Jerry brought her engine down to slow speed as she passed a thrifty ranch-house where barns and clustering silos, and fields of grain and cattle-dotted prairies outlying all, betokened the possibilities of the Sage Brush Valley. The blue eyes of Lesa Swaim's daughter were full of dreamy light as she paused to picture here the possibilities of her own possessions.
At the crest of a low ridge the road forked, one branch wandering in and out among the small willow-trees along the river, and the other cutting clean and broad across the rougher open land swelling away from the narrowed valley.
"Here's something Mr. Junius Brutus Ponk left out of his map. I'll take the rim road; it looks the more inviting," Jerry decided, because the way of least resistance had been her life-road always.
This one grew narrow and clung close to the water's side. Its sandy bed was damp and firm, and the slender trees on either side here and there almost touched branches overhead. Mile after mile it seemed to stretch without another given landmark to show Jerry her destination. Beyond where the road curved sharply around a thicket of small trees and underbrush Jerry halted her car. Before her the waters of the river rippled into foam against a rocky ledge that helped to form a deep hole above it. Below, the stream was shallow, and in dry midsummer here offered rough stepping-stones across it. It was a lonely spot, with the river on one side and a tangle of bushes and tall weeds on the other, and the curves along the roadway, filled with underbrush and low timber shutting off the view up-stream and down-stream.
At the coming of Jerry's car a man who had been kneeling over some fishing-lines at the river's edge rose up beside the road, brushing the wet sand from his clothes, and staring at her. He was small and old and stooped and fuzzy, and thoroughly unpretty to see.
"It's the Teddy Bear who 'sat in the sand and the sun' coming up from that horrid railroad junction. Who's afraid of bears? I'll ask him how to find my lost empire."
Jerry did not reflect that it was the unconscious effect of this humble creature's thoughtfulness for her that made her unafraid of him in this lonely spot. Reflection was not yet one of her active psychological processes.
"I want to find a ranch-house by a big bend in the river where it turns east," Jerry said, looking at the man much as she would look at the bend in the river—merely for the information to be furnished. He pushed his brown cap back from his forehead and rubbed his fingers thoughtfully through his thin sunburnt hair.
"It's Joe's place, eh?" the high, quavering voice squeaking like an unused machine afraid of itself. "You'd ought to took the t'other fork of the road back yander. It's a goodish mile on down this way now to where you das to turn your cyar round. When you get where you kin turn, then go back and take the t'other fork. It'll take you right to Joe's door about."
The words came hesitatingly, as if the speaker had little use for sounding them in his solitary, silent life. Fishermen don't catch fish by talking to them.