"I'm partly 'what,'" Joe Thomson replied. The shadows were on his face again, and his loss, after that moment of glad surprise, seemed to be doubly heavy.
"But how? I don't understand. I'm dreaming. You really are here, and not dead, are you?"
"No, you are not dreaming. I only wish you were," Joe responded, gloomily. "But no matter. Yes, I'm here. 'Part of me lived, but most of me died,'" he muttered Kipling's line half audibly. "I subleased your land from the Macpherson Mortgage Company three years ago. The lease expires to-day. You remember what it was worth when you saw it before. I shall hand it over to you now, worth thirty dollars an acre. Thirty thousand dollars, at the very least, besides the value of the crop. I got beyond the blowout and followed it up. I plowed and planted. Lord! how I plowed and planted! And as with old Paul and Apollos, it was God who gave the increase."
"Joe! Oh, Joe! You are a miracle-worker!" Jerry cried.
"A worker, all right, maybe. And all life is a miracle," Joe declared, gravely.
"But your own land, Joe. They told me that your house was gone and that maybe you had gone with it, and that these roads down here were impassable and nobody could find you."
Joe came to the side of the little gray car where Jerry sat with her white hands crossed on the steering-wheel. Her soft white gown, fitted for a summer afternoon on the Macpherson porch, seemed far more lovely in the evening light down by the oak-trees. Her golden hair was blown in little ringlets about her forehead, and her dark-blue eyes—Joe wondered if Nature ever gave such eyes to another human being!
"No, Jerry, my house isn't gone. My father built it up pretty high above the river, and I saved almost everything loose before the flood reached my place. It was the Ekblad house that went down the river. I went over there to help Thelma get her brother and the baby to safety on the high ground. She had started out to warn old Fishin' Teddy, thinking her own family was secure, and afraid he would get caught. She could not get back to them, nor anywhere else. I saved her, all right, but when I went back after Paul and the baby, the home and those in it were gone down-stream. Thelma thought we were all lost. That's how the story got started. Old Teddy is gone, but I heard later that the others are saved. Their home wasn't worth so very much. They got most of the real valuable things—photographs of their dead father and mother, and the family Bible, and deeds, and a few trinkets. Other things don't count. Money will replace them. Anyhow, York Macpherson is buying their land at a good figure. It will give Thelma the chance she's wanted—to go to a college town and teach botany. She will make her way and carry a name among educators yet, and support Paul and the baby, all right, too. Did the folks miss me and say I had gone down the river? Well, I didn't. I'm here. And as to all this"—he waved his hand toward the wheat—"I can net a right good bank-account for myself and I can pay off the mortgage I put on my claim to pay the lease on yours, and for steam-plows and such things. It has been a bumper year for wheat down here. I have reclaimed the land from the desert. It will revert to you now—you and your artist cousin jointly, I suppose. The river helped to finish the work for me—found its old bed in that low sandy streak where years ago the blowout began. It has straightened its bend for itself and got away from that ledge below the deep hole, and left the rest of the ground, all the upper portion of the blowout, yours and mine, covered with a fine silt, splendid for cultivation. The blowout is dead. It took hard work and patience and a big risk, of course, and the Lord Almighty at last for a partner in the firm to kill it off. Your own comes back to you now. Can I be of any further service to you?"
As he stood there with folded arms beside the car, tall and rugged, with the triumph of overcoming deep written on his sad face, the width of the earth seemed suddenly to yawn between him and the lucky artist who had inherited a fortune without labor.
"You have done more than to reclaim this ground, Joe," Jerry exclaimed. "Miraculous as it all is, there is a bigger desert than this, the waste and useless desert in the human heart. You have helped to reclaim to a better life a foolish, romancing, daring girl, with no true conception of what makes life worth while. All the Sage Brush Valley has been good to me. York and Laura Macpherson in their well-bred, wholesome friendship; little Mr. Ponk in his deep love for his mother and faith in God; even old Teddy Bear, poor lost creature, in his sublime devotion to duty, protecting the woman he had vowed once at the marriage altar that he would protect; and, most of all"—Jerry's voice was soft and low—"a sturdy, brave young farmer has helped me by his respect for honest labor and his willingness to sacrifice for others.