The Rim of the Desert

by Ada Woodruff Anderson

"I was in desperate need," she went on quickly. "There was a debt—a debt of honor—I wished to pay. And Mr. Foster told me you were interested in that desert land; that you were going to look it over. He caught me by long distance telephone the night he sailed for Alaska, to let me know. Oh, it all sounds sordid, but if you have ever come to the ragged edge of things—"

She stopped, with a little outward, deprecating movement of her hands, and turned again to meet Tisdale's look. But he was still silent. "I believed when you knew me," she went on, "you would see I am not the kind of woman you imagined; I even hoped, for David's sake, you would forgive me. But I did not know there was such friendship as yours in the world. I thought only mothers loved so,—the great ones, the Hagars, the Marys. It is more than that; it is the best and deepest of every kind of love in one. I can't fathom it—unless—men sometimes are born with twin souls."

It was not the influence of her personality now; it was not any magnetism. Something far down in the depths of him responded to that something in her. It was as though he felt the white soul of her rising transcendent over her body. It spoke in her pose, her eloquent face, and it filled the brief silence with an insistent, almost vibrant appeal.

"They are," he answered, and the emotion in his own face played softly through his voice, "I am sure that they are. Weatherbee had other friends, plenty of them, scattered from the Yukon territory to Nome; men who would have been glad to go out of their way to serve him, if they had known; but he never asked anything of them; he saved the right to call on me. Neither of us ever came as near that 'ragged edge of things' as he did, toppled on it as he did, for so long. There never was a braver fight, against greater odds, single-handed, yet I failed him." He paused while his eyes again sought that high gorge of the Olympic Mountains, then added: "The most I can do now is to see that his work is carried on."

"You mean," she said not quite steadily, "you are going to buy that land?"

"I mean"—he frowned a little—"I am going to renew my offer to finance the project for you. You owe it to David Weatherbee even more than I do. Go back to that pocket; set his desert blossoming. It's your only salvation."

She groped for the bulwark behind her and moved back to its support. "I could not. I could not. I should go mad in that terrible place."

"Listen, madam." He said this very gently, but his voice carried its vibrant undernote as though down beneath the surface a waiting reserve force stirred. "I did not tell all about that orchard of spruce twigs. It was planted along a bench, the miniature of the one we climbed in the Wenatchee Mountains, that was crossed with tiny, frozen, irrigating canals leading from a basin; and midway stood a house. You must have known that trick he had of carving small things with his pocket-knife. Then imagine that delicately modeled house of snow. It was the nucleus of the whole, and before the door, fine as a cameo and holding a bundle in her arms, was set the image of a woman."

There was a silent moment. She waited, leaning a little forward, watching Tisdale's face, while a sort of incredulous surprise rose through the despair in her eyes. "There were women at Fairbanks and Seward after the first year," he went on. "Bright, refined women who would have counted it a privilege to share things, his hardest luck, with David Weatherbee. But the best of them in his eyes was nothing more than a shadow. There was just one woman in the world for him. That image stood for you. The whole project revolved around you. It would be incomplete now without you."

She shrank closer against the bulwark, glancing about her with the swift look of a creature trapped, then for a moment dropped her face in her hands. When she tried to say something, the words would not come. Her lips, her whole face quivered, but she could only shake her head in protest again and again.