"Bless her heart!" he ejaculated, at length. "She is self-willed like her dad. Aunt Darby always told me I'd have to manage her with gloves on, but not to forget to manage her, anyhow."
He strolled back to the Commercial Hotel, where the best-natured man in Kansas lay in wait for him.
"You're in early. Have a real cigar—a regular Havany-de-Cuby—off of me. An' take a smoke out here where it's cool."
Eugene took the proffered cigar and the seat on the side porch of the hotel that commanded a view of the street clear to "Castle Cluny."
"Town's pretty quiet this evenin'. All the men are gone up-stream or down, to see if they can help in the storm region. Every store shut up tight as wax. Three preachers, station-agent, the three movie men—gone with the rest. We are a sympathetic bunch out here, an' rather quick to get the S O S signal and respond noble."
"So it seems," Eugene replied, wondering the while how he should be able to kill the time till Jerry's return, resolving not to tarry here to paint a single canvas. The sooner Geraldine Swaim was out of Kansas the better for her perverted sense of the esthetic, and the safer for her happiness—and his own.
"Yes," Ponk was going on to say, "everybody helps. Why, I just now let out the pride of the gurrage to a young lady. She's just heard that a man she knows well is lost or marooned on a island in the floods of the Sage Brush. And if anybody'll ever save him, she will. She's been doin' impossible things here for three years, and the town just worships her."
"I should think it would," Eugene Wellington said, with a sarcasm in his tone.
"It does," Ponk assured him. "She's the real stuff—even mother, out yonder, loves her."
The little man's face was turned momentarily toward the hill-slope cemetery beyond the town. "And when a girl like that comes to me for my fastest-powered car to go where no car can't go, for the sake of as good a man as ever lived on earth, a man she's been comrading with for three years, and with that look in her fine eyes, they's no mistakin' to any sensible man on God's earth why she's doin' it."