"Am I all right? Good God, Helen! do you think anybody's all right when he hasn't got any money? We've just got into this rotten burg; been driving all day long and half the night across a desert hotter than the hinges of the main gate, and not a drink for a hundred and forty—" His voice blurred into a buzzing on the wire, and she caught disconnected words: "Skinflints—over on me—they've got another guess—piker stunt—"
She reiterated loudly that she would send the money, and heard central relaying the words Nothing more came over the wire, though she rattled the receiver. At last she went back to bed, to lie awake till dawn came.
She was waiting at the telegraph-office when the money-order department opened. After she had sent the twenty dollars she tried to drink a cup of coffee, and walked quickly back to the apartment. She felt that she should be able to think of something to do, some action she could take which would help Bert, and many wild schemes rushed through her feverish brain. But she knew that she could do nothing but wait.
The telephone-bell was ringing when she reached her door. It seemed an eternity before she could reach it. Again she assured central that she would pay the charges, and heard his voice. He wanted to know why she had not sent the money, then when she had sent it, then why it had not arrived. He talked a great deal, impatiently, and she saw that his high-strung temperament had been excited to a frenzy by disasters which in her ignorance of business she could not know. Her heart ached with a passion of sympathy and love; she was torn by her inability to help him.
Half an hour later he called again, and demanded the same explanations. Then suddenly he interrupted her, and told her to come to Coalinga. It was a rotten hole, he repeated, and he wanted her.
That he should want her was almost too much happiness, but she tried to be cool and reasonable about it. She pointed out that she had just paid a month's rent, that she had only ten dollars, that it might be wiser, she might be less a burden to him, if she stayed in San Francisco. She would make the ten dollars last a month, and that would give him time—He interrupted her savagely. He wanted her. Was she coming or was she throwing him down? Thought he couldn't support her, did she? He always had done it, hadn't he? Where she'd get this sudden notion he was no good? He could tell her Gilbert Kennedy wasn't done for yet, not by a damned sight. Was she coming or—
"Oh, yes! yes! yes! I'll come right away!" she cried.
While she was packing, she wished that she had something to pawn She would have braved a pawnbroker's shop herself. But the diamond ring had gone when the Guatemala rubber plantation failed; her other jewels were paste or semi-precious stones; her furs were too old to bring anything. She could take Bert nothing but her courage and her faith.
She found that her ticket cost nine dollars and ninety cents. When she reached Coalinga, after a long restless night on the train and a two-hours' careful toilet in the swaying dressing-room, she gave the porter the remaining dime. It was a gesture of confidence in Bert and in the future. She was going to him with a high spirit, matching his reckless daring with her own.
He was not on the platform. When the train had gone she still waited a few minutes, looking at a row of one-story ramshackle buildings which paralleled the single track. Obviously they were all saloons. A few loungers stared at her from the sagging board sidewalk. She turned her head, to see on either side the far level stretches of a desert broken only by dirty splashes of sage-brush. The whole scene seemed curiously small under a high gray sky quivering with blinding heat.