"Ponk, I appreciate your motive," York said, feelingly. "I will take this up as soon as I can with Miss Swaim. You see, she's our guest and I can't very gracefully suggest that she seek employment. And, to be frank with you, my sister has become very fond of her—Laura misses a good many good things on account of her lameness—and we would like to keep her our guest indefinitely; but we can't do that, of course."
"I don't wonder your sister wants her. Of course, you don't care nothin' about it yourself. An' I'll have the board hold the place awhile to see what 'll happen. I must soar back home now." And the little man left the office.
"Sound to the core, if he does strut when strangers come to town. Especially ladies. That's the only way some little men have of attracting attention to themselves. A kind-hearted man as ever came up the Sage Brush," York commented, as he watched his caller crossing the street to the hotel.
That evening Jerry Swaim sat alone on the porch of the Macpherson home, where shafts of silvery moonlight fell through the honeysuckle vines. What York Macpherson would have called a fight between Jim Swaim's chin and Lesa's eyes was going on in Jerry's soul this evening. Since her visit to her claim life had suddenly become a maze of perplexities. She had never before known a care that could not have been lifted from her by others, except the one problem of leaving Philadelphia, and the solution of that might have been the prank of a headstrong child, prompted by self-will and love of adventure, rather than by the grave decision of well-poised judgment. Heretofore in all her ventures a safe harbor had been near to shelter her. Now she was among the breakers and the storm was on.
For the first time in her memory her purse was light and there was no visible source from which to refill it. She was too well-bred to tax the hospitality of the Macpherson home, where she was made to feel herself so welcome. To return to Philadelphia meant to write and ask for the expenses of transportation. She had burned too many bridges behind her to meet the humility of such a request just yet; for that meant the subjection of her whole future to Jerusha Darby's will, and against such subjection Jerry's spirit rebelled mightily.
Every day for two weeks the girl had gone to the post-office with an eager, expectant face. Every evening she had asked York Macpherson if he had heard anything from Philadelphia since her coming, the pretended indifference in her tone hardly concealing the longing behind the query. But not a line from the East had come to New Eden for her.
On the afternoon of this day the postmaster had hurried through the letters because he, too, had caught the meaning of the hunger in the earnest eyes watching him through the little window among the letter-boxes. The mail was heavy to-day, but the distributer paused with one letter, long enough to look at it carefully, and then, leaving his work half finished, he hurried to the window.
"Here's something for you. Aren't you Miss Swaim?" he inquired, courteously, as he pushed the letter toward Jerry's waiting hand.
He had lived in Kansas since the passage of the homestead law. He knew the mark of homesickness on the face of a late arrival. Something in the cultivation of a new land puts a gentler culture into the soul. Out of the common heartache, the common sacrifice, the common need, have grown the open-hearted, keen-sighted, fine-fibered folk of the big and generous Middle West, the very heart of which, to the Kansan, is Kansas.
The postmaster turned quickly back to his task. He did not see the girl's face; he only felt that she walked away on air.