but plucky from start to finish. And we, Dad and I, didn't know what it was costing her—till she was gone."