“I’ll just ask father,” she exclaimed. “There can’t be more than a dozen Johnsons around here.”
Which would have given Ed Sorenson a fresh jolt in his breathing apparatus if he had overheard, and shriveled the cocky self-assurance with which he sipped a high-ball that moment at Vorse’s bar.
CHAPTER XI
JANET AND MARY
In a region as sparsely settled by white people as San Mateo and its adjoining counties there were not, as Janet put it, more than a dozen Johnson families. In fact, there were but two, she learned from her father: one at Bowenville, the small railroad town of three hundred people, a merchant with a wife and four little children; the other a rancher on Terry Creek, whose wife was dead and who had one child, a girl of sixteen or seventeen years of age.
“I may be away at dinner time, so don’t wait for me,” she told her father next morning. “I’m going out in the country a few miles––and you know my car! If you’d just let me squeeze some of these patients who never pay, you could have a new car yourself.”
“Mine’s all right,” he smiled.
“But mine isn’t. Look at it. You gave it to me only because you scorned to ride in it any longer yourself. It would do for me, you said, but you prance around in a bright shiny one yourself. I blush at the row mine makes; sounds like a boiler factory; I drive only along side streets. If the patients would pay what they owe, I could ride like a lady instead of a slinking magpie.”