"Went just like her brother, the late Jeremiah Swaim," the papers said, the next evening.
Instead of the lawyer, it was the undertaker who came to officiate. And the last will and testament, and the too-late evidence of a forgiving good-will, all were impossible henceforth and forever.
The estate of the late Jerusha Darby, relict of the late Cornelius Darby, no will of hers having been found, passed, by agreement under law, to a distant relative of the late Cornelius, which relative being Eugene Wellington, whose knowledge of the said possible conditions of inheritance he had held in his possession for three years, since the day he accidentally found them among the private papers of his late uncle, knowing the while that any sudden notion of the late Jerusha might result in putting her possessions, by her own signature, where neither Jerry, as her favorite and heir apparent, nor himself, as heir-in-law without a will, could inherit anything. Truly Gene had had a bothersome time of it for three years, and he congratulated himself on having done well—excellently well, indeed. Truly only the good little snakes ever entered that "Eden" in the Winnowoc Valley in Pennsylvania.
XVII
THE FLESH-POTS OF THE WINNOWOC
The glory of that third springtime was on the Kansas prairies and in the heart of a man and a maid, the best of good fellows each to the other, who rode together far along their blossomy trails. The eyes of the man were on the future and in his heart there was only one wish—that the good-fellowship would soon end in the realization of his heart's desire. The eyes of the maid were closed to the future. For her, too, there was only one wish—that this kind of comradeship might go on unchanged indefinitely. To Jerry no trouble seemed quite so big when Joe was with her, and little foxes sought their holes when he came near. If the spring work had not grown so heavy late in May, and Joe could have come to town oftener, and one teacher had not fallen sick, and Clare Lenwell hadn't been so stubborn, and if Stellar Bahrr had held her tongue—But why go on with ifs? All these conditions did exist. What might have been without them no man knoweth.
One of the humanest traits of human beings is to believe what is pleasant to believe, and to doubt and question what would be an undesirable fact. Jerry Swaim, clinging ever to a memory of what might have been, building a pretty love dream, it is true, to be acted out some far-away time by a young farmer and his neighbor in the Sage Brush Valley, listened to Stellar Bahrr's version of Thelma Ekblad's shopping mission, held back the tears that burned her eyeballs for a moment, and then, being human, voted the whole thing as impossible, if not as malicious as any of Stellar Bahrr's stories. Indeed, Thelma Ekblad was now, as she had always been, the very least of Jerry's troubles.
The school row, that had become the community fuss, culminated in the superintendent putting upon his teachers the responsibility of settlement.