CHAPTER X
JERKLINE JO
About six months previous to Hiram Hooker's momentous debut into theworld outside of the big trees of Mendocino County, a girl stood in herdormitory room at Kendrick Hall and read a telegram with tear-dimmedeyes.
This girl was Miss Josepha Modock. She was twenty-two, and Providencehad been kind to her--nay, lavish. She was straight and sturdy andstrong. Her hair was of a dark chestnut hue, and its beauty andluxuriant growth made it at once the envy and admiration of her fellowstudents of the Wisconsin boarding school. Her eyes were large anddark and luminous, her nose just far enough short of perfect, her lipsfull and distracting.
Josepha Modock had been two years at Kendrick Hall. She was older thanmost of the girls who were her classmates, for the desire andopportunity to acquire an education had come to her at a late day inher teens. She was ambitious, however, and was making fast progresswith her college preparatory course. Then came the telegram which shenow held, and over which she wept tears of grief.
Her name was not really Josepha Modock. Modock was the name of herfoster father, and he and her foster mother, the latter dead now forten years, had given the girl the name of Josepha, because, when theyhad found her a mere baby weeping and lost on the great desert ofCalifornia, they had discovered a "J" embroidered on her underwear.
At that time Peter Modock--"Pickhandle" Modock--had been what is knownin railroad-construction circles as a gypo man, or shanty man. A gypoman is an impecunious construction contractor whose light, haphazardoutfit of teams and tools makes it necessary for him to subcontract inthe lightest dirt work from a slightly better equipped subcontractor,who in turn has taken a subcontract from the main contractors in a bigpiece of railroad building. In the vernacular of the grade, a gypoman's daughter, if she follows the outfit, is known as a gypo queen.
Josepha Modock, then, had grown up in the camp of Pickhandle Modock,and in time had been known as a gypo queen, or shanty queen, and theprettiest one in the business at that.
It was when the Salt Lake Road was being built across the Mohave Desertthat the baby girl had been found. Pickhandle Modock had taken alittle piece of work from Grace Brothers, and was on his way across thesandy wastes to pitch camp and begin operations. His outfit was to beone of the first to arrive, and as yet no definite line of travel hadbeen established to the work. A terrific sandstorm came up, and theoutfit became lost on the desert, where men and teams wandered aboutwithout water for many perilous hours, some time in the midst of whichthe human atom afterward called Josepha was found.
She had been sole mistress of a tiny camp tucked away in ahalf-sheltered little arroyo, over which spiked yucca palms stood guardand helped to break the wind and check the drifting sands. There wereprovisioned pack bags there, and the blowing sand had not entirelycovered the small hoof prints of several burros. A corral of corkyyucca trunks held the child a prisoner, and more trunks had been laidon the walls to form a roof, which kept off coyotes. In here theyfound her sobbing, suffering for water, abandoned by her elders, whileslowly but surely the sand was sifting in to bury her alive.
All trails leading to or from the spot had been wiped out. The childwas cautiously given water and food, and the suffering contractor'sparty camped there, hoping for the return of the man or men who hadleft the baby to such dangers in the merciless desert. But no one cameto claim her that day nor during the ensuing night; so next morningPickhandle's outfit set out to search desperately to better their ownalarming conditions, and took the child along. Modock left behind anote explaining their action and informing whoever was responsible howhe might eventually be connected with, whereupon the child would bereturned.
That day the sandstorm subsided, and the outfit stumbled upon the roadto their destination. They found water before noon, and camped thereto recuperate. Here also, when they took their leave, they left wordof their appropriation of the baby girl. Later, when they had reachedtheir camp site and settled down, Modock, having received nocommunication relative to the child, returned on horseback and soughtfor the spot where she had been found. At last it was discovered, andit was quite apparent that during the ten days' interval no one hadbeen there. The pack bags with the supplies, and the few miners' toolsthat lay about, were all but buried in the sands. Modock's note wasstill there.
Deciding that the baby's guardians or parents had perished in thestorm, Pickhandle Modock took the articles for the purpose ofidentification, if some one ever should claim the child, and returnedwith them to his camp, greatly to the joy of motherly Anna Modock, hiswife. Anna Modock had no children, and now she loved the desert waifas if the child had been her own.
Slowly Pickhandle Modock prospered in the years that followed, for hewas a thrifty, hard-working man. The child, whom they had namedJosepha, grew to girlhood, and reached young womanhood as a sprite ofthe camps--a gypo queen. The Modocks were uneducated people, but knewit, and strove to make amends by educating the girl to the best oftheir ability. When the contractor had prospered to the point where heneeded and could afford a bookkeeper, he employed a gray-hairedderelict of the grade, half of whose duties were to educate Josepha.
The old man loved the child and did his best by her, guiding hersuccessfully through the elementary branches and succeeding inimplanting in her mind what is known as a common-school education. Shelearned rapidly, but showed no particular interest in her studies.With the work of the grade she was enraptured. At ten she was drivinga slip team, loading and dumping without the help of any one. Latershe drove wheeler teams, then snap teams, and even the six-horse plowteams. She became a wonderful horsewoman, and, when in the West,entered contests at rodeos in trick riding, riding buckers andso-called outlaws, and won many prizes. Horses and mules loved her.Her voice or her hand spoke to them in a language that they seemed toknow. She could break a colt to steady work in half the time requiredby any man she had ever met. It was said that the only thing a horseor mule would not do for her was to talk, whereupon Josepha trained acolt to "talk," just to prove that her understanding of animals wasvirtually unlimited.
So Joshepha Modock grew to young womanhood, admired, loved, and spoiledby the thousands of nomad laborers who knew her. At eighteen she couldtruthfully boast of a hundred proposals of marriage, and some of themhad been worth an ambitious girl's consideration. Gypo Jo they calledher, and she was known all over the West, where her foster father'soperations were confined, and stories of her beauty and horsewomanshiphad gone East and North and South, for railroad-construction laborersare a nomadic brood and repeat their tales and traditions from coast tocoast.
Then Pickhandle Modock, whose wife had died some years before, made themove which finally brought his mounting prospects to the verge of ruin.Just when he was on the point of being recognized as a contractor ofconsequence, and owned a big, fine outfit of stock and tents andimplements, he decided to change his activities to those of a freighter.
Numerous railroad projects were being launched in the West, and most ofthe lines were bound to extend through countries difficult to access.Contractors preferred to have their freight hauled to them by regularfreighters, so that every team of their own could be put on the task ofrailroad building. Or so Pickhandle Modock reasoned.
Accordingly he sold his construction outfit, and with the proceedsbought heavy freight wagons and heavy young teams, and launched forthin his new career. For a year or more he followed railroad camps withhis heavy freight outfit; then he suddenly decided that he was gettingtoo old for camp life and to be eternally moving about. So when a newgold mine was opened up in the mountains that overlook southernCalifornia's desert, he moved into the little frontier town of Palada,forty miles from the new mines, and got the freighting contract fromthis railroad point up into the mountains.
He bought out the town's largest store, and set up a blacksmith andwagoner's shop to keep his great wagons in repair and his hard-workingteams shod. Here for a year or more Josepha attended high schooldur
ing the winter months, and drove eight and ten-horse teams with ajerkline to the mines in summer, and acquired her new title of JerklineJo because of her skill in training and handling the big teams. Here,too, she required [Transcriber's note: acquired?] her thirst for aneducation, and, torn between her new ambition and her love for the bigoutdoors and her devoted mules and horses, she at last set off forWisconsin for her preparatory course at Kendrick Hall.
Pickhandle Modock, however, had reckoned without the automobile truck,which now was fast displacing heavy freight teams. While as yet theroad into the mountains was not in the best shape for trucks, at leastduring winter months, still the noisy transporters of freight, of thelower tonnage capacity, were taking a great deal of business from him.Then the road on the other side of the mountains, connecting with thebig coast-side cities, was paved; and this ended Pickhandle Modock'scareer as a jerkline freighter. The town of Palada, too, degeneratedfrom an active little supply point to a stagnating desert village, withno visible means of support, and Pickhandle Modock found himself with abig stock of goods on hand with no one to buy, and with sixty or moreheavy freight horses eating their heads off in their corrals.
His circumstances went from bad to worse, but he had carefully kept allthis from his adopted daughter, in the preparatory school in the MiddleWest. Consequently the blithe and lovable Jerkline Jo knew nothing ofthe state of affairs when the telegram announcing her father's deathreached her that fateful morning.
It stunned her at first. She could scarcely believe that lovable,hard-working, grizzled old Pickhandle Modock, the only father she hadever known had gone out of her life forever. The justice of the peaceat Palada, who had handled Pickhandle's legal affairs, had sent thetelegram, which advised her to return at once, as she was named as thesole heir to her foster father's estate. The telegram--a night letterand a long one--hinted of things of which she had not even dreamed, anprepared her for financial disappointments.
She at once realized that her school days at Kendrick Hall were ended,just when the future looked so bright. She would have entered collegenext year, and this, too, she must now forego, just when her ambitionwas at its height.
But she had been through many discouragements as a gypo queen, and shedid not flinch. She had known poverty--even actual want--had foughtmud and sandstorms and cold and heat and rain that hampered work forweeks and months. In her was the indomitable spirit of the pioneer.She bravely and silently packed her treasured belongings, bade adry-eyed good-by to her tearful instructors and classmates, and set herface toward the Western desert to learn the worst, and meet it ashard-fighting old Pickhandle Modock would have wished her to meetit--as a girl called Jerkline Jo should meet life's threatening defeats.
The She Boss: A Western Story Page 10
