"Why do you loan him money if you know he can't succeed?" Laura inquired.
"Making farm loans is the business of the Macpherson Mortgage Company. That's how we maintain our meager existence," York replied, teasingly. "Joe wants to fight back the blowout creeping over his south border farther and farther each year. Our company gets its commission while he fights. See?"
"Oh, you grasping loan shark! If I didn't know how easy it is for you to lie I'd disown you," Laura declared, flinging a chair pillow at her brother, who was chuckling at her earnestness.
But York was serious himself in the next minute.
"Our company doesn't want the prairie; it wants prosperity. A foreclosed mortgage is bad business. It brings us responsibility and ill-will. What we want is good-will and interest money. I have put the thing up to Joe just as it is. Man is a free agent to choose or let alone. I have a bigger problem than Joe to handle now. I had a letter this evening from Miss Geraldine Swaim, of Philadelphia. Do you remember her, Laura? She used to come up to Winnowoc when she was a little girl."
"I remember little Jerry Swaim, Jim and Lesa's only child," York's sister declared. "She was considerably younger than I. I pushed her in her baby-cab when I wasn't very big myself. When I went away to college she was a little roly-poly beauty of ten or eleven, maybe. Wasn't she named for her father's rich sister, Mrs. Darby? I never knew that Mrs. Darby's name was Geraldine."
"It wasn't; it was Jerusha; and Jim's name was Jeremiah; and Lesa's was plain Melissa," York explained. "But Lesa changed all of their names to make them sound more romantic. Romance was Lesa's strong suit. She called her daughter 'Jerry,' to please Mrs. Darby, but the child was christened Geraldine—never Jerusha. Lesa wouldn't stand for that."
"And now what does this Geraldine want from my respected brother?" Laura inquired, leaning back on the cushions of her chair to listen.
York's face was hidden by the darker shadows of the porch, but his sister knew by his grave tone, when he spoke again, that something deeper than a business transaction lay back of this message from Philadelphia.
"It's an old story, Laura. The story of parents rearing a child in luxury and then dying poor and leaving this child unprovided for and unfitted to provide for herself. Jim Swaim was as clear-headed as his wife was soft-hearted and idealizing. Every angle of his was a right angle, even if he did grow a bit tight-fisted sometimes for his family's sake. But a leech of a fellow, a sort of relative by marriage, got his claws into Jim some way, and in the end got him, root and branch. Then Lesa contracted pneumonia and died after a short illness. And just when Jim was most needed to hold up his business interests and tide things over, as well as look after his daughter, they found him dead in his office one morning. Heart failure, the doctors said, the kind that gets a brain-fagged business man. The estate has been in litigation for two years. Now it is settled, and all that is left for Geraldine is a claim her father held out here in the Sage Brush Valley. She thinks she is going to live on that. She came in on the afternoon train and is stopping at the Commercial Hotel. I called to see her a minute on my way home. That was why I ate a cold dinner this evening. I asked her to come here at once, but she refused. Some one from the hotel will bring her over later. That means Ponk, of course. He's the whole Commercial Hotel 'and Gurrage.' We must have her here to stay with us awhile, of course."