"DRIFTING."
She stood in the cabin door, where the morning sunlight stole through the branches and vines and played around her head. Against the well-worn post of this plain, unpainted old hut she leaned with a far-away look in her eyes. Nineteen years ago to-day she was born here where the hills shut in Blackberry Valley and the trees roofed it over. From the stream yonder she had learned the ripple of childhood's laughter; up yonder well-worn trail she had climbed these long years, away to the great outside world—to the Frost Creek school and the Gold City church. It was over the same trail that, wearing shoes for almost the first time in her life, and attired in a black calico dress and a black straw hat which the neighbors had brought her, Jane had taken her father's rough hand, long years ago, one summer day, and followed her mother to the grave. Ten years she had done a woman's work to try and keep a home for Tom Reed.
How much longer would it be? The impulses and longings of a maiden's heart were stirring within her. Father's rough, good-natured kindness still cheered her lonely life, but the morning sun would kiss two graves in God's Acre yonder some day instead of one. The father's step was feeble and the years were going fast, and she would be alone. Alone? Ah, no, not alone, for the loving Christ was hers. Ever since the old Coyote Valley camp-meeting a new friendship, a new happiness, had come into her life. No one who knew her could doubt it. It had added to the natural frankness of her modest, unsophisticated nature a staunchness of character, a womanliness, and a nobility of soul that gave her the admiration and respect of all true hearts. Yet how few knew her! Like earth's rarest flowers, Jane Reed's life blossomed in this hidden dell unknown to the great world. She had the love of Christ in her soul, and yet she longed, she knew not why, for some strong human love to fill to its completeness the fullness of her heart.
So she stood that morning dreaming of love—the old, old dream of life. And who should it be? One of two, of course. No others had ever come close enough to pay court at the portal of her soul. Job or Dan—Dan or Job? Sooner or later her life must be linked with one or the other. Dan cared for her. How often he had said it!—almost till it seemed commonplace. But she had never said yes; yet somehow she enjoyed the thought that somebody cared for her, even if it was poor Dan. She was at his bedside yesterday, down in the long, low house at the end of Dean's Lane, where they had brought him home from the Yellow Jacket. She had heard of it all at once—that Job was dangerously sick at the ranch, and Dan was crippled for life at the lane. She wanted to go to Job. Her eyes filled as they told her of his heroism. What a brave fellow! She brushed away the dust from the secret shrine in her heart and worshiped him anew.
She wanted to go to him. But what would he say? How forward, how unwomanly it would seem! Did he ever think of her? Ah! sometimes she thought so! But he was beyond her now; she could not go to him. But Dan would expect it. Poor Dan! He needed somebody to say a kind word. So she had gone. She had bathed his aching head; she had told him she was praying for him; she had left with him the blossoms picked at her door.
Dan or Job—which should it be? In the doorway she stood dreaming till the sun was between the tree-tops, and looked straight down the trail. All day at her tasks she dreamed on. Twice she took her bonnet and thought she would go to Job; then she hung it away again. There they stood at the doorway of her soul—Dan, crippled, helpless, selfish; a poor, wild, wandering boy. Job, strong, brave, the soul of honor, the manliest of men, a Christian in all that word means in a young man's life—her ideal.
There they stood on the threshold of her heart; and, lingering at sundown in the same old doorway, the tears filling her eyes, she took them both in—Dan to pity, comfort, cheer; Job to honor and to love. Job was hers; perhaps he would never know it, but that day she gave him the best a woman has—her first love.
