Her gift of winning friends, the old imperious power to make herself the center of the universe, was in no wise disturbed by being a citizen and a school-teacher instead of an Eastern lady of leisure sojourning temporarily in the Sage Brush country. The young men of the valley tried eagerly to win a greater place than that of mere friendship with her, but she gave no serious consideration to any of them, least of all—so she persuaded herself—to the young ranchman whom she had met so early after her arrival in Kansas. Further, she had persuaded herself that the pretty rural romance she had woven about him and his Norwegian neighbor, Thelma Ekblad, must be a reality. Thelma had finished her university course and was making a success of farming and of caring for her crippled brother Paul and that roly-poly Belkap baby, now a white-haired, blue-eyed, red-lipped chunk of innocence, responsibility, and delight. Gossip, beginning at Stellar Bahrr's door, said that interest in her neighbor, the big ranchman down the river, was responsible for Thelma's staying on the Ekblad farm, now that she had her university degree, because she could make a career for herself as a botany specialist in any college in the West. Jerry knew that love for a crippled brother and the care of a worse than orphaned child of the woman that brother had loved were real factors in the life of this country girl, but her air castles must be built for somebody, and they seemed to cluster around the young Norwegian and the ranchman. Of course, then, the ranchman, Joe Thomson, could interest Jerry only in a general genial comradeship kind of way. Beginning in a common bond, the presence of a common enemy—the blowout—chance meetings grew into regular and helpful association. That was all that it meant to Jerry Swaim.
Three stanch friends watched her closely. Ponk, of the Commercial Hotel and Garage, believed blindly and wholly in her ability, laying all blame for her defective work in the school upon other shoulders, standing manfully by her in every crisis. Laura Macpherson, although never blinded to the truth about Jerry in her impetuous, self-willed, unsympathetic, undeveloped nature, loved her too well to doubt her ultimate triumph over all fortune. Only York, who studied her closest of all three, because he was the keenest reader of human nature, still held that the final outcome for Jerry Swaim was a matter of uncertainty.
"I tell you, Laura," York said, one evening in the early spring of the third year, when Jerry had gone with Joe Thomson for a long horseback ride up the Sage Brush—"I tell you that girl is still a type of her own, which means that sometimes she is soft-hearted, and romantic, and frivolous, and impulsive, and affectionate, like Lesa Swaim, and sometimes clear-eyed, hard-headed, close-fisted, with a keen judgment for values, practical, and clever, like old Jim."
"And which parent, Sir Oracle, would you have her be most like?" Laura inquired.
"Lord knows," York replied. "As He alone knows how much of the good of each she may reject and how much of the weak and objectionable she may appropriate."
"Being a free moral agent to just dissect her fond parents and choose and refuse at will when she makes up her life and being for herself! It's a way we all have of doing, you know," Laura said, sarcastically. "Remember, York, when you elected to look like papa, only you chose mother's wavy brown hair instead of her husband's straight black locks; and you voted you'd have her clear judgment in business matters, which our father never had."
"And gave to you the same which he never possessed. Yes, I remember," York retorted. "But how is all this psychological analysis going to help matters here?"
"How's it going to help Joe Thomson, or keep him from being helped, you mean?" Laura suggested.
A faint flush crept into York Macpherson's brown cheek.
"It's dead sure Jerry has little enough thought of Joe now," York said, gravely. "She's living a day at a time, and underneath the three years' veneer of genuine service the real Philadelphia Geraldine Swaim is still a sojourner in the Sage Brush Valley, not a fixture here."