Jasper County Democrat, Volume 20, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 June 1917 — Then I'll Come Back to you [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Then I'll Come Back to you

By Lurry Evans

SYNOPSIS Caleb Hunter and his sister Sarah welcome to their home Stephen O’Mara, a Skomelesa and friendless boy, starting from tthe wilderness to see the city. Stephen O’Mara catches a glimpse of Barbara Allison. The girl Is rich. The O’Mara boy falls In love with her. She to ten. he fourteen. > me boy and girl are in 4 party UinX go to town. The old people watch with con•em the "youth’s growing attachment for the girl. Caleb Is much impressed with the boy's Meas on the moving of timber. He preslicts a great future for the lau. O’Mara whips Archibald Wickersham In boyhood fight over Barbara. She takes Wickersham’s side, _ and Stephen leaves for parts unknown, saying, "I’ll come hack to vou." A Tears later the boy returns as a ®e is a contractor. Sarah welcomes him" Barbara is a beautiful woman. O'Mara suspects there is a plot to prevent his successful completion of a railroad and that Barbara Allison A father •and Wickersham are in it O’Mara meets Garry Devereau, with whom Barbara’s closest friend is in love. O’Mara starts to reform him. O'Mara meets Barbara’ Allison on the road. There is a play of wends In which both seek to conceal their feeling. “ Wickersham notices that Barbara and ■Stephen are together a great deal. Miriam Burrell, Barbara’s friend, sees and understands the black rage that shadows Ills fazse. O’Mara daily becomes more convinced that some one is trying to stir up trouble among his mei> , y Wickersham and Allison have a confer■«nce. They agree that Harrigap, their tool, has messed things trying to stir up trouble among the men. O’Mara assures the men that as long as they work for him they need have no fear. He checks an incipient strike. O’Mara cheers Devereau with the information that Miriam Burrell cares for him -despite his unhappy past.

CHAPTER XVi. A Game of Cards. HEN they tuck a ninety-nine year clause into a franchise they mean it's forever's don't they?” Joe wanted to know.

“Forever, to all intents and purposes!” said Garry. Joe’s chest sank and rose in a long, long breath. “It’s no word to trifle with,” he cautioned at last. “If you lose it’ll Le a considerable drouth.” “Cut!” invited Garry, and they start <ed to play. s That other night Garry's stack of chips had lasted far longer, than theft did on this second occasion. A half hour later, when he rose to go to bed. his ninety-nine year promise of abstb nence was piled symmetrically before Fat Joe. Btft his good night was gay. For a time after his departure Joe eyed Steve sidewise. “Hum-m-m,” he cleared- his throat. “Hum-m-m! And I was expectin' you to turn up any hour of the last twentyfour with a request that I come and help bring home the remains. You must be quite a silver tongued ex horter, aren’t you, Steve?” Stephen O'Mara was silent over the paper which Joe had handed him earlier in the evening, and the lack of any offer on his part to go into details ‘did not trouble his questioner. Fat Joe sat and bobbed his head over what would never cease to be a miracle in his eyes. “And he’ll stick this time,”,he vented his wonder aloud. “He’s surely going, to stick!” Then he smiled widely. “And I reckon you’ll have to admit that I handled the small part that came my way with ease and dispatch when I tell you that he didn't catch so much as one lonesome pair all the time. I was dealing. I’m ashamed of my-

self. I haven’t seen such a mean, crooked game of stud dealt since I came east!” Gariy was very quiet the next morning when he and Steve went back to their work; before noon came his uneasiness had become very apparent to the man he was assisting. But neither his silence nor his nervousness any longer worried Steve. Instead the latter let himself smile over both those outward evidences of inward panic, whenever his thoughts were on Garry at all. For the latter’s diffidence as the day aged became a flushed and warm cheeked thing, until at 4 in the'afternoon Steve could no longer withhold the suggestion for which, wordlessly, Garry was asking. “Joe was more than half right,” he remarked, one eye to his level, “in spite of the fact that we refused to take him seriously. We can’t let those people come in and find everything too hopelessly uncomfortable, so perhaps you’d better run ahead now,

Garry, and see what he has accom- ? plished. I don’t want to leave this spot myself Until I have some figures upon which I know I can rely. But you might run aheacf, if you will. I’ll be along later.” It was couched in the form of a request, but. Garry’s face flamed. He went, albeit a bit reluctantly. And he stopped more than a few times in his climb from the edge of the timber to the door of Steve’s shack. But once he had passed over the threshold to find that unrecognizably trim room empty, his face grew heavy with disappointment. He was on the point

of going back ootsidejo scan. the bowl of the valley when a tall, short skirted figure, enveloped in a voluminous apron which Fat Joe in a moment of mistaken zeal had once provided for the cook boy, flashed through the passageway from the kitchen annex and barely missed catapulting into his arais. Miriam Burrell, pink faced from the heat of the roaring wood stove and smudged with flour on forehead and cheek, lifted her apron and swung it like a flag of victory. “I've found it,” she sang triumphantly. *T*re found out whi»t wr«> the matter! I'd just forgotten, the baking powder. that was all! Next time”— Then she recognized him. With outstretched hands still clutching the edge of her apron, she stood, almond eyes ■widening, and scanned, him from head to foot. Even Steve, who had been with him every moment, had noticed the hour to hour change that had been taking place in Garry's appearance. To the girl who had not seen him for weeks, that flushed, self conscious man was a different Garry than she had never known before. Hungrily her gaze went from open shirt to' caked boots, from steady hands to clear eyes which made her own eyes shy. And then Miriam Burrell. cool and poised Miriam, did what many another maid in a checkered apron has done in similar situations. She lifted that stiff gingham to hide her unutterable happiness. But before he could speak she found her voice, nor was it very steady at that. “T thought you were that party of idlers come back,” she hesitated. “How —how tanned you are becoming, Garry! I thought they—oh, I can't tell you how glad lam to see you so—so well. I’m making biscuits for supper—that is, I’ve just been practicing until now. It seemed as though I’d forgotten some thing that was necessary to the recipe, i*canse they were flatter after they were cooked than when I put them in . the oven. And most marvelously heavy too! But it was just the baking pow der, that was all. Do you—do you think you'd care to hels?”

Steve was very late in returning to camp that night Throughout the rest of the afternoon he set himself a pace knee deep in slushy mud which Garry could not have maintained. But when he paused there in the dark where he always stopped for a moment and a tumult of voices swept down to meet him he forgot his fatigue. He had lifted his battered hat from his to distinguish a single note in all that treble of girlish laughter, when, framed suddenly against the background of ugnr within, he saw a slender silhouette take fcp its station in the door frame. Barbara was still peering out across the darkness when he came up to her. ’, “We've been waiting dinner for you for almost an hour.” she rebuked him in place of what might have been a commonplace greeting. “We’ve been waiting in the face of Mr. Morgan's insistence that it was practically useless. He has been telling us that when a man here in the hills fails to turn up for a meal you never bother to look for him. You know that the worst has happened.” Over her head the first eyes that Steve encountered that evening were those of Archibald Wickersham. While shaking hands with the girl he bowed in grave welcome to the tall figure in

leather puttees and whipcord riding breeches, and Wickersham from the far side of the room bowed back in equal gravity. Then Caleb Hunter grasped Stere’s elbow and spun him around toward the light and peered at him accusingly. Barbara had not noticed until them how tired Steve looked. “Before get to talking,” said Caleb, ‘ before the tide grows too strong for my weak voice, young man, I want to deliver a message. Miss Sarah wants it explicitly understood that unless you stop in to say hello on your

next trip down she herself win Take the trail up here. And lest that ultimatum sound too little threatening I might add that when Miss Sarah, takes the trail she never travels with less than six trunks.” Caleb clung so tightly to his arm that it brought a tinge of color to Steve’s cheeks. It was minutes before he could get away to change his wet clothes, and in that minute or tw T o he could not help but coptrast, grimly, his own mud bespattered attire with that of Archie Wickersham. The tired blue circles beneath his eyes were even more noticeable ■when he returnd, to be ushered with much ceremony by Fat Joe to the head of the table.

It was an utterly irresponsible gathering . that leaned Over the red tablecloth that night—an oddly assorted group which from the very first Joe realized was not at all to Wickersham's liking. Dexter Allison himself, fairly, radiating good will, sat at the foot of the table, with his son-in-law to be on one side and Barbara'S little maid, Cecile, on the other. And between Cecile and Barbara, who sat opposite Garry and Miriam. Fat Joe leaned both elbows upon the table edge and monopolized the conversation. The seating auTangement was Joe's; it was his party. And the absolute inattention to detail, the large imftfference to veracity which his discourse disclosed before that noisy supper was over, grew to be an astonishing thing. His flights of fancy left Steve aghast in more than one instance; they even forced a stiff smile t<y-Wicker sham’s lips, and that is saying much for Joe’s success as an entertainer, for in the bearing of those two men toward each other there had been evident from the first a chill antipathy which amounted actually to armed truce. And the color in Miriam’s cheeks, whenever his gaze strayed to that side of the table, helped Steve to forget, temporarily, much that he found not pleasant to recall at all. For Miriam's tongue was no less irresponsible than was Joe’s. Her mood was so mercurial that she drew time and again the eyes of all at the table. She chattered with an abandon that scandalized Barbara; broke in and interrupted every argument with hoydenish trivialities, in one breath, to appeal to Garry the next for refutation. And Garry, the light tongued and quick witted, sat almost dumb of lip before her happy garrulity. But his eyes never left her; they spoke his thoughts aloud. The quick lift and droop of her eyelids, the brilliancy of her lips, made Miriam's face a living thing of happiness—made Barbara’s silence seem even more profound. For the latter's withdrawal f«tm the hilarity, dominated half the time by her father’s booming bass, was nearly as complete as that of Wickersham himself.

Just once, shortly before they w’ithdrew for the night, Steve .caught a gleam of mischief in the dark eyes she turned toward him. She rose the next moment and started slowly around the room, poking demurely into corners and closeted nooks. Every eye was following her when she finally found the thing for which she was searching. She drew a red felt, yellow mottoed cushion from beneath the deer hide covering a chair and held it up so that all might read. “What Is Home Without a Father?” it ran, and when the joy that stormed through the room made it sure that the exhibition needed no Interpreter Fat Joe turned and hid his face. Miriam rose languidly and joined the other girl in an examination of his handiwork. Smooth face tinted by the firelight, copper hair almost disheveled in its disarray, she was an exquisitely lovely thing. In her alto voice she expressed her opinion. « “It’s an entirely new stitch to me, Bobs,” she averred. “I don’t think I have ever before seen just this method employed.” And she turned to’ Stephen O’Mara. “Do you suppose, Mr. O’Mara,” she asked, “that I might learn it from the one who did this work for you? It’s rather”—and her head tilted to one side—“it’s rather a pretty thing.” Again they succumbed to mirth, and then Joe rose, bristling, apd went forward much as a gamecock might step out to do battle. He took the cushion from the hands of the girls, who no longer had strength enough even to hold it. “If you are aiming to do any sewing around this camp,” he stated, “you can start in sewing on buttons. This kind of work is entirely too nerve wearing for amateurs.”

He carried the cushion across the room and placed it not where it had been hidden by the deer hide, but in colorful prominence against the ‘back of the chair. Long after he had crossed with Steve and Garry to their tents he continued to explode with soft chuckles. “I never did say,” he defended himself, “‘that that sentiment was strictly appropriate. I always stated that it was the best I could. And as for my technique—well, either of you guys try it some time. You just take a needleful of that yellow worsted and start tracking across a couple of yards of red and pathless desert and see where you come out. I know, because I’ve it. I’m a pioneer. But if I ever tackle another job like that it’s going to be a crazy quilt.” And Joe considered in spite of the din which answered him that his challenge was ample. It was fully an hour after Fat Joe and Garry had rolled themselves up in their blankets when Steve, who had elected to sit up for one last pipe even though his body was aching with fatigue, heard behind him the approach of her footsteps. Outside at the top of the rise some fifty yards in front of the tents he had seated himself on a log, chin buried in" one palm and eyes vacantly steady before him. But even before he turned, before he rose slowly to his feet, he knew who was coming, knew and realized that she should not have come. Wrapped in a

long heavy coat, face half hidden by the upturned collar, bare of head, Barbara came quietly down to where he waited. And without word of greeting ou the part of either of them they sat down together, facing the silvered bowl of the valley. Time before Barbara opened her lips for a long, quivering intake of breath. “I never dreamed it could be so big,” she murmured in awe. ‘“And then to think that some day—within a few months in reality—engines will go screeching their signals across this very place. It doesn’t seem possible; it seems almost a shame to spoil it too.’* ’, I, < ‘ . “I’ve felt that way about it often,” Stove answered, almost dully. “1 like it better myself as it is. It does appear to bo a long way ahead, doesn't it —that day of completion which you

cover in the screech of the whistles? Only today, when we were scrambling about down there in the alders it took nearly all the imagination I possessed to see two streaks of steel where there is nothing but thicket now. But as for the bigness of it”—lie laughed deprecatiugly—‘it isn’t so very big, you know. It’s just a—a mean sort of proposition.”

“To me,” Barbara said—“to me it is colossal! Why, I thought the work at Morrison seemed complicated and tangled enough, but there—there isn’t even a beginning or an ending here. There’s nothing but woods and water.” She pointed out across the valley toward a moundlike outline yellow under the moon; pointed into the north and asked another question. “Is that part of the embankment?” she wanted to know? “Is that the direction in which Mr. Wickersham’s timber lies?” The man nodded. “Just a few' miles up through that notch,” he told her. “That’s the end of the rail bed which we have been building along the river edge.” Her next words ma s de him start and then try to cover that moment with a readjustment of his long body. (To be continued.)

“Oh, I can’t tell you how glad I am to See you!"

“I never dreamed it could be so big.”