Thaine was nineteen and wise to give advice. A sudden thrill caught his pulse, mid-beat.
“Is that all? Can’t I do something?” he asked eagerly.
“That’s a great deal. And nobody can do for anybody. We have to do for ourselves.”
“You are not doing anything for Uncle Jim, then, I am to understand,” Thaine said.
But Leigh ignored his thrust, saying:
“When Pryor leaves, he doesn’t want to say good-by to anybody, not even to Uncle Jim. He says China is only a little way off, just behind the purple notches over there. I’m going to take him to the train tomorrow and then I’m going on to Wykerton on business. After that, I may need lots of advice.”
“Wykerton’s a joint-ridden place, but John Jacobs has put a good class of farmers around it. He’s such an old saloon hater, Hans Wyker’d like to kill him. But say, why not tell me now what you are about, so I can be looking up references and former judicial decisions handed down in similar cases?” Thaine asked lightly.
“Because it’s too long a story, and I must get Pryor to the eight o’clock limited,” Leigh said.
The crowing of chickens in a far away farmyard came faintly at that moment, and Thaine with a strange new sense of the importance of living, sent the black horses cantering down the trail to the old Cloverdale Ranch house.
Jo Bennington slept late. She had been up late. She had danced often and she had waited for Thaine’s 235 homecoming. Yet, when she came downstairs in a white morning dress all sprinkled with little pink sprays, there was hardly a hint of weariness in her young face or in her quick footsteps.