"I was offered one of two alternatives: I might be dependent on my aunt's bounty or I could come out West and live on my claim. I chose the West. Now what can I do?"
The pathos of the young face was touching. The question of maintenance is hard enough for the resourceful and experienced to meet; how doubly hard it must be to the young, untried, and untrained!
Joe Thomson looked out to where the open prairie, swathed in silvery mist, seemed to flow up to the indefinite bounds of the town. All the earth was beautiful in the stillness of the June night.
"I don't know how to advise you," he said, at length. "If you were one of us—a real Western girl—it would be different."
To Jerry this sincerity outweighed any suggestion he could have offered. From the point of romance this young man was impossible to Lesa Swaim's child. Yet truly nobody before, not even York Macpherson, had ever seemed like such a real friend to her, and the chance acquaintance was reaching by leaps and bounds toward a genuine comradeship.
"Why do you stay here? You weren't born here, were you? Tell me about yourself," Jerry demanded.
"There's a big difference between our cases," Joe replied, wondering how this girl could care anything for his life-story. "I was the oldest child of our family. My father came out here on account of his health, but he came too late, and died, leaving me the claim on the Sage Brush and my pledge on his death-bed never to leave the West, for fear I, too, would become an invalid as he had been. There seems to be little danger of that, and I like the West too well to leave it now. And then, besides, I'm like a lot of other fellows who claim to love the Sage Brush. I haven't the means to get away and start life anywhere else, anyhow. You see, we are as frank out here about our conditions as you Philadelphians are."
He smiled and looked down at his strong hands and sturdy arms. It would be difficult to think of Joe Thomson as an invalid.
"I inherited, besides my claim and my promise, the provision for two younger sisters, housed with relatives in the East, but supported by contributions from this same Sage Brush claim on which I have had to wrestle with the heat and drought that sear the prairies. And now, when both my sisters, who married young, are provided for and settled in homes of their own, and I can begin to live my own life a little, comes my enemy, the blowout—"
"Oh, I never want to think of that awful thing!" Jerry cried. "I shall give the Macpherson Mortgage Company control of the entire sand-pile. I'll never play there again, never!"