The Rim of the Desert

by Ada Woodruff Anderson

  “The porter is coming back for it now,” he answered “And thank you, but I am going in the smoking-car.”

  As he approached the vestibule, he caught her reflection in the mirror at the end of the sleeper. She was looking after him, and she leaned forward a little with parted lips, as though she had started to call him back, but her eyes clouded in uncertainty; then suddenly, the sparkle rose. It suffused her whole face. She had met his glance in the glass. And the porter was waiting. She settled herself once more and devoted herself to the telegram.

  The lines in Tisdale's face deepened mellowly. He believed that, now they were so near their journey's end, she wanted to be sure of an opportunity to thank him some more. “I am coming back,” he said inwardly, addressing the woman in the mirror, “but I must have a smoke to keep my pulse normal.”

  But he did not return to the sleeper, for the reason that at Scenic Hot Springs the Seattle papers were brought aboard. The copy of the Press he bought contained the account of the accident in Snoqualmie Pass. The illustrations were unusually clear, and Daniels' cuts were supplemented by another labelled: “The Morganstein party leaving Vivian Court,” which also designated the group.

  (Mrs. Feversham, wife of the special delegate from Alaska, in the tonneau.

  Her sister, Miss Morganstein, on her right.

  Mrs. Weatherbee seated in front.

  Frederic Morganstein driving the car.)

  And under the central picture Hollis read: “Mrs. Weatherbee (Miss Armitage?), as she drove the machine into the embankment.”

  The paper rattled a little in his hands. His face flamed, then settled gray and very still. Except that his eyes moved, flashing from the photographs to the headlines, he might have been a man hewn of granite. “One more reason why the Snoqualmie highway should be improved,” he read. “Narrow escape of the Morganstein party. Mrs. Weatherbee's presence of mind.” And, half-way down the page, “Mrs. Weatherbee modestly assumes an incognito when interviewed by a representative of the Press.”

  But Tisdale did not look at the story. He crushed the newspaper into the corner of his seat and turned his face to the window. His cigar had gone out. He laid it mechanically on the sill. So, this was the woman who had wrecked David Weatherbee; who had cast her spell over level-headed Foster; and already, in the less than three days he had known her, had made a complete idiot of him. Suppose Foster should hear about that drive through the mountains that had cost him over seven hundred dollars; suppose Foster should know about that episode in the basin on Weatherbee's own ground. A great revulsion came over him.

  Presently he began to take up detail after detail of that journey. Now he saw the real impulse that had led her to board the eastbound train in Snoqualmie Pass. She had recognized him, conjectured he was on his way to find that tract of Weatherbee's; and she had determined to go over the land with him, cajole him into putting the highest estimate possible on the property. Even now, there in the sleeper, she was congratulating herself no doubt on the success of her scheme.

  At the thought of the ease with which he had allowed himself to be ensnared, his muscles tightened. It was as though the iron in the man took shape, shook off the veneer, encased him like a coat of mail. Hitherto, in those remote Alaska solitudes, this would have meant the calling to account of some transgressor in his camp. He began to sift for the prime element in this woman's wonderful personality. It was not physical beauty alone; neither was it that mysterious magnetism, almost electrical, yet delicately responsive as a stringed instrument. One of these might have kept that tremendous hold on Weatherbee near, but on Weatherbee absent through those long, breaking years, hardly. It was something deeper; something elusive yet insistent that had made it easier for him to brave out his defeat alone in the Alaska wilderness than come back to face. Clearly she was not just the handsome animal he had believed her to be. Had she not called herself proud? Had he not seen her courage? She had a spirit to break. A soul!

  CHAPTER XIII. “A LITTLE STREAK OF LUCK”

  It was not the first time Jimmie Daniels had entertained the Society Editor at the Rathskeller, and that Monday, though he had invited her to lunch with him in the Venetian room, she asked him, as was her habit, to “order for both.”

  “Isn't there something special you'd like?” he asked generously; “something you haven't had for a long time?”

  “No. You are so much of an epicure—for a literary person—I know it's sure to be something nice. Besides,” and the shadow of a smile drifted across her face, “it saves me guessing the state of your finances.”

  A critic would have called Geraldine Atkins too slender for her height, and her face, notwithstanding its girlish freshness, hardly pretty. The chin, in spite of its dimple, was too strong; the lips, scarlet as a holly berry, lacked fullness and had a trick of closing firmly over her white teeth. Even her gray-blue eyes, which should have been a dreamer's, had acquired a direct intensity of expression as though they were forever seeking the inner, real you. Still, from the rolling brim of her soft felt hat to the hem of her brown tailor-made, that cleared the ankles of trim brown shoes, she was undeniably chic and in the eyes of Jimmie Daniels “mighty nice.”

  He was longer than usual filling out the card, and the waiter hesitated thoughtfully when he had read it, then be glanced from the young man to his companion with a comprehensive smile and hurried away. There was chilled grapefruit in goblets with cracked ice, followed by bouillon, oysters, and a delectable young duck with toast. But it was only when the man brought a small green bottle and held it for Jimmie to approve the label that his guest began to arch her brows.

  Daniels smiled his ingenuous smile. “It's just to celebrate a little streak of luck,” he said. “And I owe it to you. If you hadn't been at Vivian Court to write up the decorations for that bridge-luncheon and happened to make that snap-shot of the Morganstein party, my leading lady would have gone to the paper as Miss Armitage straight, and I guess that would have queered me with the chief. But that headline you introduced about Mrs. Weatherbee's incognito struck him right. 'Well, Jimmie,' he said, 'you've saved your scalp this time.'“

  The Society Editor smiled. “You were a gullible kiddie,” she replied. “But it's a mystery to me how you could have lived in Seattle three years without knowing the prettiest woman on the boulevard by sight.”

  Jimmie shook his head. “I haven't the shadow of an excuse, unless it was because another girl was running such a close second she always cut off my view.”

  “Think,” said Miss Atkins quickly, disregarding the excuse, “if that name, Miss Armitage, had been tagged to a picture that half the town would have recognized. Mrs. Weatherbee is the most popular lady, socially, in Seattle. When there's a reception for a new Council, she's always in the receiving line; she pours tea at the tennis tournament, and it was she who led the cotillion at the Charity ball. You would find her name in all the important affairs, if you read the society column.”

  Daniels nodded meekly. “It was a hairbreadth escape, and I'm mighty grateful.”

  There was a little silence then, but after the waiter had filled the long-stemmed glasses and hurried away, she said slowly, her gray-blue eyes sifting Jimmie through and through: “It looks like you've been playing cards for money, but I never should have suspected it—of you.”

  Daniels shook his head gravely. “No get-rich-quick games for me. My luck doesn't come that way. But it cost me nearly two thousand dollars to find it out. I've always meant to tell you about that, sometime. That two thousand dollars was all my capital when I came to Seattle to take my course in journalism. I expected it to see me through. But, well, it was my first week at the University—fortunately I had paid the expenses of the first semester in advance—when one night a couple of fellows I knew brought me down to see the town. I didn't know much about a city then; I had grown up over in the sage-brush country, and I never had heard of a highball. To start with I had two, then I got interested in a game of roulette, and the last I
remember I was learning to play poker. But I must have had more high-balls; the boys said afterwards they left me early in the evening with a new acquaintance; they couldn't get me to go home. I never knew how I got back to the dorm, and the next day, when I woke, the stubs of my checkbook showed I had signed practically all of my two thousand away.”

  There was a brief silence. Out in the main room the orchestra began to play. Miss Atkins was looking at Jimmie, and her scarlet lips were closed like a straight cord.

  He drew his hand over his smooth, close-cut, dark hair and took a long draught from his glass of ice-water. “I can't make you understand how I felt about it,” he went on, “but that two thousand was the price of my father's ranch over near the Columbia. It stood for years of privation, heart-breaking toil, and disappointment—the worst kind. Two seasons of drouth we saw the whole wheat crop blister and go to ruin. I carried water in buckets from the river up to that plateau day after day, just to keep our home garden and a little patch of grass alive. And mother carried too up that breaking slope in the desert sun. It was thinking of that made me— all in. She worked the same way with the stock. Something lacking in the soil affected the feed, and some of the calves were born without hair; their bones were soft. It baffled my father and every man along that rim of the desert, but not mother. She said doctors prescribed lime for rickety human babies, and she made limewater and mixed it with the feed. It was just the thing. She was a small woman, but plucky from start to finish. And we, Dad and I, didn't know what it was costing her—till she was gone.”

  There was another silence. In the orchestra, out beyond the palms and screens of the Venetian room, the first violin was playing the Humoresque. The girl leaned forward slightly, watching Jimmie's face. Her lips were parted, and an unexpected sympathy softened her eyes.

  “She had been a school teacher back in Iowa,” he resumed, “and long winter evenings and Sundays when she could, she always had her books out. Up to the year I was twenty, she taught me all I knew. She tried her best to make a man of me, and I can see now how she turned my mind to journalism. She said some day there was going to be an opening for a newspaper right there in the Columbia desert. Where a great river received the waters of another big stream, there was bound to be a city. She saw farther than we did. The High Line canal was only a pipe dream then, but she believed it would come true. When she died, we hadn't the heart to stay on with the ranch, so Dad gave it to me, to sell for what I could get, and went back to Iowa. He said he had promised her he would give me a chance at the State University, and that was the best he could do. And, well, you see I had to come to the U. of W. to stay, and I was used to work. I did all sorts of stunts out of hours and managed to pull through the second semester. Then I hiked over the mountains to the Wenatchee valley and earned enough that summer vacation to tide me over the next year. I had a friend there in the sage-brush country, a station agent named Bailey, who had blown a thousand dollars into a tract of desert land he hadn't seen off the map. He was the kind of fellow to call himself all kinds of a fool, then go ahead and make that ground pay his money back. He saw a way to bring it under irrigation and had it cleared and set to apples. But, while he was waiting for the trees to grow, he put in fillers of alfalfa and strawberries. He was operating for the new Milwaukee railroad then, and hired me to harvest his crops. They paid my wages and the two Japs I had to help, with a snug profit. And his trees were doing fine; thrifty, every one in the twenty acres. Last year they began to bear, only a few apples to a tree, but for flavor and size fit for Eden. This year he is giving up his position with the Milwaukee; his orchards are going to make him rich. And he wrote me the other day that the old ranch I threw away is coming under the new High Line ditch. The company that bought it has platted it into fruit tracts. Think-of that! Trees growing all over that piece of desert. Water running to waste, where mother and I carried it in buckets through the sand, in the sweltering heat, up that miserable slope.”

  The Society Editor drew a full breath and settled back in her chair. Her glance fell to her glass, and she laid her fingers on the thin stem. Jimmie refreshed himself again with the ice-water. “I didn't mean to go into the story so deep,” he said, “but you are a good listener.”

  “It was worth listening to,” she answered earnestly. “I've always wondered about your mother; I knew she must have been nice. But you must simply hate the sight of cards now. I am sorry I said what I did. And I don't care how it happened, here is to that 'Little Streak of Luck.' May it lead to the great pay-streak.”

  She reached her glass out for Jimmie to touch with his, then raised it to her lips. Daniels drank and held his glass off to examine the remaining liquor, like a connoisseur. “I play cards a little sometimes,” he confessed; “on boats and places where I have to kill time. But,” and he brightened, “it was this way about that streak of luck. I was detailed to write up the new Yacht Club quarters at West Seattle, with illustrations to show the finer boats at the anchorage and, while I was on the landing making an exposure of the Morganstein yacht, a tender put off with a message for me to come aboard. Mr. Morganstein had seen me from the deck, where he was nursing his injured leg. He was lonesome, I suppose. There was no one else in sight, though as I stepped over the side, I heard a victrola playing down below. 'How are you?' he said. 'Have a seat.' Then he scowled down the companionway and called: 'Elizabeth, stop that infernal machine, will you?'

  “The music was turned off, and pretty soon Miss Morganstein came up the stairs. She was stunning, in a white sailor suit with red fixings, eyes black as midnight; piles of raven hair. But as soon as he had introduced us, and she had settled his pillows to suit him—he was lying in one of those invalid chairs—he sent her off to mix a julep or something. Then he said he presumed we were going to have a fine cut of the Aquila in the Sunday paper, if I was the reporter who made that exposure at the time of the accident to his car. I told him yes, I was Daniels, representing the Press, and had the good fortune to be in Snoqualmie Pass that day. 'I was sure of it,' he said. 'Watched you over there with these binoculars.' He put the glasses down on a table and opened a drawer and took out his fountain-pen and checkbook. 'That write-up was so good,' he said, handing me the blank he had filled, 'I want to make you a little present. But you are the first Press reporter I ever gave anything to, and I want this kept quiet.'

  “I thanked him, but when I looked at that check I woke up. It was for a cool hundred dollars. I tried to make him take it back; I told him my paper was paying me; besides, I couldn't accept all the credit; that you had fixed up the story and put the names right, and the first cut was yours. 'Never mind,' he said, 'I have something else for your society miss to do. I am going to have her describe my new country place, when it's all in shape. Takes a woman to get hold of the scenery and color schemes.' Then he insisted I had earned the extra money. Not one man in a hundred would have been quick enough to make that exposure, and the picture was certainly fine of the whole group. In fact, he wanted that film of the car swinging into the embankment. He wanted to have an enlargement made.”

  “I see,” said Miss Atkins slowly, “I see.” She paused, scooping the crest from her pineapple ice, then added: “Now we are getting to the core.”

  “I told him it belonged to the paper, but I thought I would be able to get it for him,” Jimmie resumed. “And he asked me to bring it down to Pier Number Three just before four this afternoon. The Aquila was starting for a little cruise around Bainbridge Island to his country place, and if I wanted to work in something about her equipment and speed, I might sail as far as the Navy Yard, where they would make a short stop. Then he mentioned that Hollis Tisdale might be aboard, and possibly I would be able to pick up a little information on the coal question. These Government people were 'non-committal,' he said, but there was a snug corner behind the awnings aft, where in any case I could work up my Yacht Club copy.”

  “So,” remarked the Society Editor slowly, “it's a double core.”

  C
HAPTER XIV. ON BOARD THE AQUILA

  Tisdale's rooms were very warm that afternoon. It was another of those rare, breezeless days, an aftermath of August rather than the advent of Indian summer, and the sun streamed in at the western windows. His injured hand, his whole feverish body, protested against the heat. The peroxide which he had applied to the hurt at Wenatchee had brought little relief, and that morning the increased pain and swelling had forced him to consult a surgeon, who had probed the wound, cut a little, bandaged it, and announced curtly that it looked like infection.

  “But I can't afford to nurse this hand”—Hollis rose from the couch where he had thrown himself when he came in from the doctor's office—“I ought to be using it now.” He went over and drew the blinds, but the atmosphere seemed more stifling. He needed air, plenty of it, clean and fresh in God's out-of-doors; it was being penned in these close rooms that raised his temperature. He pulled the shades up again and took a turn across the floor. Then he noticed the crumpled note which, aimed left-handedly, had missed the waste basket earlier, when he opened his mail, and he went over and picked it up. He stood smoothing it on his desk. A perfume, spicy yet suggestive of roses, pervaded the sheet, which was written in a round, firm, masculine hand, under the gilt monogram, M.F. His glance ran through the lines: