Part 29 (2/2)
She hid her face against his breast and said nothing, but her shoulders shook.
”Jo, say it!” he pleaded. ”Don't torment me! You must love me. You came to my arms when trouble threatened. Tell me that you love me, Jo!”
She only trembled and s.h.i.+vered as if cold.
”Tell me, Jo! Don't torture me. Tell me that you love me!”
There was a stifled sob; then, in m.u.f.fled tones:
”You big, blind country jake! If you don't know that I'm telling you that with every nerve and fiber of my being, you deserve torture!”
The forest and the lake came together in Hiram's vision, then vanished.
There was no lake, no trees, no sentinel peaks about them.
”But, Jo,” said Hiram as they walked back slowly toward the camp, his arm about her waist, ”I can't marry you. I've got nothing--I'm only your skinner. You--why, your profits every month run up into four figures. Oh, I wish you hadn't a cent! I wish Drummond had beaten us out!”
”What foolish talk!” she said scornfully. ”What is money? I care so little for money, Hiram. It was only to try and preserve from total collapse all my hard-working, indomitable, old foster father had built up so patiently that I undertook the freighting job. I've made money--lots of it--and if you think you and the rest of the boys haven't had a big share in my success you're all wrong. We'll keep on skinning them to Ragtown till the steel is laid; then I mean to do something handsome by the men who have been so loyal to me, and sell the outfit. Then”--she sighed--”then something else,” she finished.
”But that's neither here nor there,” Hiram pointed out. ”I'm penniless compared with you. I couldn't marry a girl who had money while I have nothing to offer her. I'm too much of a man for that. Why, everything that I have I owe to you--even the education I am so slowly acquiring.”
”Oh, I won't listen to such talk, Hiram! Most of my money is invested in Tweet's project, anyway. We'll let him handle it, and you and I will continue to study and improve ourselves. Then when Tweet begins to pay us dividends we'll travel, and----”
”On your money! Not in a thousand years!”
”You're bull-headed about a trifle, Hiram,” she accused.
”Jo,” he said after a thoughtful pause, ”don't wear that blue silk dress and those diamonds and have your hair fixed that way any more.
It--it makes me feel hollowlike.”
They had almost forgotten the man in the pines, there was so much else to think about now. Jo was almost ready to confess that she had imagined the entire incident--that she had heard only a prowling animal and had seen the shadow of a shrub. Hiram, on his part, was too triumphant over the thought that he, only a few months from the backwoods of Mendocino County, had captured the heart of this splendid girl, whom men praised and admired and swore by throughout all the desert region.
Still the man was stubborn. In him was a knight-errantry which forbade him to marry a girl and profit by the rewards of her pluck, energy, and business courage. If he could not make money to offer her, he must do something big for her, must win for her some conflict that threatened her fortunes, must make himself worthy of her by some great service.
Hiram still kept his boyish dreams of the adventure girl who had beckoned him from the forests to deeds of emprise. He had found his adventure girl, but he would not consider that he had won her yet. He little knew that night that his opportunity was close at hand, and that the shadow which the coming event had cast before it had lurked there in the lakeside pines.
CHAPTER XXV
JO LOSES HER SUPPORT
Eight days later Jerkline Jo leaned on the ledge of the office window in Huber's store at Ragtown and handed him the various papers which accompanied a consignment of freight from Julia.
”There's no hay, Jo,” he cried, looking up in perplexity and worriment.
”The Mulligan Supply Company was short of hay when we left,” Jo explained. ”They hoped to have a trainload in by the time I got back.”
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