HER
FATHER’S
DAUGHTER

BY
GENE STRATTON-PORTER

Contents

List of Characters

• Linda Strong, her Father’s Daughter
• Dr. Alexander Strong, a great Nerve Specialist
• Mrs. Strong, his Wife
• Eileen Strong, having Social Aspirations
• Mr. and Mrs. Thorne, neighbors of the Strongs
• Marian Thorne, a Dreamer of Houses
• John Gilman, a Man of Law
• Peter Morrison, an Author
• Henry Anderson, an Architect
• Donald Whiting, a High School Senior
• Mary Louise Whiting, his Sister
• Judge and Mrs. Whiting, a Man of Law and a Woman of Culture
• Katherine O’Donovan, the Strong Cook
• Oka Sayye, a High School Senior
• JAmes Heitman, accidentally rich
• Mrs. Caroline Heitman, his Wife

CHAPTER I

“What Kind of Shoes Are the Shoes You Wear?”

“What makes you wear such funny shoes?”

Linda Strong thrust forward a foot and critically examined the narrow vamp, the projecting sole, the broad, low heel of her well-worn brown calf-skin shoe. Then her glance lifted to the face of Donald Whiting, one of the most brilliant and popular seniors of the High School. Her eyes narrowed in a manner habitual to her when thinking intently.

“Never you mind my shoes,” she said deliberately. “Kindly fix your attention on my head piece. When you see me allowing any Jap in my class to make higher grades than I do, then I give you leave to say anything you please concerning my head.”

An angry red rushed to the boy’s face. It was an irritating fact that in the senior class of that particular Los Angeles high school a Japanese boy stood at the head. This was embarrassing to every senior.

“I say,” said Donald Whiting, “I call that a mean thrust.”

“I have a particular reason,” said Linda.

“And I have ‘a particular reason’,” said Donald, “for being interested in your shoes.”

Linda laughed suddenly. When Linda laughed, which was very seldom, those within hearing turned to look at her. Hers was not a laugh that can be achieved. There were a few high places on the peak of Linda’s soul, and on one of them homed a small flock of notes of rapture; notes as sweet as the voice of the white-banded mocking-bird of Argentina.

“How surprising!” exclaimed Linda. “We have been attending the same school for three years; now, you stop me suddenly to tell me that you are interested in the shape of my shoes.”

“I have been watching them all the time,” said Donald. “I can’t understand why any girl wants to be so different. Why don’t you dress your hair the same as the other girls and wear the same kind of clothes and shoes?”

“Now look here,” interposed Linda “You are flying the track. I am willing to justify my shoes, if I can, but here you go including my dress and a big psychological problem, as well; but I think perhaps the why of the shoes will explain the remainder. Does the name ‘Alexander Strong’ mean anything to you?”

“The great nerve specialist?” asked Donald.

“Yes,” said Linda. “The man who was the author of half-dozen books that have been translated into many foreign tongues and are used as authorities all over the world. He happened to be my father. There are two children in our family. I have a sister four years older than I am who is exactly like Mother, and she and Mother were inseparable. I am exactly like Father; because we understood each other, and because both of us always knew, although we never mentioned it, that Mother preferred my sister Eileen to me, Father tried to make it up to me, so from the time I can remember I was at his heels. It never bothered him to have me playing around in the library while he was writing his most complicated treatise. I have waited in his car half a day at a time, playing or reading, while he watched a patient or delivered a lecture at some medical college. His mental relaxation was to hike or to motor to the sea, to the mountains, to the canyons or the desert, and he very seldom went without me even on long trips when he was fishing or hunting with other men. There was not much to know concerning a woman’s frame or her psychology that Father did not know, so there were two reasons why he selected my footwear as he did. One was because he be believed high heels and pointed toes an outrage against the nervous system of a woman that would in time bring her within his province, and the other was that I could not possibly have kept pace with him except in shoes like these. No doubt, they are the same kind I shall wear all my life, for walking. You probably don’t know it, but my home lies near the middle of Lilac Valley and I walk over a mile each morning and evening to and from the cars. Does this sufficiently explain my shoes?”

“I should think you’d feel queer,” said Donald.

“I suspect I would if I had time to brood over it,” Linda replied, “but I haven’t. I must hustle to get to school on time in the morning. It’s nearly or quite dark before I reach home in the evening. My father believed in having a good time. He had superb health, so he spent most of what he made as it came to him. He counted on a long life. It never occurred to him that a little piece of machinery going wrong would plunge him into Eternity in a second.”

“Oh, I remember!” cried the boy.

Linda’s face paled slightly.

“Yes,” she said, “it happened four years ago and I haven’t gotten away from the horror of it yet, enough ever to step inside of a motor car; but I am going to get over that one of these days. Brakes are not all defective, and one must take one’s risks.”

“You just bet I would,” said Donald. “Motoring is one of the greatest pleasures of modern life. I’ll wager it makes some of the gay old boys, like Marcus Aurelius for example, want to turn over in their graves when they see us flying along the roads of California the way we do.”

“What I was getting at,” said Linda, “was a word of reply to the remainder of your indictment against me. Dad’s income stopped with him, and household expenses went on, and war came, so there isn’t enough money to dress two of us as most of the High-School girls are dressed. Eileen is so much older that it’s her turn first, and I must say she is not at all backward about exercising her rights. I think that will have to suffice for the question of dress; but you may be sure that I am capable of wearing the loveliest dress imaginable, that would be suitable for a school girl, if I had it to wear.”

“Ah, there’s the little ‘fly in your ointment’—‘dress that would be suitable.’ I bet in your heart you think the dresses that half the girls in high school are wearing are not suitable!”

“Commendable perspicacity, O learned senior,” said Linda, “and amazingly true. In the few short years I had with Daddy I acquired a fixed idea as to what kind of dress is suitable and sufficiently durable to wear while walking my daily two miles. I can’t seem to become reconciled to the custom of dressing the same for school as for a party. You get my idea?”

“I get it all right enough,” said Donald, “but I must think awhile before I decide whether I agree with you. Why should you be right, and hundreds of other girls be wrong?”

“I’ll wager your mother would agree with me,” suggested Linda.

“Did yours?” asked Donald.

“Half way,” answered Linda. “She agreed with me for me, but not for Eileen.”

“And not for my sister,” said Donald. “She wears the very foxiest clothes that Father can afford to pay for, and when she was going to school she wore them without the least regard as to whether she was going to school or to a tea party or a matinée. For that matter she frequently went to all three the same day.”

“And that brings us straight to the point concerning you,” said Linda.

“Sure enough!” said Donald. “There is me to be considered! What is it you have against me?”

Linda looked at him meditatively.

“You seem exceptionally strong,” she said. “No doubt are good in athletics. Your head looks all right; it indicates brains. What I want to know is why in the world you don’t use them.”

“What are you getting at, anyway?” asked Donald, with more than a hint of asperity in his voice.

“I am getting at the fact,” said Linda, “that a boy as big as you and as strong as you and with as good brain and your opportunities has allowed a little brown Jap to cross the Pacific Ocean and in a totally strange country to learn a language foreign to him, and, and, with the same books and the same chances, to beat you at your own game. You and every other boy in your classes ought to thoroughly ashamed of yourselves. Before I would let a Jap, either boy or girl, lead in my class, I would give up going to school and go out and see if I could beat him growing lettuce and spinach.”

“It’s all very well to talk,” said Donald hotly.

“And it’s better to make good what you say,” broke in Linda, with equal heat. “There are half a dozen Japs in my classes but no one of them is leading, you will notice, if I do wear peculiar shoes.”

“Well, you would be going some if you beat the leading Jap in the senior class,” said Donald.

“Then I would go some,” said Linda. “I’d beat him, or I’d go straight up trying. You could do it if you’d make up your mind to. The trouble with you is that you’re wasting your brain on speeding an automobile, on dances, and all sorts of foolishness that is not doing you any good in any particular way. Bet you are developing nerves smoking cigarettes. You are not concentrating. Oka Sayye is not thinking of a thing except the triumph of proving to California that he is head man in one of the Los Angeles high schools. That’s what I have got against you, and every other white boy in your class, and in the long run it stacks up bigger than your arraignment of my shoes.”

“Oh, darn your shoes!” cried Donald hotly. “Forget ’em! I’ve got to move on or I’ll be late for trigonometry, but I don’t know when I’ve had such a tidy little fight with a girl, and I don’t enjoy feeling that I have been worsted. I propose another session. May I come out to Lilac Valley Saturday afternoon and flay you alive to pay up for my present humiliation?”

“Why, if your mother happened to be motoring that way and would care to call, I think that would be fine,” said Linda.

“Well, for the Lord’s sake!” exclaimed the irate senior. “Can’t a fellow come and fight with you without being refereed by his mother? Shall I bring Father too?”

“I only thought,” said Linda quietly, “that you would like your mother to see the home and environment of any girl whose acquaintance you made, but the fight we have coming will in all probability be such a pitched battle that when I go over the top, you won’t ever care to follow me and start another issue on the other side. You’re dying right now to ask why I wear my hair in braids down my back instead of in cootie coops over my ears.”

“I don’t give a hang,” said Donald ungallantly, “as to how you wear your hair, but I am coming Saturday to fight, and I don’t think Mother will take any greater interest in the matter than to know that I am going to do battle with a daughter of Doctor Strong.”

“That is a very nice compliment to my daddy, thank you, said Linda, turning away and proceeding in the direction of her own classrooms. There was a brilliant sparkle in her eyes and she sang in a muffled voice, yet distinctly enough to be heard:

“The shoes I wear are common-sense shoes,

And you may wear them if you choose.”

“By gracious! She’s no fool,” he said to himself. In three minutes’ unpremeditated talk the “Junior Freak,” as he mentally denominated her, had managed to irritate him, to puncture his pride, to entertain and amuse him.

“I wonder——” he said as he went his way; and all day he kept on wondering, when he was not studying harder than ever before in all his life.

That night Linda walked slowly along the road toward home. She was not seeing the broad stretch of Lilac Valley, on every hand green with spring, odorous with citrus and wild bloom, blue walled with lacy lilacs veiling the mountain face on either side; and she was not thinking of her plain, well-worn dress or her common-sense shoes. What she was thinking was of every flaying, scathing, solidly based argument she could produce the following Saturday to spur Donald Whiting in some way to surpass Oka Sayye. His chance remark that morning, as they stood near each other waiting a few minutes in the hall, had ended in his asking to come to see her, and she decided as she walked homeward that his first visit in all probability would be his last, since she had not time to spare for boys, when she had so many different interests involved; but she did decide very firmly in her own mind that the would make that visit a memorable one for him.

In arriving at this decision her mind traveled a number of devious roads. The thought that she had been criticized did not annoy her as to the kind of criticism, but she did resent the quality of truth about it. She was right in following the rules her father had laid down for her health and physical well-being, but was it right that she should wear shoes scuffed, resoled, and even patched, when there was money enough for Eileen to have many pairs of expensive laced boots, walking shoes, and fancy slippers? She was sure she was right in wearing dresses suitable for school, but was it right that she must wear them until they were sun-faded, stained, and disreputable? Was it right that Eileen should occupy their father’s and mother’s suite, redecorated and daintily furnished according to her own taste, to keep the parts of the house that she cared to use decorated with flowers and beautifully appointed, while Linda must lock herself in a small stuffy bedroom room, dingy and none too comfortable, when in deference to her pride she wished to work in secret until she learned whether she could succeed.

Then she began thinking, and decided that the only available place in the house for her use was the billiard room. She made up her mind that she would demand the sole right to this big attic room. She would sell the table and use the money to buy herself a suitable work table and a rug. She would demand that Eileen produce enough money for better clothing for her, and then she remembered what she had said to Donald Whiting about conquering her horror for a motor car. Linda turned in at the walk leading to her home, but she passed the front entrance and followed around to the side. As she went she could hear voices in the living room and she knew that Eileen was entertaining some of her many friends; for Eileen was that peculiar creature known as a social butterfly. Each day of her life friends came, or Eileen went—mostly the latter, for Eileen had a knack of management and she so managed her friends that, without their realizing it, they entertained her many times while she entertained them once. Linda went to the kitchen, laid her books and package of mail on the table, and, walking over to the stove, she proceeded deliberately and heartily to kiss the cook.

“Katy, me darlin’,” she said, “look upon your only child. Do you notice a ‘lean and hungry look’ on her classic features?”

Katy turned adoring eyes to the young girl.

“It’s growing so fast ye are, childie,” she said. “It’s only a little while to dinner, and there’s company to-night, so hadn’t ye better wait and not spoil your appetite with piecing?”

“Is there going to be anything ‘jarvis’?” inquired Linda.

“I’d say there is,” said Katy. “John Gilman is here and two friends of Eileen’s. It’s a near banquet, lassie.”

“Then I’ll wait,” said Linda. “I want the keys to the garage.”

Katy handed them to her and Linda went down the back walk beneath an arch of tropical foliage, between blazing walls of brilliant flower faces, unlocked the garage, and stood looking at her father’s runabout.

In the revolution that had taken place in their home after the passing of their father and mother, Eileen had dominated the situation and done as she pleased, with the exception of two instances. Linda had shown both temper and determination at the proposal to dismantle the library and dispose of the cars. She had told Eileen that she might take the touring car and do as she pleased with it. For her share she wanted her father’s roadster, and she meant to have it. She took the same firm stand concerning the library. With the rest of the house Eileen might do as she would. The library was to remain absolutely untouched and what it contained was Linda’s. To this Eileen had agreed, but so far Linda had been content merely to possess her property.

Lately, driven by the feeling that she must find a way in which she could earn money, she had been secretly working on some plans that she hoped might soon yield her small returns. As for the roadster, she as well as Eileen had been horror-stricken when the car containing their father and mother and their adjoining neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Thorne, driven by Marian Thorne, the playmate and companion from childhood of the Strong girls, had become uncontrollable and plunged down the mountain in a disaster that had left only Marian, protected by the steering gear, alive. They had simply by mutual agreement begun using the street cars when they wanted to reach the city.

Linda stood looking at the roadster, jacked up and tucked under a heavy canvas tent that she and her father had used on their hunting and fishing trips. After a long time she laid strong hands on the canvas and dragged it to one side. She looked the car over carefully and then, her face very white and her hands trembling, she climbed into it and slowly and mechanically went through the motions of starting it. For another intent period she sat with her hands on the steering gear, staring straight ahead, and then she said slowly: “Something has got to be done. It’s not going to be very agreeable, but I am going to do it. Eileen has had things all her own way long enough. I am getting such a big girl I ought to have a few things in my life as I want them. Something must be done.”

Then Linda proceeded to do something. What she did was to lean forward, rest her head upon the steering wheel and fight to keep down deep, pitiful sobbing until her whole slender body twisted in the effort.

She was yielding to a breaking up after four years of endurance, for the greater part in silence. As the months of the past year had rolled their deliberate way, Linda had begun to realize that the course her elder sister had taken was wholly unfair to her, and slowly a tumult of revolt was growing in her soul. Without a doubt the culmination had resulted from her few minutes’ talk with Donald Whiting in the hall that morning. It had started Linda to thinking deeply, and the more deeply she thought the clearly she saw the situation. Linda was a loyal soul and her heart was honest. She was quite willing that Eileen should exercise her rights as head of the family, that she should take the precedence to which she was entitled by her four years’ seniority, that she should spend the money which accrued monthly from their father’s estate as she saw fit, up to a certain point. That point was where things ceased to be fair or to be just. If there had been money to do no more for Eileen than had been done for Linda, it would not have been in Linda’s heart to utter a complaint. She could have worn scuffed shoes and old dresses, and gone her way with her proud young head held very high and a jest on her lips; but when her mind really fastened on the problem and she began to reason, she could not feel that Eileen was just to her or that she was fair in her administration of the money which should have been divided more nearly equally between them, after the household expenses had been paid. Once rebellion burned in her heart the flames leaped rapidly, and Linda began to remember a thousand small things that she had scarcely noted at the time of their occurrence.

She was leaning on the steering wheel, tired with nerve strain, when she heard Katy calling her, and realized that she was needed in the kitchen. As a matter of economy Eileen, after her parents’ passing, had dismissed the housemaid, and when there were guests before whom she wished to make a nice appearance Linda had been impressed either to wait on the table or to help in the kitchen in order that Katy might attend the dining room, so Linda understood what was wanted when Katy called her. She ran her fingers over the steering wheel, worn bright by the touch of her father’s and her own hands, and with the buoyancy of youth, found comfort. Once more she mechanically went through the motions of starting the car, then she stepped down, closed the door, and stood an instant thinking.

“You’re four years behind the times,” she said slowly. “No doubt there’s a newer and a better model; I suspect the tires are rotten, but the last day I drove you for Daddy you purred like a kitten, and ran like a clock, and if you were cleaned and oiled and put in proper shape, there’s no reason in the world why I should not drive you again, as I have driven you hundreds of miles when Daddy was tired or when he wanted to teach me the rules of good motoring, and the laws of the road. I can do it all right. I have got to do it, but it will be some time before I’ll care to tackle the mountains.”

Leaving the cover on the floor, she locked the door and returned to the kitchen.

“All right, Katy, what is the programme?” she inquired as lightly as she could.

Katy had been cook in the Strong family ever since they had moved to Lilac Valley. She had obeyed Mrs. Strong and Eileen. She had worshiped the Doctor and Linda. It always had been patent to her eyes that Mrs. Strong was extremely partial to Eileen, so Katy had joined forces with the Doctor in surreptitiously doing everything her warm Irish heart prompted to prevent Linda from feeling neglected. Her quick eyes saw the traces of tears on Linda’s face, and she instantly knew that the trip the girl had made to the garage was in some way connected with some belongings of her father’s, so she said: “I am serving to-night but I want you to keep things smoking hot and to have them dished up ready for me so that everything will go smoothly.”

“What would happen,” inquired Linda, “if everything did not go smoothly? Katy, do you think the roof would blow straight up if I had my way about something, just for a change?”

“No, I think the roof would stay right where it belongs,” said Katy with a chuckle, “but I do think its staying there would not be because Miss Eileen wanted it to.”

“Well,” said Linda, deliberately, “we won’t waste any time on thinking We are going to have some positive knowledge on the subject pretty immediately. I don’t feel equal to starting any domestic santana to-day, but the forces are gathering and the blow is coming soon. To that I have firmly made up my mind.”

“It’s not the least mite I’m blaming you, honey,” said Katy.

“Ye’ve got to be such a big girl that it’s only fair things in this house should go a good deal different.”

“Is Marian to be here?” asked Linda as she stood beside the stove peering into pans and kettles.

“Miss Eileen didn’t say,” replied Katy.

Linda’s eyes reddened suddenly. She slammed down a lid with vicious emphasis.

“That is another deal Eileen’s engineered,” she said, “that is just about as wrong as anything possibly can be. What makes me the maddest about it is that John Gilman will let Eileen take him by the nose and lead him around like a ringed calf. Where is his common sense? Where is his perception? Where is his honour?”

“Now wait, dearie,” said Katy soothingly, “wait. John Gilman is a mighty fine man. Ye know how your father loved him and trusted him and gave him charge of all his business affairs. Ye mustn’t go so far as to be insinuating that he is lacking in honour.”

“No,” said Linda, “that was not fair. I don’t in the least know that he ever asked Marian to marry him; but I do know that as long as he was a struggling, threadbare young lawyer Marian was welcome to him, and they had grand times together. The minute he won the big Bailey suit and came into public notice and his practice increased until he was independent, that minute Eileen began to take notice, and it looks to me now as if she very nearly had him.”

“And so far as I can see,” said Katy, “Miss Marian is taking it without a struggle. She is not lifting a finger or making a move to win him back.”

“Of course she isn’t!” said Linda indignantly. “If she thought he preferred some other girl to her, she would merely say: ‘If John has discovered that he likes Eileen the better, why, that is all right’; but there wouldn’t be anything to prevent seeing Eileen take John from hurting like the deuce. Did you ever lose a man you loved, Katy?”

“That I did not!” said Katy emphatically. “We didn’t do any four or five years’ philanderin’ to see if a man ‘could make good’ when I was a youngster. When a girl and her laddie stood up to each other and looked each other straight in the eye and had the great understanding, there weren’t no question of whether he could do for her what her father and mither had been doing, nor of how much he had to earn before they would be able to begin life together. They just caught hands and hot-footed it to the praste and told him to read the banns the next Sunday, and when the law allowed they was man and wife and taking what life had for them the way it came, and together. All this philanderin’ that young folks do nowadays is just pure nonsense, and waste of time.”

“Sure!” laughed Linda. “When my brave comes along with his blanket I’ll just step under, and then if anybody tries to take my man I’ll have the right to go on the warpath and have a scalping party that would be some satisfaction to the soul.”

Then they served the dinner, and when the guests had left the dining room, Katy closed the doors, and brought on the delicacies she had hidden for Linda and patted and cajoled her while she ate like any healthy, hungry young creature.

CHAPTER II

Cotyledon of Multiflores Canyon

“‘Ave, atque vale!’ Cotyledon!”

Linda slid down the side of the canyon with the deftness of the expert. At the first available crevice she thrust in her Alpine stick, and bracing herself, gained a footing. Then she turned and by use of her fingers and toes worked her way back to the plant, she had passed. She was familiar with many members of the family, but such a fine specimen she seldom had found and she could not recall having seen it in all of her botanies. Opposite the plant she worked out a footing, drove her stick deep at the base of a rock to brace herself, and from the knapsack on her back took a sketch-book and pencil and began rapidly copying the thick fleshy leaves of the flattened rosette, sitting securely at the edge of a rock. She worked swiftly and with breathless interest. When she had finished the flower she began sketching in the moss-covered face of the boulder against which it grew, and other bits of vegetation near.

“I think, Coty,” she said, “it is very probable that I can corner a few simoleons with you. You are becoming better looking every minute.”

For a touch of colour she margined one side of her drawing with a little spray of Pentstemon whose bright tubular flowers the canyon knew as “humming-bird’s dinner horn.” That gave her the idea of introducing a touch of living interest, so bearing down upon the flowers from the upper right-hand corner of her drawing she deftly sketched in a ruby-throated humming bird, and across the bottom of the sheet the lace of a few leaves of fern. Then she returned the drawing and pencil to her knapsack, and making sure of her footing, worked her way forward. With her long slender fingers she began teasing the plant loose from the rock and the surrounding soil. The roots penetrated deeper than she had supposed and in her interest she forgot her precarious footing and pulled hard. The plant gave way unexpectedly, and losing her balance, Linda plunged down the side of the canyon catching wildly at shrubs and bushes and bruising herself severely on stones, finally landing in a sitting posture on the road that traversed the canyon.

She was not seriously hurt, but she did not present a picturesque figure as she sprawled in the road, her booted feet thrust straight before her, one of her long black braids caught on a bush at her back, her blouse pulled above her breeches, the contents of her knapsack decorating the canyon side and the road around her; but high in one hand, without break or blemish, she triumphantly held aloft the rare Cotyledon. She shrugged her shoulders, wiggled her toes, and moved her arms to assure herself that no bones were broken; then she glanced at her drawings and the fruits of her day’s collecting scattered on the roadside around her. She was in the act of rising when a motor car containing two young men shot around a curve of the canyon, swerved to avoid running over her, and stopped as abruptly as possible.

“It’s a girl!” cried the driver, and both men sprang to the road and hurried to Linda’s assistance. Her dark cheeks were red with mortification, but she managed to recover her feet and tuck in her blouse before they reached her.

“We heard you coming down,” said the elder of the young men, “and we thought you might be a bear. Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

Linda stood before them, a lithe slender figure, vivid with youth and vitality.

“I am able to stand,” she said, “so of course I haven’t broken any bones. I think I am fairly well battered, but you will please to observe that there isn’t a scratch on Cotyledon, and I brought her down—at least I think it’s she—from the edge of that boulder away up there. Isn’t she a beauty? Only notice the delicate frosty ‘bloom’ on her leaves!”

“I should prefer,” said the younger of the men, “to know whether you have any broken bones.”

“I’m sure I am all right,” answered Linda. “I have falling down mountains reduced to an exact science. I’ll bet you couldn’t slide that far and bring down Coty without a scratch.”

“Well, which is the more precious,” said the young man. “Yourself or the specimen?”

“Why, the specimen!” answered Linda, in impatience. “California is full of girls; but this is the finest Cotyledon of this family I have ever seen. Don’t mistake this for any common stonecrop. It looks to me like an Echeveria. I know what I mean to do with the picture I have made of her, and I know exactly where she is going to grow from this day on.”

“Is there any way we can help you?” inquired the elder of the two men.

For the first time Linda glanced at him, and her impression was that he was decidedly attractive.

“No, thank you!” she answered briskly. “I am going to climb back up to the boulder and collect the belongings I spilled on the way down. Then I am going to carry Coty to the car line in a kind of triumphal march, because she is the rarest find that I have ever made. I hope you have no dark designs on Coty, because this is ‘what the owner had to do to redeem her.’”

Linda indicated her trail down the canyon side, brushed soil and twigs from her trousers, turned her straight young back, carefully set down her specimen, and by the aid of her recovered stick began expertly making her way up the canyon side. “Here, let me do that,” offered the younger man. “You rest until I collect your belongings.” Linda glanced back over her shoulder. “Thanks,” she said. “I have a mental inventory of all the pencils and knives and trowels I must find. You might overlook the most important part of my paraphernalia; and really I am not damaged. I’m merely hurt. Good-bye!”

Linda started back up the side of the canyon, leaving the young men to enter their car and drive away. For a minute both of them stood watching her.

“What will girls be wearing and doing next?” asked the elder of the two as he started his car.

“What would you have a girl wear when she is occupied with coasting down canyons?” said his friend. “And as for what she is doing, it’s probable that every high-school girl in Los Angeles has a botanical collection to make before she graduates.”

“I see!” said the man driving. “She is only a high-school kid, but did you notice that she is going to make an extremely attractive young woman?”

“Yes, I noticed just that; I noticed it very particularly,” answered the younger man. “And I noticed also that she either doesn’t know it, or doesn’t give a flip.”

Linda collected her belongings, straightened her hair and clothing, and, with her knapsack in place, and leaning rather on heavily on her walking stick, made her way down the road to the abutment of a small rustic bridge where she stopped to rest. The stream at her feet was noisy and icy cold. It rushed through narrow defiles in the rock, beat itself to foam against the faces a of the big stones, fell over jutting cliffs, spread in whispering pools, wound back and forth across the road at its will, singing every foot of its downward way and watering beds of crisp, cool miners’ lettuce, great ferns, and heliotrope, climbing clematis, soil and blue-eyed grass. All along its length grew willows, and in a few places white-bodied sycamores. Everywhere over the walls above it that vegetation could find a footing grew mosses, vines, flowers, and shrubs. On the shadiest side homed most of the ferns and the Cotyledon. In the sun, larkspur, lupin, and monkey flower; everywhere wild rose, holly, mahogany, gooseberry, and bayoneted yucca all intermingling in a curtain of variegated greens, brocaded with flower arabesques of vivid red, white, yellow, and blue. Canyon wrens and vireos sang as they nested. The air was clear, cool, and salty from the near-by sea. Myriad leaf shadows danced on the black roadbed, level as a barn floor, and across it trailed the wavering image of hawk and vulture, gull and white sea swallow. Linda studied the canyon with intent eyes, but bruised flesh pleaded, so reluctantly she arose, shouldered her belongings, and slowly followed the road out to the car line that passed through Lilac Valley, still carefully bearing in triumph the precious Cotyledon. An hour later she entered the driveway of her home. She stopped to set her plant carefully in the wild garden she and her father had worked all her life at collecting, then followed the back porch and kitchen route.

“Whatever have ye been doing to yourself, honey?” cried Katy.

“I came a cropper down Multiflores Canyon where it is so steep that it leans the other way. I pretty well pulverized myself for a pulverulenta, Katy, which is a poor joke.”

“Now ain’t that just my luck!” wailed Katy, snatching a cake cutter and beginning hurriedly to stamp out little cakes from the dough before her.

“Well, I don’t understand in exactly what way,” said Linda, absently rubbing her elbows and her knees. “Seems to me it’s my promontories that have been knocked off, not yours, Katy.”

“Yes, and ain’t it just like ye,” said Katy, “to be coming in late, and all banged up when Miss Eileen has got sudden notice that there is going to be company again and I have an especial dinner to serve, and never in the world can I manage if ye don’t help me!”

“Why, who is coming now?” asked Linda, seating herself on the nearest chair and beginning to unfasten her boots slowly.

“Well, first of all, there is Mr. Gilman, of course.”

“‘Of course,’” conceded Linda. “If he tried to get past our house, Eileen is perfectly capable of setting it on fire to stop him. She’s got him ‘vamped’ properly.”

“Oh I don’t know that ye should say just that,” said Katy “Eileen is a mighty pretty girl, and she is some manager.”

“You can stake your hilarious life she is,” said Linda, viciously kicking a boot to the center of the kitchen. “She can manage to go down town for lunch and be invited out to dinner thirteen times a week, and leave us at home to eat bread and milk, bread heavily stressed. She can manage to get every cent of the income from the property in her fingers, and a great big girl like me has to go to high school looking so tacky that even the boys are beginning to comment on it. Manage? I’ll say she can manage, not to mention managing to snake John Gilman right out of Marian’s fingers. I doubt if Marian fully realizes yet that she’s lost her man; and I happen to know that she just plain loved John!”

The second boot landed beside the first, then Linda picked them both up and started toward the back hall.

“Honey, are ye too bad hurt to help me any?” asked Katy, as she passed her.

“Of course not,” said Linda. “Give me a few minutes to take a bath and step into my clothes and then I’ll be on the job.”

With a black scowl on her face, Linda climbed the dingy back stairway in her stocking-feet. At the head of the stairs she paused one minute, glanced at the gloom of her end of the house, then she turned and walked to the front of the hall where there were potted ferns, dainty white curtains, and bright rugs. The door of the guest room stood open and she could see that it was filled with fresh flowers and ready for occupancy. The door of her sister’s room was slightly ajar and she pushed it open and stood looking inside. In her state of disarray she made a shocking contrast to the flower-like figure busy before a dressing table. Linda was dark, narrow, rawboned, overgrown in height, and forthright of disposition. Eileen was a tiny woman, delicately moulded, exquisitely coloured, and one of the most perfectly successful tendrils from the original clinging vine in her intercourse with men, and with such women as would tolerate the clinging-vine idea in the present forthright days. With a strand of softly curled hair in one hand and a fancy pin in the other, Eileen turned a disapproving look upon her sister.

“What’s the great idea?” demanded Linda shortly.

“Oh, it’s perfectly splendid,” answered Eileen. “John Gilman’s best friend is motoring around here looking for a location to build a home. He is an author and young and good looking and not married, and he thinks he would like to settle somewhere near Los Angeles. Of course John would love to have him in Lilac Valley because he hopes to build a home here some day for himself. His name is Peter Morrison and John says that his articles and stories have horse sense, logic, and humor, and he is making a lot of money.”

“Then God help John Gilman, if he thinks now that he is in love with you,” said Linda dryly.

Eileen arched her eyebrows, thinned to a hair line, and her lips drew together in disapproval.

“What I can’t understand,” she said, “is how you can be so unspeakably vulgar, Linda.”

Linda laughed sharply.

“And this Peter Morrison and John are our guests for dinner?”

“Yes,” said Eileen. “I am going to show them this valley inside and out. I’m so glad it’s spring. We’re at our very best. It would be perfectly wonderful to have an author for a neighbor, and he must be going to build a real house, because he has his architect with him; and John says that while he is young, he has done several awfully good houses. He has seen a couple of them in San Francisco.”

Linda shrugged her shoulders.

“Up the flue goes Marian’s chance of drawing the plans for John Gilman’s house,” she said. “I have heard him say a dozen times he would not build a house unless Marian made the plans.”

Eileen deftly placed the strand of hair and set the jewelled pin with precision.

“Just possibly things have changed slightly,” she suggested.

“Yes,” said Linda, “I observe that they have. Marian has sold the home she adored. She is leaving friends she loved and trusted, and who were particularly bound to her by a common grief, without realizing exactly how it is happening. She certainly must know that you have taken her lover, and I have not a doubt but that is the reason she has discovered she can no longer work at home, that she must sell her property and spend the money cooped up in a city, to study her profession further.”

“Linda,” said Eileen, her face pale with anger, “you are positively insufferable. Will you leave my room and close the door after you?”

“Well, Katy has just informed me,” said Linda, “that this dinner party doesn’t come off without my valued assistance, and before I agree to assist, I’ll know one thing. Are you proposing to entertain these three men yourself, or have you asked Marian?”

Eileen indicated an open note lying on her dressing table.

“I did not know they were coming until an hour ago,” she said. “I barely had time to fill the vases and dust, and then I ran up to dress so that there would be someone presentable when they arrive.”

“All right then, we’ll agree that this is a surprise party, but if John Gilman has told you so much about them, you must have been expecting them, and in a measure prepared for them at any time. Haven’t you talked it over with Marian, and told her that you would want her when they came?”

Eileen was extremely busy with another wave of hair. She turned her back and her voice was not quite steady as she answered. “Ever since Marian got this ‘going to the city to study’ idea in her head I have scarcely seen her. She had an awful job to empty the house, and pack such things as she wants to keep, and she is working overtime on a very special plan that she thinks maybe she’ll submit in a prize competition offered by a big firm of San Francisco architects, so I have scarcely seen her for six weeks.”

“And you never once went over to help her with her work, or to encourage her or to comfort her? You can’t think Marian can leave this valley and not be almost heartbroken,” said Linda. “You just make me almost wonder at you. When you think of the kind of friends that Marian Thorne’s father and mother, and our father and mother were, and how we children were reared together, and the good times we have had in these two houses—and then the awful day when the car went over the cliff, and how Marian clung to us and tried to comfort us, when her own heart was broken—and Marian’s the same Marian she has always been, only nicer every day—how you can sit there and say you have scarcely seen her in six of the hardest weeks of her life, certainly surprises me. I’ll tell you this: I told Katy I would help her, but I won’t do it if you don’t go over and make Marian come to-night.”

Eileen turned to her sister and looked at her keenly. Linda’s brow was sullen, and her jaw set.

“A bed would look mighty good to me and I will go and get into mine this minute if you don’t say you will go and ask her, in such a way that she comes,” she threatened.

Eileen hesitated a second and then said: “All right, since you make such a point of it I will ask her.”

“Very well,” said Linda. “Then I’ll help Katy the very best I can.”

CHAPTER III

The House of Dreams

In less than an hour, Linda was in the kitchen, dressed in an old green skirt and an orange blouse. Katy pinned one of her aprons on the girl and told her that her first job was to set the table.

“And Miss Eileen has given most particular orders that I use the very best of everything. Lay the table for four, and you are to be extremely careful in serving not to spill the soup.”

Linda stood very quietly for a second, her heavy black brows drawn together in deep thought.

“When did Eileen issue these instructions?” she inquired.

“Not five minutes ago,” said Katy. “She just left me kitchen and I’ll say I never saw her lookin’ such a parfect picture. That new dress of hers is the most becoming one she has ever had.”

Almost unconsciously, Linda’s hand reached to the front of her well-worn blouse, and she glanced downward at her skirt and shoes.

“Um-hm,” she said meditatively, “another new dress for Eileen, which means that I will get nothing until next month’s allowance comes in, if I do then. The table set for four, which, interpreted, signifies that she has asked Marian in such a way that Marian won’t come. And the caution as to care with the soup means that I am to serve my father’s table like a paid waitress. Katy, I have run for over three years on Eileen’s schedule, but this past year I am beginning to use my brains and I am reaching the place of self-assertion. That programme won’t do, Katy. It’s got to be completely revised. You just watch me and see how I follow those instructions.”

Then Linda marched out of the kitchen door and started across the lawn in the direction of a big brown house dimly outlined through widely spreading branches of ancient live oaks, palm, and bamboo thickets. She entered the house without knocking and in the hall uttered a low penetrating whistle. It was instantly answered from upstairs. Linda began climbing, and met Marian at the top.

“Why, Marian,” she cried, “I had no idea you were so far along. The house is actually empty.”

“Practically everything went yesterday,” answered Marian. “Those things of Father’s and Mother’s and my own that I wish to keep I have put in storage, and the remainder went to James’s Auction Rooms. The house is sold, and I am leaving in the morning.”

“Then that explains,” questioned Linda, “why you refused Eileen’s invitation to dinner to-night?”

“On the contrary,” answered Marian, “an invitation to dinner to-night would be particularly and peculiarly acceptable to me, since the kitchen is barren as the remainder of the house, and I was intending to slip over when your room was lighted to ask if I might spend the night with you.”

Linda suddenly gathered her friend in her arms and held her tight.

“Well, thank heaven that you felt sufficiently sure of me to come to me when you needed me. Of course you shall spend the night with me; and I must have been mistaken in thinking Eileen had been here. She probably will come any minute. There are guests for the night. John is bringing that writer friend of his. Of course you know about him. It’s Peter Morrison.”

Marian nodded her head. “Of course! John has always talked of him. He had some extremely clever articles in The Post lately.”

“Well, he is one,” said Linda, “and an architect who is touring with him is two; they are looking for a location to build a house for the writer. You can see that it would be a particularly attractive feather in our cap if he would endorse our valley sufficiently to home in it. So Eileen has invited them to sample our brand of entertainment, and in the morning no doubt she will be delighted to accompany them and show them all the beautiful spots not yet preëmpted.”

“Oh, heavens,” cried Marian, “I’m glad I never showed her my spot!”

“Well, if you are particular about wanting a certain place I sincerely hope you did not,” said Linda.

“I am sure I never did,” answered Marian. “I so love one spot that I have been most secretive about it. I am certain I never went further than to say there was a place on which I would love to build for myself the house of my dreams. I have just about finished getting that home on paper, and I truly have high hopes that I may stand at least a fair chance of winning with it the prize Nicholson and Snow are offering. That is one of the reasons why I am hurrying on my way to San Francisco much sooner than I had expected to go. I haven’t a suitable dinner dress because my trunks have gone, but among such old friends it won’t matter. I have one fussy blouse in my bag, and I’ll be over as soon as I can see to closing up the house and dressing.”

Linda hurried home, and going to the dining room, she laid the table for six in a deft and artistic manner. She filled a basket with beautiful flowers of her own growing for a centerpiece, and carefully followed Eileen’s instruction to use the best of everything. When she had finished she went to the kitchen.

“Katy,” she said, “take a look at my handiwork.”

“It’s just lovely,” said Katy heartily.

“I quite agree with you,” answered Linda, “and now in pursuance of a recently arrived at decision, I have resigned, vamoosed, quit, dead stopped being waitress for Eileen. I was seventeen my last birthday. Hereafter when there are guests I sit at my father’s table, and you will have to do the best you can with serving, Katy.”

“And it’s just exactly right ye are,” said Katy. “I’ll do my best, and if that’s not good enough, Miss Eileen knows what she can do.”

“Now listen to you,” laughed Linda. “Katy, you couldn’t be driven to leave me, by anything on this earth that Eileen could do; you know you couldn’t.”

Katy chuckled quietly. “Sure, I wouldn’t be leaving ye, lambie,” she said. “We’ll get everything ready, and I can serve six as nicely as any one. But you’re not forgetting that Miss Eileen said most explicit to lay the table for four?’

“I am not forgetting,” said Linda. “For Eileen’s sake I am I sorry to say that her ship is on the shoals. She is not going to have clear sailing with little sister Linda any longer. This is the year of woman’s rights, you know, Katy, and I am beginning to realize that my rights have been badly infringed upon for lo these many years. If Eileen chooses to make a scene before guests, that is strictly up to Eileen. Now what is it you want me to do?”

Katy directed and Linda worked swiftly. Soon they heard a motor stop, and laughing voices told them that the guests had arrived.

“Now I wonder,” said Linda, “whether Marian is here yet.”

At that minute Marian appeared at the kitchen door.

“Linda,” she said breathlessly, “I am feeling queer about this. Eileen hasn’t been over.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” said Linda casually. “The folks have come, and she was only waiting to make them a bit at home before she ran after you.”

Marian hesitated.

“She was not allowing me much time to dress.”

“That’s ’cause she knew you did not need it,” retorted Linda. “The more you fuss up, the less handsome you are, and you never owned anything in your life so becoming as that old red blouse. So farewell, Katy, we’re due to burst into high society to-night. We’re going to help Eileen vamp a lawyer, and an author, and an architect, one apiece. Which do you prefer, Marian?”

“I’ll take the architect,” said Marian. “We should have something in common since I am going to be a great architect myself one of these days.”

“Why, that is too bad,” said Linda. “I’ll have to rearrange the table if you insist, because I took him, and left you the author, and it was for love of you I did it. I truly wanted him myself, all the time.”

They stopped in the dining room and Marian praised Linda’s work in laying the table; and then, together they entered the living room.

At the moment of their entrance, Eileen was talking animatedly about the beauties of the valley as a location for a happy home. When she saw the two girls she paused, the colour swiftly faded from her face, and Linda, who was watching to see what would happen, noticed the effort she made at self-control, but she was very sure that their guests did not.

It never occurred to Linda that anyone would consider good looks in connection with her overgrown, rawboned frame and lean face, but she was accustomed to seeing people admire Marian, for Marian was a perfectly modelled woman with peach-bloom cheeks, deep, dark eyes, her face framed in a waving mass of hair whose whiteness dated from the day that the brakes of her car failed and she plunged down the mountain with her father beside her, and her mother and Doctor and Mrs. Strong in the back seat. Ten days afterward Marian’s head of beautiful dark hair was muslin white. Now it framed a face of youth and beauty with peculiar pathos. “Striking” was perhaps the one adjective which would best describe her.

John Gilman came hastily to greet them. Linda, after a swift glance at Eileen, turned astonished eyes on their guests. For one second she looked at the elder of them, then at the younger. There was no recognition in her eyes, and there was a decided negative in a swift movement of her head. Both men understood that she did not wish them to mention that they ever had seen her previously. For an instant there was a strained situation. Eileen was white with anger. John Gilman was looking straight at Marian, and in his soul he must have wondered if he had been wise in neglecting her for Eileen. Peter Morrison and his architect, Henry Anderson, had two things to think about. One was the stunning beauty of Marian Thorne as she paused in the doorway, the light misting her white hair and deepening the tints of her red waist. The other was why the young girl facing them had forbidden them to reveal that two hours before they had seen her in the canyon. Katy, the efficient life-saver of the Strong family, announced dinner, and Linda drew back the curtains and led the way to the dining room, saying when they had arrived: “I didn’t have time in my hour’s notice to make elaborate place cards as I should have liked to do, so these little pen sketches will have to serve.”

To cover his embarrassment and to satisfy his legal mind, John Gilman turned to Linda, asking: “Why ‘an hour’? I told Eileen a week ago I was expecting the boys to-day.”

“But that does not prove that Eileen mentioned it to me,” answered Linda quietly; “so you must find your places from the cards I could prepare in a hurry.”

This same preparation of cards at the round table placed Eileen between the architect and the author, Marian between the author and John Gilman, and Linda between Gilman and the architect, which added one more tiny gale to the storm of fury that was raging in the breast of white-faced Eileen. The situation was so strained that without fully understanding it, Marian, who was several years older than either of the Strong sisters, knew that although she was tired to the point of exhaustion she should muster what reserve force she could to the end of making the dinner party particularly attractive, because she was deeply interested in drawing to the valley every suitable home seeker it was possible to locate there. It was the unwritten law of the valley that whenever a home seeker passed through, every soul who belonged exerted the strongest influence to prove that the stars hung lower and shone bigger and in bluer heavens than anywhere else on earth; that nowhere could be found air to equal the energizing salt breezes from the sea, snow chilled, perfumed with almond and orange; that the sun shone brighter more days in the year, and the soil produced a greater variety of vegetables and fruits than any other spot of the same size on God’s wonderful footstool. This could be done with unanimity and enthusiasm by every resident of Lilac Valley for the very simple reason that it was the truth. The valley stood with its steep sides raying blue from myriad wild lilacs; olives and oranges sloped down to the flat floor, where cultivated ranches and gardens were so screened by eucalyptus and pepper trees, palm and live oak, myriads of roses of every colour and variety, and gaudy plants gathered there from the entire girth of the tropical world, that to the traveler on the highway trees and flowers predominated. The greatest treasure of the valley was the enthusiastic stream of icy mountain water that wandered through the near-by canyon and followed the length of the valley on its singing, chuckling way to the ocean. All the residents of Lilac Valley had to do to entrance strangers with the location was to show any one of a dozen vantage points, and let visitors test for themselves the quality of the sunshine and air, and study the picture made by the broad stretch of intensively cultivated valley, walled on either side by mountains whose highest peaks were often cloud-draped and for ever shifting their delicate pastel shades from gray to blue, from lavender to purple, from tawny yellow to sepia, under the play of the sun and clouds.

They had not been seated three minutes before Linda realized from her knowledge of Eileen that the shock had been too great, if such a thing might be said of so resourceful a creature as Eileen. Evidently she was going to sulk in the hope that this would prove that any party was a failure at which she did not exert herself to be gracious. It had not been in Linda’s heart to do more than sit quietly in the place belonging by right to her, but when she realized what was going to happen, she sent Marian one swift appealing glance, and then desperately plunged into conversation to cover Eileen’s defection.

“I have been told,” she said, addressing the author, “that you are looking for a home in California. Is this true, or is it merely that every good Californian hopes this will happen when any distinguished Easterner comes our way?”

“I can scarcely answer you,” said Peter Morrison, “because my ideas on the subject are still slightly nebulous, but I am only too willing to see them become concrete.”

“You have struck exactly the right place,” said Linda. “We have concrete by the wagon load in this valley and we are perfectly willing to donate the amount required to materialize your ideas. Do you dream of a whole ranch or only a nest?”

“Well, the fact is,” answered Peter Morrison with a most attractive drawl in his slow speech, “the fact is the dimensions of my dream must fit my purse. Ever since I finished college I have been in newspaper work and I have lived in an apartment in New York except while I was abroad. When I came back my paper sent me to San Francisco and from there I motored down to see for myself if the wonderful things that are written about Los Angeles County are true.”

“That is not much of a compliment to us,” said Linda slowly. “How do you think we would dare write them if they were not true?”

This caused such a laugh that everyone felt much easier. Marian turned her dark eyes toward Peter Morrison.

“Linda and I are busy people,” she said. “We waste little time in indirections, so I hope it’s not out of the way for me to ask straight-forwardly if you are truly in earnest, about wanting a home in Lilac Valley?”

“Then I’ll have to answer you,” said Peter, “that I have an attractive part of the ‘makin’s’ and I am in deadly earnest about wanting a home somewhere. I am sick in my soul of narrow apartments and wheels and the rush and roar of the city. There was a time when I ate and drank it. It was the very breath of life to me. I charged on Broadway like a caterpillar tank charging in battle; but it is very remarkable how quickly one changes in this world. I have had some success in my work, and the higher I go, the better work I feel I can do in a quiet place and among less enervating surroundings. John and I were in college together, room-mates, and no doubt he has told you that we graduated with the same class. He has found his location here and I would particularly enjoy having a home near him. They tell me there are well-trained servants to look after a house and care for a bachelor, so I truly feel that if I can find a location I would like, and if Henry can plan me a house, and I can stretch my purse to cover the investment, that there is a very large possibility that somewhere within twenty miles of Los Angeles I may find the home of my dreams.”

“One would almost expect,” said Marian, “that a writer would say something more original. This valley is filled with people who came here saying precisely what you have said; and the lure of the land won them and here they are, shameless boosters of California.”

“Why shameless?” inquired Henry Anderson.

“Because California so verifies the wildest statement that can be made concerning her that one may go the limit of imagination without shame,” laughed Marian. “I try in all my dealings to stick to the straight and narrow path.”

“Oh, Kid, don’t stick to the straight and narrow,” broke in Linda, “there’s no scenery.”

Eileen laid down her fork and stared in white-lipped amazement at the two girls, but she was utterly incapable of forgetting herself and her neatly arranged plans to have the three cultivated and attractive young men all to herself for the evening. She realized too, from the satisfaction betrayed in the glances these men were exchanging among each other, the ease with which they sat, and the gusto with which they ate the food Katy was deftly serving them, that something was happening which never had happened at the Strong table since she had presided as its head, her sole endeavor having been to flatter her guests or to extract flattery for herself from them.

“That is what makes this valley so adorable,” said Marian when at last she could make herself heard. “It is neither straight nor narrow. The wing of a white sea swallow never swept a lovelier curve on the breast of the ocean than the line of this valley. My mother was the dearest little woman, and she used to say that this valley was outlined by a gracious gesture from the hand of God in the dawn of Creation.”

Peter Morrison deliberately turned in his chair, his eyes intent on Marian’s earnest face.

“You almost make me want to say, in the language of an old hymn I used to hear my mother sing, ‘Here will I set up my rest.’ With such a name as Lilac Valley and with such a thought in the heart concerning it, I scarcely feel that there is any use in looking further. How about it, Henry? Doesn’t it sound conclusive to you?”

“It certainly does,” answered Henry Anderson, “and from what I could see as we drove in, it looks as well as it sounds.”

Peter Morrison turned to his friend.

“Gilman,” he said, “you’re a lawyer; you should know the things I’d like to. Are there desirable homesites still to be found in the valley, and does the inflation of land at the present minute put it out of my reach?”

“Well, that is on a par with the average question asked a lawyer,” answered Gilman, “but part of it I can answer definitely and at once. I think every acre of land suitable for garden or field cultivation is taken. I doubt if there is much of the orchard land higher up remaining and what there is would command a rather stiff price; but if you would be content with some small plateau at the base of a mountain where you could set any sort of a house and have—say two or three acres, mostly of sage and boulders and greasewood and yucca around it——”

“Why in this world are you talking about stones and sage and greasewood?” cried Linda. “Next thing they’ll be asking about mountain lions and rattlesnakes.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Gilman, “I fear none of us has remembered to present Miss Linda as a coming naturalist. She got her start from her father who was one of the greatest nerve specialists the world ever has known. She knows every inch of the mountains, the canyons and the desert. She always says that she cut her teeth on a chunk of adobe, while her father hunted the nests of trap-door spiders out in Sunland. What should I have said when describing a suitable homesite for Peter, Linda?”

“You should have assumed that immediately, Peter,”—Linda lifted her eyes to Morrison’s face with a sparkle of gay challenge, and by way of apology interjected—“I am only a kid, you know, so I may call John’s friend Peter—you should have assumed that sage and greasewood would simply have vanished from any home location chosen by Peter, leaving it all lacy blue with lilac, and misty white with lemonade bush, and lovely gold with monkey flower, and purple with lupin, and painted blood red with broad strokes of Indian paint brush, and beautifully lighted with feathery flames from Our Lord’s Candles, and perfumy as altar incense with wild almond.”

“Oh, my soul,” said Peter Morrison. “Good people, I have located. I have come to stay. I would like three acres but I could exist with two; an acre would seem an estate to me, and my ideas of a house, Henry, are shriveling. I did have a dream of something that must have been precious near a home. There might have been an evanescent hint of flitting draperies and inexperienced feet in it, but for the sake of living and working in such a location as Miss Linda describes, I would gladly cut my residence to a workroom and a sleeping room and kitchen.”

“Won’t do,” said Linda. “A house is not a house in California without a furnace and a bathroom. We are cold as blue blazes here when the sun goes down and the salty fog creeps up from the sea, and the icy mist rolls down from the mountains to chill our bones; and when it has not rained for six months at a stretch, your own private swimming pool is a comfort. This to add verisimilitude to what everyone else in Lilac Valley is going to tell you.”

“I hadn’t thought I would need a fire,” said Peter, “and I was depending on the ocean for my bath tub. I am particularly fond of a salt rub.”

So far, Eileen had not deigned to enter the conversation. It was all so human, so far from her ideas of entertaining that the disapproval on her lips was not sufficiently veiled to be invisible, and John Gilman, glancing in her direction, realized that he was having the best time he had ever had in the Strong household since the passing of his friends, Doctor and Mrs. Strong, vaguely wondered why. And it occurred to him that Linda and Marian were dominating the party. He said the most irritating thing possible in the circumstances: “I am afraid you are not feeling well this evening, Eileen.”

Eileen laughed shortly.

“The one perfect thing about me,” she said with closely cut precision, “is my health. I haven’t the faintest notion what it means to be ill. I am merely waiting for the conversation to take a I turn where I can join in it intelligently.”

“Why, bless the child!” exclaimed Linda. “Can’t you talk intelligently about a suitable location for a home? On what subject is a woman supposed to be intelligent if she is not at her best on the theme of home? If you really are not interested you had better begin to polish up, because it appeals to me that the world goes just so far in one direction, and then it whirls to the right-about and goes equally as far in the opposite direction. If Daddy were living I think he would say we have reached the limit with apartment house homes minus fireplaces, with restaurant dining minus a blessing, with jazz music minus melody, with jazz dancing minus grace, with national progress minus cradles.”

“Linda!” cried Eileen indignantly.

“Good gracious!” cried Linda. “Do I get the shillalah for that? Weren’t all of us rocked in cradles? I think that the pendulum has swung far and it is time to swing back to where one man and one woman choose any little spot on God’s footstool, build a nest and plan their lives in accord with personal desire and inclination instead of aping their neighbors.”

“Bravo!” cried Henry Anderson. “Miss Linda, if you see any suitable spot, and you think I would serve for a bug-catcher, won’t you please stake the location?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Linda. “Would it be the old case of ‘I furnish the bread and you furnish the water’?”

“No,” said Peter Morrison, “it would not. Henry is doing mighty well. I guarantee that he would furnish a cow that would produce real cream.”

“How joyous!” said Linda. “I feel quite competent to manage the bread question. We’ll call that settled then. When I next cast an appraising eye over my beloved valley, I shan’t select the choicest spot in it for Peter Morrison to write a book in; and I want to warn you people when you go hunting to keep a mile away from Marian’s plot. She has had her location staked from childhood and has worked on her dream house until she has it all ready to put the ice in the chest and scratch the match for the living room fire-logs. The one thing she won’t ever tell is where her location is, but wherever it is, Peter Morrison, don’t you dare take it.”

“I wouldn’t for the world,” said Peter Morrison gravely. “If Miss Thorne will tell me even on which side of the valley her location lies, I will agree to stay on the other side.”

“Well there is one thing you can depend upon,” said the irrepressible Linda before Marian had time to speak. “It is sure to be on the sunny side. Every living soul in California is looking for a place in the sun.”

“Then I will make a note of it,” said Peter Morrison. “But isn’t there enough sun in all this lovely valley that I may have a place in it too?”

“You go straight ahead and select any location you like,” said Marian. “I give you the freedom of the valley. There’s not one chance in ten thousand that you would find or see anything attractive about the one secluded spot I have always hoped I might some day own.”

“This is not fooling, then?” asked Peter Morrison. “You truly have a place selected where you would like to live?”

“She truly has the spot selected and she truly has the house on paper and it truly is a house of dreams,” said Linda. “I dream about it myself. When she builds it and lives in it awhile and finds out all the things that are wrong with it, then I am going to build one like it, only I shall eliminate all the mistakes she has made.”

“I have often wondered,” said Henry Anderson, “if such a thing ever happened as that people built a house and lived in it, say ten years, and did not find one single thing about it that they would change if they had it to build over again. I never have heard of such a case. Have any of you?”

“I am sure no one has,” said John Gilman meditatively, “and it’s a queer thing. I can’t see why people don’t plan a house the way they want it before they build.”

Marian turned to him—the same Marian he had fallen in love with when they were children.

“Mightn’t it be,” she asked, “that it is due to changing conditions caused by the rapid development of science and invention? If one had built the most perfect house possible five years ago and learned to-day that infinitely superior lighting and heating and living facilities could be installed at much less expense and far greater convenience, don’t you think that one would want to change? Isn’t life a series of changes? Mustn’t one be changing constantly to keep abreast of one’s day and age?”

“Why, surely,” answered Gilman, “and no doubt therein lies at least part of the answer to Anderson’s question.”

“And then,” added Marian, “things happen in families. Sometimes more babies than they expect come to newly married people and they require more room.”

“My goodness, yes!” broke in Linda. “Just look at Sylvia Townsend—twins to begin with.”

“Linda!” breathed Eileen, aghast.

“So glad you like my name, dear,” murmured Linda sweetly.

“And then,” continued Marian, “changes come to other people as they have to me. I can’t say that I had any fault to find with either the comforts or the conveniences of Hawthorne House until Daddy and Mother were swept from it at one cruel sweep; and after that it was nothing to me but a haunted house, and I don’t feel that I can be blamed for wanting to leave it. I will be glad to know that there are people living in it who won’t see a big strong figure meditatively smoking before the fireplace and a gray dove of a woman sitting on the arm of his chair. I will be glad, if Fate is kind to me and people like my houses, to come back to the valley when I can afford to and build myself a home that has no past—a place, in fact, where I can furnish my own ghost, and if I meet myself on the stairs then I won’t be shocked by me.

“I don’t think there is a soul in the valley who blames you for selling your home and going, Marian,” said Linda soberly. “I think it would be foolish if you did not.”

The return to the living room brought no change. Eileen pouted while Linda and Marian thoroughly enjoyed themselves and gave the guests a most entertaining evening. So disgruntled was Eileen, when the young men had gone, that she immediately went to her room, leaving Linda and Marian to close the house and make their own arrangements for the night. Whereupon Linda deliberately led Marian to the carefully dusted and flower-garnished guest room and installed her with every comfort and convenience that the house afforded. Then bringing her brushes from her own room, she and Marian made themselves comfortable, visiting far into the night.

“I wonder,” said Linda, “if Peter Morrison will go to a real estate man in the morning and look over the locations remaining in Lilac Valley.”

“Yes, I think he will,” said Marian conclusively.

“It seems to me,” said Linda, “that we did a whole lot of talking about homes to-night; which reminds me, Marian, in packing have you put in your plans? Have you got your last draught with you?”

“No,” answered Marian, “it’s in one of the cases. I haven’t anything but two or three pencil sketches from which I drew the final plans as I now think I’ll submit them for the contest. Wouldn’t it be a tall feather in my cap, Linda, if by any chance l I should win that prize?”

“It would be more than a feather,” said Linda. “It would be a whole cap, and a coat to wear with it, and a dress to match the coat, and slippers to match the dress, and so forth just like ‘The House That Jack Built.’ Have you those sketches, Marian?”

Opening her case, Marian slid from underneath the garments folded in it, several sheets on which were roughly penciled sketches of the exterior of a house—on the reverse, the upstairs and downstairs floor plans; and sitting down, she explained these to Linda. Then she left them lying on a table, waiting to be returned to her case before she replaced her clothes in the morning. Both girls were fast asleep when a mischievous wind slipped down the valley, and lightly lifting the top sheet, carried it through the window, across the garden, and dropped it at the foot of a honey dripping loquat.

Because they had talked until late in the night of Marian’s plans and prospects in the city, of Peter Morrison’s proposed residence in the valley, of how lonely Linda would be without Marian, of everything concerning their lives except the change in Eileen and John Gilman, the two girls slept until late in the morning, so that there were but a few minutes remaining in which Marian might dress, have a hasty breakfast and make her train. In helping her, it fell to Linda to pack Marian’s case. She put the drawings she found on the table in the bottom, the clothing and brushes on top of them, and closing the case, carried it herself until she delivered it into the porter’s hands as Marian boarded her train.

CHAPTER IV

Linda Starts a Revolution

The last glimpse Marian Thorne had of Linda was as she stood alone, waving her hand, her cheeks flushed, her eyes shining, her final word cheery and encouraging. Marian smiled and waved in return until the train bore her away. Then she sat down wearily and stared unseeingly from a window. Life did such very dreadful things to people. Her girlhood had been so happy. Then came the day of the Black Shadow, but in her blackest hour she had not felt alone. She had supposed she was leaning on John Gilman as securely as she had leaned on her father. She had learned, with the loss of her father, that one cannot be sure of anything in this world least of all of human life. Yet in her darkest days she had depended on John Gilman. She had every reason to believe that it was for her that he struggled daily to gain a footing in his chosen profession. When success came, when there was no reason that Marian could see why they might not have begun life together, there had come a subtle change in John, and that change had developed so rapidly that in a few weeks’ time, she was forced to admit that the companionship and loving attentions that once had been all hers were now all Eileen’s.

She sat in the train, steadily carrying her mile after mile farther from her home, and tried to think what had happened and how and why it had happened. She could not feel that she had been wrong in her estimate of John Gilman. Her valuation of him had been taught her by her father and mother and by Doctor and Mrs. Strong and by John Gilman himself. Dating from the time that Doctor Strong had purchased the property and built a home in Lilac Valley beside Hawthorne House, Marian had admired Eileen and had loved her. She was several years older than the beautiful girl she had grown up beside. Age had not mattered; Eileen’s beauty had not mattered. Marian was good looking herself.

She always had known that Eileen had imposed upon her and was selfish with her, but Eileen’s impositions were so skillfully maneuvered, her selfishness was so adorably taken for granted that Marian in retrospection felt that perhaps she was responsible for at least a small part of it. She never had been able to see the inner workings of Eileen’s heart. She was not capable of understanding that when John Gilman was poor and struggling Eileen had ignored him. It had not occurred to Marian that when the success for which he struggled began to come generously, Eileen would begin to covet the man she had previously disdained. She had always striven to find friends among people of wealth and distinction. How was Marian to know that when John began to achieve wealth and distinction, Eileen would covet him also?

Marian could not know that Eileen had studied her harder than she ever studied any book, that she had deliberately set herself to make the most of every defect or idiosyncrasy in Marian, at the same time offering herself as a charming substitute. Marian was prepared to be the mental, the spiritual, and the physical mate of a man.

Eileen was not prepared to be in truth and honour any of these. She was prepared to make any emergency of life subservient to her own selfish desires. She was prepared to use any man with whom she came in contact for the furtherance of any whim that at the hour possessed her. What she wanted was unbridled personal liberty, unlimited financial resources.

Marian, almost numbed with physical fatigue and weeks of mental strain, came repeatedly against the dead wall of ignorance when she tried to fathom the change that had taken place between herself and John Gilman and between herself and Eileen.

Daniel Thorne was an older man than Doctor Strong. He had accumulated more property. Marian had sufficient means at her command to make it unnecessary for her to acquire a profession or work for her living, but she had always been interested in and loved to plan houses and help her friends with buildings they were erecting. When the silence and the loneliness of her empty home enveloped her, she had begun, at first as a distraction, to work on the drawings for a home that an architect had made for one of her neighbors. She had been able to suggest so many comforts and conveniences, and so to revise these plans that, at first in a desultory way, later in real earnest, she had begun to draw plans for houses. Then, being of methodical habit and mathematical mind, she began scaling up the plans and figuring on the cost of building, and so she had worked until she felt that she was evolving homes that could be built for the same amount of money and lived in with more comfort and convenience than the homes that many of her friends were having planned for them by architects of the city.

To one spot in the valley she had gone from childhood as a secret place in which to dream and study. She had loved that retreat until it had become a living passion with her. The more John Gilman neglected her, the more she concentrated upon her plans, and when the hour came in which she realized what she had lost and what Eileen had won, she reached the decision to sell her home, go to the city, and study until she knew whether she really could succeed at her chosen profession.

Then she would come back to the valley, buy the spot she coveted, build the house of which she dreamed, and in it she would spend the remainder of her life making homes for the women who knew how to hold the love of men. When she reached the city she had decided that if one could not have the best in life, one must be content with the next best, and for her the next best would be homes for other people, since she might not materialize the home she had dreamed for John Gilman and herself. She had not wanted to leave the valley. She had not wanted to lose John Gilman. She had not wanted to part with the home she had been reared in. Yet all of these things seemed to have been forced upon her. All Marian knew to do was to square her shoulders, take a deep breath, put regrets behind her, and move steadily toward the best future she could devise for herself.

She carried letters of introduction to the San Francisco architects, Nicholson and Snow, who had offered a prize for the best house that could be built in a reasonable time for fifteen thousand dollars. She meant to offer her plans in this competition. Through friends she had secured a comfortable place in which to live and work. She need undergo no hardships in searching for a home, in clothing herself, in paying for instruction in the course in architecture she meant to pursue.

Concerning Linda she could not resist a feeling of exultation. Linda was one of the friends in Lilac Valley about whom Marian could think whole-heartedly and lovingly. Sometimes she had been on the point of making a suggestion to Linda, and then she had contented herself with waiting in the thought that very soon there must come to the girl a proper sense of her position and her rights. The experience of the previous night taught Marian that Linda had arrived. She would no longer be the compliant little sister who would run Eileen’s errands, wait upon her guests and wear disreputable clothing. When Linda reached a point where she was capable of the performance of the previous night, Marian knew that she would proceed to live up to her blue china in every ramification of life. She did not know exactly how Linda would follow up the assertion of her rights that she had made, but she did know that in some way she would follow it up, because Linda was a very close reproduction of her father.

She had been almost constantly with him during his life, very much alone since his death. She was a busy young person. From Marian’s windows she had watched the business of carrying on the wild flower garden that Linda and her father had begun. What the occupation was that kept the light burning in Linda’s room far into the night Marian did not know. For a long time she had supposed that her studies were difficult for her, and when she had asked Linda if it were not possible for her to prepare her lessons without so many hours of midnight study she had caught the stare of frank amazement with which the girl regarded her, and in that surprised, almost grieved look she had realized that very probably a daughter of Alexander Strong, so resembling him as Linda resembled him, would not be compelled to overwork to master the prescribed course of any city high school. What Linda was doing during those midnight hours Marian did not know, but she did know that she was not wrestling with mathematics and languages—at least not all of the time. So Marian, knowing Linda’s gift with a pencil, had come to the conclusion that she was drawing pictures; but circumstantial evidence was all she had as a basis for her conviction. Linda went her way silently and alone. She was acquainted with everyone living in Lilac Valley, frank and friendly with all of them; aside from Marian she had no intimate friend. Not another girl in the valley cared to follow Linda’s pursuits or to cultivate the acquaintance of the breeched, booted girl, constantly devoting herself to outdoor study with her father during his lifetime, afterward alone.

For an instant after Marian had boarded her train Linda stood looking at it, her heart so heavy that it pained acutely. She had not said one word to make Marian feel that she did not want her to go. Not once had she put forward the argument that Marian’s going would leave her to depend entirely for human sympathy upon the cook, and her guardian, also administrator of the Strong estate, John Gilman. So long as he was Marian’s friend Linda had admired John Gilman. She had gone to him for some measure of the companionship she had missed in losing her father. Since Gilman had allowed himself to be captivated by Eileen, Linda had harbored a feeling concerning him almost of contempt. Linda was so familiar with every move that Eileen made, so thoroughly understood that there was a motive back of her every action, that she could not see why John Gilman, having known her from childhood, should not understand her also.

She had decided that the time had come when she would force Eileen to give her an allowance, however small, for her own personal expenses, that she must in some way manage to be clothed so that she was not a matter of comment even among the boys of her school, and she could see no reason why the absolute personal liberty she always had enjoyed so long as she disappeared when Eileen did not want her and appeared when she did, should not extend to her own convenience as well as Eileen’s.

Life was a busy affair for Linda. She had not time to watch Marian’s train from sight. She must hurry to the nearest street car and make all possible haste or she would be late for her classes. Throughout the day she worked with the deepest concentration, but she could not keep down the knowledge that Eileen would have things to say, possibly things to do, when they met that evening, for Eileen was capable of disconcerting hysteria. Previously Linda had remained stubbornly silent during any tirade in which Eileen chose to indulge. She had allowed herself to be nagged into doing many things that she despised, because she would not assert herself against apparent injustice. But since she had come fully to realize the results of Eileen’s course of action for Marian and for herself, she was deliberately arriving at the conclusion that hereafter she would speak when she had a defense, and she would make it her business to let the sun shine on any dark spot that she discovered in Eileen.

Linda knew that if John Gilman were well acquainted with Eileen, he could not come any nearer to loving her than she did. Such an idea as loving Eileen never had entered Linda’s thoughts. To Linda, Eileen was not lovable. That she should be expected to love her because they had the same parents and lived in the same home seemed absurd. She was slightly disappointed, on reaching home, to find that Eileen was not there.

“Will the lady of the house dine with us this evening?” she asked as she stood eating an apple in the kitchen.

“She didn’t say,” answered Katy. “Have ye had it out about last night yet?”

“No,” answered Linda. “That is why I was asking about her. I want to clear the atmosphere before I make my new start in life.”

“Now, don’t ye be going too far, lambie,” cautioned Katy “Ye young things make such an awful serious business of life these days. In your scramble to wring artificial joy out of it you miss all the natural joy the good God provided ye.”

“It seems to me, Katy,” said Linda slowly, “that you should put that statement the other way round. It seems that life makes a mighty serious business for us young things, and it seems to me that if we don’t get the right start and have a proper foundation, life Is going to be spoiled for us. One life is all I’ve got to live in this world; and I would like it to be the interesting and the beautiful kind of life that Father lived.”

Linda dropped to a chair.

“Katy,” she said, leaning forward and looking intently into the earnest face of the woman before her, “Katy, I have been thinking an awful lot lately. There is a question you could answer for me if you wanted to.”

“Well, I don’t see any raison,” said Katy, “why I shouldn’t answer ye any question ye’d be asking me.”

Linda’s eyes narrowed as they did habitually in deep thought She was looking past Katy down the sunlit spaces of the wild garden that was her dearest possession, and then her eyes strayed higher to where the blue walls that shut in Lilac Valley ranged their peaks against the sky.

“Katy,” she said, scarcely above her breath, “was Mother like Eileen?”

Katy stiffened. Her red face paled slightly. She turned her back and slowly slid into the oven the pie she was carrying. She closed the door with more force than was necessary and then turned and deliberately studied Linda from the top of her shining black head to the tip of her shoe.

“Some,” she said tersely.

“Yes, I know ‘some’,” said Linda, “but you know I was too young to pay much attention, and Daddy managed always to make me so happy that I never realized until he was gone that he not only had been my father but my mother as well. You know what I mean, Katy.”

“Yes,” said Katy deliberately, “I know what ye mean, lambie, and I’ll tell ye the truth as far as I know it. She managed your father, she pampered him, but she deceived him every day, just about little things. She always made the household accounts bigger than they were, and used the extra money for Miss Eileen and herself—things like that. I’m thinkin’ he never knew it. I’m thinking he loved her deeply and trusted her complete. I know what ye’re getting at. She was not enough like Eileen to make him unhappy with her. He might have been if he had known all there was to know, but for his own sake I was not the one to give her away, though she constantly made him think that I was extravagant and wasteful in me work.”

Linda’s eyes came back from the mountains and met Katy’s straightly.

“Katy,” she said, “did you ever see sisters as different as Eileen and I are?”

“No, I don’t think I ever did,” said Katy.

“It puzzles me,” said Linda slowly. “The more I think about it, the less I can understand why, if we are sisters, we would not accidentally resemble each other a tiny bit in some way, and I must say I can’t see that we do physically or mentally.”

“No,” said Katy, “ye were just as different as ye are now when I came to this house new and ye were both little things.”

“And we are going to be as different and to keep on growing more different every day of our lives, because red war breaks out the minute Eileen comes home. I haven’t a notion what she will say to me for what I did last night and what I am going to do in the future, but I have a definite idea as to what I am going to say to her.”

“Now, easy; ye go easy, lambie,” cautioned Katy.

“I wouldn’t regret it,” said Linda, “if I took Eileen by the shoulders and shook her till I shook the rouge off her cheek, and the brilliantine off her hair, and a million mean little subterfuges out of her soul. You know Eileen is lovely when she is natural, and if she would be straight-off-the-bat square, I would be proud to be her sister. As it is, I have my doubts, even about this sister business.”

“Why, Linda, child, ye are just plain crazy,” said Katy. “What kind of notions are you getting into your head?”

“I hear the front door,” said Linda, “and I am going to march straight to battle. She’s going up the front stairs. I did mean to short-cut up the back, but, come to think of it, I have served my apprenticeship on the back stairs. I believe I’ll ascend the front myself. Good-bye, darlin’, wish me luck.”

Linda swung Katy around, hugged her tight, and dropped a kiss on the top of her faithful head.

“Ye just stick right up for your rights,” Katy advised her. “Ye’re a great big girl. ’Tain’t going to be long till ye’re eighteen. But mind your old Katy about going too far. If ye lose your temper and cat-spit, it won’t get ye anywhere. The fellow that keeps the coolest can always do the best headwork.”

“I get you,” said Linda, “and that is good advice for which I thank you.”

CHAPTER V

The Smoke of Battle

Then Linda walked down the hall, climbed the front stairs, and presented herself at Eileen’s door, there to receive one of the severest shocks of her young life. Eileen had tossed her hat and fur upon a couch, seated herself at her dressing table, and was studying her hair in the effort to decide whether she could fluff it up sufficiently to serve for the evening or whether she must take it down and redress it. At Linda’s step in the doorway she turned a smiling face upon her and cried: “Hello, little sister, come in and tell me the news.”

Linda stopped as if dazed. The wonderment in which she looked at Eileen was stamped all over her. A surprised braid of hair hung over one of her shoulders. Her hands were surprised, and the skirt of her dress, and her shoes flatly set on the floor.

“Well, I’ll be darned!” she ejaculated, and then walked to where she could face Eileen, and seated herself without making any attempt to conceal her amazement.

“Linda,” said Eileen sweetly, “you would stand far better chance of being popular and making a host of friends if you would not be so coarse. I am quite sure you never heard Mama or me use such an expression.”

For one long instant Linda was too amazed to speak. Then she recovered herself.

“Look here, Eileen, you needn’t try any ‘perfect lady’ business on me,” she said shortly. “Do you think I have forgotten the extent of your vocabulary when the curling iron gets too hot or you fail to receive an invitation to the Bachelors’ Ball?”

Linda never had been capable of understanding Eileen. At that minute she could not know that Eileen had been facing facts through the long hours of the night and all through the day, and that she had reached the decision that for the future her only hope of working Linda to her will was to conciliate her, to ignore the previous night, to try to put their relationship upon the old basis by pretending that there never had been a break. She laughed softly.

“On rare occasions, I grant it. Of course a little swear slips out sometimes. What I am trying to point out is that you do too much of it.”

“How did you ever get the idea,” said Linda, “that I wanted to be popular and have hosts of friends? What would I do with them if I had them?”

“Why, use them, my child, use them,” answered Eileen promptly.

“Let’s cut this,” said Linda tersely. “I am not your child. I’m getting to the place where I have serious doubt as to whether I am your sister or not. If I am, it’s not my fault, and the same clay never made two objects quite so different. I came up here to fight, and I’m going to see it through. I’m on the war-path, so you may take your club and proceed to battle.”

“What have we to fight about?” inquired Eileen.

“Every single thing that you have done that was unfair to me all my life,” said Linda. “Since all of it has been deliberate you probably know more about the details than I do, so I’ll just content myself with telling you that for the future, last night marked a change in the relations between us. I am going to be eighteen before so very long, and I have ceased to be your maid or your waitress or your dupe. You are not going to work me one single time when I have got brains to see through your schemes after this. Hereafter I take my place in my father’s house and at my father’s table on an equality with you.”

Eileen looked at Linda steadily, trying to see to the depths of her soul. She saw enough to convince her that the young creature in front of her was in earnest.

“Hm,” she said, “have I been so busy that I have failed to notice what a great girl you are getting?”

“Busy!” scoffed Linda. “Tell that to Katy. It’s a kumquat!”

“Perhaps you are too big,” continued Eileen, “to be asked to wait on the table any more.”

“I certainly am,” retorted Linda, “and I am also too big to wear such shoes or such a dress as I have on at the present minute. I know all about the war and the inflation of prices and the reduction in income, but I know also that if there is enough to run the house, and dress you, and furnish you such a suite of rooms as you’re enjoying right now, there is enough to furnish me suitable clothes, a comfortable bedroom and a place where I can leave my work without putting away everything I am doing each time I step from the room. I told you four years ago that you might take the touring car and do what you pleased with it. I have never asked what you did or what you got out of it, so I’ll thank you to observe equal silence about anything I choose to do now with the runabout, which I reserved for myself. I told you to take this suite, and this is the first time that I have ever mentioned to you what you spent on it.”

Linda waved an inclusive hand toward the fully equipped, dainty dressing table, over rugs of pale blue, and beautifully decorated walls, including the sleeping room and bath adjoining.

“So now I’ll ask you to keep off while I do what I please about the library and the billiard room. I’ll try to get along without much money in doing what I desire there, but I must have some new clothes. I want money to buy me a pair of new shoes for school. I want a pair of pumps suitable for evenings when there are guests to dinner. I want a couple of attractive school dresses. This old serge is getting too hot and too worn for common decency. And I also want a couple of dresses something like you are wearing, for afternoons and evenings.”

Eileen stared aghast at Linda.

“Where,” she inquired politely, “is the money for all this to come from?”

“Eileen,” said Linda in a low tense voice, “I have reached the place where even the boys of the high school are twitting me about how I am dressed, and that is the limit. I have stood it for three years from the girls. I am an adept in pretending that I don’t see, and I don’t hear. I have got to the point where I am perfectly capable of walking into your wardrobe and taking out enough of the clothes there and selling them at a second-hand store to buy me what I require to dress me just plainly and decently. So take warning. I don’t know where you are going to get the money, but you are going to get it. If you would welcome a suggestion from me, come home only half the times you dine yourself and your girl friends at tearooms and cafes in the city, and you will save my share that way. I am going to give you a chance to total your budget, and then I demand one half of the income from Father’s estate above household expenses; and if I don’t get it, on the day I am eighteen I shall go to John Gilman and say to him what I have said to you, and I shall go to the bank and demand that a division be made there, and that a separate bank book be started for me.”

Linda’s amazement on entering the room had been worthy of note. Eileen’s at the present minute was beyond description. Dumbfounded was a colourless word to describe her state of mind.

“You don’t mean that,” she gasped in a quivering voice when at last she could speak.

“I can see, Eileen, that you are taken unawares,” said Linda. “I have had four long years to work up to this hour. Hasn’t it even dawned on you that this worm was ever going to turn? You know exquisite moths and butterflies evolve in the canyons from very unprepossessing and lowly living worms. You are spending your life on the butterfly stunt. Have I been such a weak worm that it hasn’t ever occurred to you that I might want to try a plain, every-day pair of wings sometime myself?”

Eileen’s face was an ugly red, her hands were shaking, her voice was unnatural, but she controlled her temper.

“Of course,” she said, “I have always known that the time would come, after you finished school and were of a proper age, when you would want to enter society.”

“No, you never knew anything of the kind,” said Linda bluntly, “because I have not the slightest ambition to enter society either now or then. All I am asking is to enter the High School in a commonly decent, suitable dress; to enter our dining room as a daughter; to enter a workroom decently equipped for my convenience. You needn’t be surprised if you hear some changes going on in the billiard room and see some changes going on in the library. And if I feel that I can muster the nerve to drive the runabout, it’s my car, it’s up to me.”

“Linda!” wailed Eileen, “how can you think of such a thing? You wouldn’t dare.”

“Because I haven’t dared till the present is no reason why I should deprive myself of every single pleasure in life,” said Linda. “You spend your days doing exactly what you please; driving that runabout for Father was my one soul-satisfying diversion. Why shouldn’t I do the thing I love most, if I can muster the nerve?”

Linda arose, and walking over to a table, picked up a magazine lying among some small packages that Eileen evidently had placed there on entering her room.

“Are you subscribing to this?” she asked.

She turned in her hands and leafed through the pages of a most attractive magazine, Everybody’s Home. It was devoted to poetry, good fiction, and everything concerning home life from beef to biscuits, and from rugs to roses.

“I saw it on a news-stand,” said Eileen. “I was at lunch with some girls who had a copy and they were talking about some articles by somebody named something—Meredith, I think it was—Jane Meredith, maybe she’s a Californian, and she is advocating the queer idea that we go back to nature by trying modern cooking on the food the aborigines ate. If we find it good then she recommends that we specialize on the growing of these native vegetables for home use and for export—as a new industry.”

“I see,” said Linda. “Out-Burbanking Burbank, as it were.”

“No, not that,” said Eileen. “She is not proposing to evolve new forms. She is proposing to show us how to make delicious dishes for luncheon or dinner from wild things now going to waste. What the girls said was so interesting that I thought I’d get a copy and if I see anything good I’ll turn it over to Katy.”

“And where’s Katy going to get the wild vegetables?” asked Linda sceptically.

“Why you might have some of them in your wild garden, or you could easily find enough to try—all the prowling the canyons you do ought to result in something.”

“So it should,” said Linda. “I quite agree with you. Did I understand you to say that I should be ready to go to the bank with you to arrange about my income next week?”

Again the colour deepened in Eileen’s face, again she made a visible effort at self-control.

“Oh, Linda,” she said, “what is the use of being so hard? You will make them think at the bank that I have not treated you fairly.”

“I?” said Linda, “I will make them think? Don’t you think it is you who will make them think? Will you kindly answer my question?”

“If I show you the books,” said Eileen, “if I divide what is left after the bills are paid so that you say yourself that it is fair, what more can you ask?”

Linda hesitated.

“What I ought to do is exactly what I have said I would do,” she said tersely, “but if you are going to put it on that basis I have no desire to hurt you or humiliate you in public. If you do that, I can’t see that I have any reason to complain, so we’ll call it a bargain and we’ll say no more about it until the first of the month, unless the spirit moves you, after taking a good square look at me, to produce some shoes and a school dress instanter.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” answered Eileen.

“All right then,” said Linda. “See you at dinner.”

She went to her own room, slipped off her school dress, brushed her hair, and put on the skirt and blouse she had worn the previous evening, these being the only extra clothing she possessed. As she straightened her hair she looked at herself intently.

“My, aren’t you coming on!” she said to the figure in the glass. “Dressing for dinner! First thing you know you’ll be a perfect lady.”

CHAPTER VI

Jane Meredith

When Eileen came down to dinner that evening Linda understood at a glance that an effort was to be made to efface thoroughly from the mind of John Gilman all memory of the Eileen of the previous evening. She had decided on redressing her hair, while she wore one of her most becoming and attractive gowns. To Linda and Katy during the dinner she was simply charming. Having said what she wanted to say and received the assurance she desired, Linda accepted her advances cordially and displayed such charming proclivities herself that Eileen began covertly to watch her, and as she watched there slowly grew in her brain the conviction that something had happened to Linda. At once she began studying deeply in an effort to learn what it might be. There were three paramount things in Eileen’s cosmos that could happen to a girl: She could have lovely clothing. Linda did not have it. She could have money and influential friends. Since Marian’s going Linda had practically no friend; she was merely acquainted with almost everyone living in Lilac Valley. She could have a lover. Linda had none. But stay! Eileen’s thought halted at the suggestion. Maybe she had! She had been left completely to her own devices when she was not wanted about the house. She had been mingling with hundreds of boys and girls in High School. She might have met some man repeatedly on the street cars, going to and from school. In school she might have attracted the son of some wealthy and influential family; which was the only kind of son Eileen chose to consider in connection with Linda. Through Eileen’s brain ran bits of the conversation of the previous evening. She recalled that the men she had intended should spend the evening waiting on her and paying her pretty compliments had spent it eating like hungry men, laughing and jesting with Linda and Marian, giving every evidence of a satisfaction with their entertainment that never had been evinced with the best brand of attractions she had to offer.

Eileen was willing to concede that Marian Thorne had been a beautiful girl, and she had known, previous to the disaster, that it was quite as likely that any man might admire Marian’s flashing dark beauty as her blonde loveliness. Between them then it would have been merely a question of taste on the part of the man. Since Marian’s dark head had turned ashen, Eileen had simply eliminated her at one sweep. That white hair would brand Marian anywhere as an old woman. Very likely no man ever would want to marry her. Eileen was sure she would not want to if she were a man. No wonder John Gilman had ceased to be attracted by a girl’s face with a grandmother setting.

As for Linda, Eileen never had considered her at all except as a convenience to serve her own purposes. Last night she had learned that Linda had a brain, that she had wit, that she could say things to which men of the world listened with interest. She began to watch Linda. She appraised with deepest envy the dark hair curling naturally on her temples. She wondered how hair that curled naturally could be so thick and heavy, and she thought what a crown of glory would adorn Linda’s head when the day came to coil those long dark braids around it and fasten them with flashing pins. She drew some satisfaction from the sunburned face and lean figure before her, but it was not satisfaction of soul-sustaining quality. There was beginning to be something disquieting about Linda. A roundness was creeping over her lean frame; a glow was beginning to colour her lips and cheek bones; a dewy look could be surprised in her dark eyes occasionally. She had the effect of a creature with something yeasty bottled inside it that was beginning to ferment and might effervesce at any minute. Eileen had been so surprised the previous evening and again before dinner, that she made up her mind that hereafter one might expect almost anything from Linda. She would no longer follow a suggestion unless the suggestion accorded with her sense of right and justice. It was barely possible that it might be required to please her inclinations. Eileen’s mind worked with unbelievable swiftness. She tore at her subject like a vulture tearing at a feast, and like a vulture she reached the vitals swiftly. She prefaced her question with a dry laugh. Then she leaned forward and asked softly: “Linda, dear, why haven’t you told me?”

Linda’s eyes were so clear and honest as they met Eileen’s that she almost hesitated.

“A little more explicit, please,” said the girl quietly.

“Who is he?” asked Eileen abruptly.

“Oh, I haven’t narrowed to an individual,” said Linda largely. “You have noticed a flock of boys following me from school and hanging around the front door? I have such hosts to choose from that it’s going to take a particularly splendid knight on a snow-white charger—I think ‘charger’ is the proper word—to capture my young affections.”

Eileen was satisfied. There wasn’t any he. She might for a short time yet cut Linda’s finances to the extreme limit. Whenever a man appeared on the horizon she would be forced to make a division at least approaching equality.

Linda followed Eileen to the living room and sat down with a book until John Gilman arrived. She had a desire to study him for a few minutes. She was going to write Marian a letter that night. She wanted to know if she could honestly tell her that Gilman appeared lonely and seemed to miss her. Katy had no chance to answer the bell when it rang. Eileen was in the hall. Linda could not tell what was happening from the murmur of voices. Presently John and Eileen entered the room, and as Linda greeted him she did have the impression that he appeared unusually thoughtful and worried. She sat for half an hour, taking slight part in the conversation. Then she excused herself and went to her room, and as she went she knew that she could not honestly write Marian what she had hoped, for in thirty minutes by the clock Eileen’s blandishments had worked, and John Gilman was looking at her as if she were the most exquisite and desirable creature in existence.

Slowly Linda climbed the stairs and entered her room. She slid the bolt of her door behind her, turned on the lights, unlocked a drawer, and taking from it a heap of materials she scattered them over a small table, and picking up her pencil, she sat gazing at the sheet before her for some time. Then slowly she began writing:

It appeals to me that, far as modern civilization has gone in culinary efforts, we have not nearly reached the limits available to us as I pointed out last month. We consider ourselves capable of preparing and producing elaborate banquets, yet at no time are we approaching anything even to compare in lavishness and delicacy with the days of Lucullus. We are not feasting on baked swans, peacock tongues and drinking our pearls. I am not recommending that we should revive the indulgence of such lavish and useless expenditure, but I would suggest that if we tire with the sameness of our culinary efforts, we at least try some of the new dishes described in this department, established for the sole purpose of their introduction. In so doing we accomplish a multiple purpose. We enlarge the resources of the southwest. We tease stale appetites with a new tang. We offer the world something different, yet native to us. We use modern methods on Indian material and the results are most surprising. In trying these dishes I would remind you that few of us cared for oysters, olives, celery—almost any fruit or vegetable one could mention on first trial. Try several times and be sure you prepare dishes exactly right before condemning them as either fad or fancy. These are very real, nourishing and delicious foods that are being offered you. Here is a salad that would have intrigued the palate of Lucullus, himself. If you do not believe me, try it. The vegetable is slightly known by a few native mountaineers and ranchers. Botanists carried it abroad where under the name of winter-purslane it is used in France and England for greens or salad, while remaining practically unknown at home. Boiled and seasoned as spinach it makes equally good greens. But it is in salad that it stands pre-eminent.

Go to any canyon—I shall not reveal the name of my particular canyon—and locate a bed of miner’s lettuce (Montia perfoliata). Growing in rank beds beside a cold, clean stream, you will find these pulpy, exquisitely shaped, pungent round leaves from the center of which lifts a tiny head of misty white lace, sending up a palate-teasing, spicy perfume. The crisp, pinkish stems snap in the fingers. Be sure that you wash the leaves carefully so that no lurking germs cling to them. Fill your salad bowl with the crisp leaves, from which the flowerhead has been plucked. For dressing, dice a teacup of the most delicious bacon you can obtain and fry it to a crisp brown together with a small sliced onion. Add to the fat two tablespoons of sugar, half a teaspoon of mustard; salt will scarcely be necessary, the bacon will furnish that. Blend the fat, sugar, and mustard, and pour in a measure of the best apple vinegar, diluted to taste. Bring this mixture to the boiling point, and when it has cooled slightly pour it over the lettuce leaves, lightly turning with a silver fork. Garnish the edge of the dish with a deep border of the fresh leaves, bearing their lace of white bloom intact, around the edge of the bowl, and sprinkle on top the sifted yolks of two hard-boiled eggs, heaping the diced whites in the center.

Linda paused and read this over carefully.

“That is all right,” she said. “I couldn’t make that much better.”

She made a few corrections here and there, and picking up a coloured pencil, she deftly sketched in a head piece of delicate sprays of miners’ lettuce tipped at differing angles, fringy white with bloom. Below she printed: “A delicious Indian salad. The second of a series of new dishes to be offered made from materials used by the Indians. Compounded and tested in her own diet kitchen by the author.” Swiftly she sketched a tail piece representing a table top upon which sat a tempting-looking big salad bowl filled with fresh green leaves, rimmed with a row of delicate white flowers, from which you could almost scent a teasing delicate fragrance arising; and beneath, in a clear, firm hand, she stroked in the name, Jane Meredith. She went over her work carefully, then laid it flat on a piece of cardboard, shoved it into an envelope, directed it to the editor of Everybody’s Home, laid it inside her geometry, and wrote her letter to Marian before going to bed.

In the morning on her way to the street car she gaily waved to a passing automobile going down Lilac Valley, in which sat John Gilman and Peter Morrison and his architect, and as they were driving in the direction from which she had come, Linda very rightly surmised that they were going to pick up Eileen and make a tour of the valley, looking for available building locations; and she wondered why Eileen had not told her that they were coming. Linda had been right about the destination of the car. It turned in at the Strong driveway and stopped at the door. John Gilman went to ring the bell and learn if Eileen were ready. Peter followed him. Henry Anderson stepped from the car and wandered over the lawn, looking at the astonishing array of bushes, vines, flowers, and trees.

From one to another he went, fingering the waxy leaves, studying the brilliant flower faces. Finally turning a corner and crossing the wild garden, to which he paid slight attention, he started down the other side of the house. Here an almost overpowering odour greeted his nostrils, and he went over to a large tree covered with rough, dark green, almost brownish, lance-shaped leaves, each branch terminating in a heavy spray of yellowish-green flowers, whose odour was of cloying sweetness. The bees were buzzing over it. It was not a tree with which he was familiar, and stepping back, he looked at it carefully. Then at its base, wind-driven into a crevice between the roots, his attention was attracted to a crumpled sheet of paper, upon which he could see lines that would have attracted the attention of any architect. He went forward instantly, picked up the sheet, and straightening it out he stood looking at it.

“Holy smoke!” he breathed softly. “What a find!”

He looked at the reverse of the sheet, his face becoming more intent every minute. When he heard Peter Morrison’s voice calling him he hastily thrust the paper into his coat pocket; but he had gone only a few steps when he stopped, glanced keenly over the house and lawn, turned his back, and taking the sheet from his pocket, he smoothed it out, folded it carefully, and put it in an inside pocket. Then he joined the party.

At once they set out to examine the available locations that yet remained in Lilac Valley. Nature provided them a wonderful day of snappy sunshine and heady sea air. Spring favoured them with lilac walls at their bluest, broken here and there with the rose-misted white mahogany. The violet nightshade was beginning to add deeper colour to the hills in the sunniest wild spots. The panicles of mahonia bloom were showing their gold colour. Wild flowers were lifting leaves of feather and lace everywhere, and most agreeable on the cool morning air was a faint breath of California sage. Up one side of the valley, weaving in and out, up and down, over the foothills they worked their way. They stopped for dinner at one of the beautiful big hotels, practically filled with Eastern tourists. Eileen never had known a prouder moment than when she took her place at the head of the table and presided over the dinner which was served to three most attractive specimens of physical manhood, each of whom was unusually well endowed with brain, all flattering her with the most devoted attention. This triumph she achieved in a dining room seating hundreds of people, its mirror-lined walls reflecting her exquisite image from many angles, to the click of silver, and the running accompaniment of many voices. What she had expected to accomplish in her own dining room had come to her before a large audience, in which, she had no doubt, there were many envious women. Eileen rayed loveliness like a Mariposa lily, and purred in utter contentment like a deftly stroked kitten.

When they parted in the evening Peter Morrison had memoranda of three locations that he wished to consider. That he might not seem to be unduly influenced or to be giving the remainder of Los Angeles County its just due, he proposed to motor around for a week before reaching an ultimate decision, but in his heart he already had decided that somewhere near Los Angeles he would build his home, and as yet he had seen nothing nearly so attractive as Lilac Valley.

CHAPTER VII

Trying Yucca

On her way to school that morning Linda stopped at the post office and pasted the required amount of stamps upon the package that she was mailing to New York. She hurried from her last class that afternoon to the city directory to find the street and number of James Brothers, figuring that the firm with whom Marian dealt would be the proper people for her to consult. She had no difficulty in finding the place for which she was searching, and she was rather agreeably impressed with the men to whom she talked. She made arrangements with their buyer to call at her home in Lilac Valley at nine o’clock the following Saturday morning to appraise the articles with which she wished to part.

Then she went to one of the leading book stores of the city and made inquiries which guided her to a reliable second-hand book dealer, and she arranged to be ready to receive his representative at ten o’clock on Saturday.

Reaching home she took a note book and pencil, and studied the billiard room and the library, making a list of the furniture which she did not actually need. After that she began on the library shelves, listing such medical works as were of a technical nature. Books of fiction, history, art, and biography, and those books written by her father she did not include. She found that she had a long task which would occupy several evenings. Her mind was methodical and she had been with her father through sufficient business transactions to understand that in order to drive a good bargain she must know how many volumes she had to offer and the importance of their authors as medical authorities; she should also know the exact condition of each set of books. Since she had made up her mind to let them go, and she knew the value of many of the big, leather-bound volumes, she determined that she would not sell them until she could secure the highest possible price for them.

Two months previously she would have consulted John Gilman and asked him to arrange the transaction for her. Since he had allowed himself to be duped so easily—or at least it had seemed easy to Linda; for, much as she knew of Eileen, she could not possibly know the weeks of secret plotting, the plans for unexpected meetings, the trumped-up business problems necessary to discuss, the deliberate flaunting of her physical charms before him, all of which had made his conquest extremely hard for Eileen, but Linda, seeing only results, had thought it contemptibly easy—she would not ask John Gilman anything. She would go ahead on the basis of her agreement with Eileen and do the best she could alone.

She counted on Saturday to dispose of the furniture. The books might go at her leisure. Then the first of the week she could select such furniture as she desired in order to arrange the billiard room for her study. If she had a suitable place in which to work in seclusion, there need be no hurry about the library. She conscientiously prepared all the lessons required in her school course for the next day and then, stacking her books, she again unlocked the drawer opened the previous evening, and taking from it the same materials, set to work. She wrote:

Botanists have failed to mention that there is any connection between asparagus, originally a product of salt marshes, and Yucca, a product of the alkaline desert. Very probably there is no botanical relationship, but these two plants are alike in flavor. From the alkaline, sunbeaten desert where the bayonet plant thrusts up a tender bloom head six inches in height, it slowly increases in stature as it travels across country more frequently rain washed, and winds its way beside mountain streams to where in more fertile soil and the same sunshine it develops magnificent specimens from ten to fifteen and more feet in height. The plant grows a number of years before it decides to flower. When it reaches maturity it throws up a bloom stem as tender as the delicate head of asparagus, thick as one’s upper arm, and running to twice one’s height. This bloom stem in its early stages is coloured the pale pink of asparagus, with faint touches of yellow, and hints of blue. At maturity it breaks into a gorgeous head of lavender-tinted, creamy pendent flowers covering the upper third of its height, billowing out slightly in the centre, so that from a distance the waxen torch takes on very much the appearance of a flaming candle. For this reason, in Mexico, where the plant flourishes in even greater abundance than in California, with the exquisite poetry common to the tongue and heart of the Spaniard, Yucca Whipplei has been commonly named “Our Lord’s Candle.” At the most delicate time of their growth these candlesticks were roasted and eaten by the Indians. Based upon this knowledge, I would recommend two dishes, almost equally delicious, which may be prepared from this plant.

Take the most succulent young bloom stems when they have exactly the appearance of an asparagus head at its moment of delicious perfection. With a sharp knife, cut them in circles an inch in depth. Arrange these in a shallow porcelain baking dish, sprinkle with salt, dot them with butter, add enough water to keep them from sticking and burning. Bake until thoroughly tender. Use a pancake turner to slide the rings to a hot platter, and garnish with circles of hard-boiled egg. This you will find an extremely delicate and appetizing dish.

The second recipe I would offer is to treat this vegetable precisely as you would creamed asparagus. Cut the stalks in six-inch lengths, quarter them to facilitate cooking and handling, and boil in salted water. Drain, arrange in a hot dish, and pour over a carefully made cream sauce. I might add that one stalk would furnish sufficient material for several families. This dish should be popular in southwestern states where the plant grows profusely; and to cultivate these plants for shipping to Eastern markets would be quite as feasible as the shipping of asparagus, rhubarb, artichokes, or lettuce.

I have found both these dishes peculiarly appetizing, but I should be sorry if, in introducing Yucca as a food, I became instrumental in the extermination of this universal and wonderfully beautiful plant. For this reason I have hesitated about including Yucca among these articles; but when I see the bloom destroyed ruthlessly by thousands who cut it to decorate touring automobiles and fruit and vegetable stands beside the highways, who carry it from its native location and stick it in the parching sun of the seashore as a temporary shelter, I feel that the bloom stems might as well be used for food as to be so ruthlessly wasted.

The plant is hardy in the extreme, growing in the most unfavourable places, clinging tenaciously to sheer mountain and canyon walls. After blooming and seeding the plant seems to have thrown every particle of nourishment it contains into its development, it dries out and dies (the spongy wood is made into pin-cushions for the art stores); but from the roots there spring a number of young plants, which, after a few years of growth, mature and repeat their life cycle, while other young plants develop from the widely scattered seeds. The Spaniards at times call the plant Quiota. This word seems to be derived from quiotl, which is the Aztec name for Agave, from which plant a drink not unlike beer is produced, and suggests the possibility that there might have been a time when the succulent flower stem of the Yucca furnished drink as well as food for the Indians.

After carefully re-reading and making several minor corrections, Linda picked up her pencil, and across the top of a sheet of heavy paper sketched the peaks of a chain of mountains. Across the base she drew a stretch of desert floor, bristling with the thorns of many different cacti brilliant with their gold, pink, and red bloom, intermingled with fine grasses and desert flower faces. At the left she painstakingly drew a huge plant of yucca with a perfect circle of bayonets, from the center of which uprose the gigantic flower stem the length of her page, and on the misty bloom of the flaming tongue she worked quite as late as Marian Thorne had ever seen a light burning in her window. When she had finished her drawing she studied it carefully a long time, adding a touch here and there, and then she said softly: “There, Daddy, I feel that even you would think that a faithful reproduction To-morrow night I’ll paint it.”

John Gilman saw the light from Linda’s window when he brought Eileen home that night, and when he left he glanced that way again, and was surprised to see the room still lighted, and the young figure bending over a work table. He stood very still for a few minutes, wondering what could keep Linda awake so far into the night, and while his thoughts were upon her he wondered, too, why she did not care to have beautiful clothes such as Eileen wore; and then he went further and wondered why, when she could be as entertaining as she had been the night she joined them at dinner, she did not make her appearance oftener; and then, because the mind is a queer thing, and he had wondered about a given state of affairs, he went a step further, and wondered whether the explanation lay in Linda’s inclinations or in Eileen’s management, and then his thought fastened tenaciously upon the subject of Eileen’s management.

He was a patient man. He had allowed his reason and better judgment to be swayed by Eileen’s exquisite beauty and her blandishments. He did not regret having discovered before it was too late that Marian Thorne was not the girl he had thought her. He wanted a wife cut after the clinging-vine pattern. He wanted to be the dominating figure in his home. It had not taken Eileen long to teach him that Marian was self-assertive and would do a large share of dominating herself. He had thought that he was perfectly satisfied and very happy with Eileen; yet that day he repeatedly had felt piqued and annoyed with her. She had openly cajoled and flirted with Henry Anderson past a point which was agreeable for any man to see his sweetheart go with another man. With Peter Morrison she had been unspeakably charming in a manner with which John was very familiar.

He turned up his coat collar, thrust his hands in his pockets, and swore softly. Looking straight ahead of him, he should have seen a stretch of level sidewalk, bordered on one hand by lacy, tropical foliage, on the other, by sheets of level green lawn, broken everywhere by the uprising boles of great trees, clumps of rare vines, and rows of darkened homes, attractive in architectural design, vine covered, hushed for the night. What he really saw was a small plateau, sun illumined, at the foot of a mountain across the valley, where the lilac wall was the bluest, where the sun shone slightly more golden than anywhere else in the valley, where huge live oaks outstretched rugged arms, where the air had a tang of salt, a tinge of sage, an odour of orange, shot through with snowy coolness, thrilled with bird song, and the laughing chuckle of a big spring breaking from the foot of the mountain. They had left the road and followed a narrow, screened path by which they came unexpectedly into this opening. They had stood upon it in wordless enchantment, looking down the slope beneath it, across the peace of the valley, to the blue ranges beyond.

“Just where are we?” Peter Morrison had asked at last.

John Gilman had been looking at a view which included Eileen. She lifted her face, flushed and exquisite, to Peter Morrison and answered in a breathless undertone, yet John had distinctly heard her:

“How wonderful it would be if we were at your house. Oh, I envy the woman who shares this with you!”

It had not been anything in particular, yet all day it had teased John Gilman’s sensibilities. He felt ashamed of himself for not being more enthusiastic as he searched records and helped to locate the owner of that particular spot. To John, there was a new tone in Peter’s voice, a possessive light in his eyes as he studied the location, and made excursions in several directions, to fix in his mind the exact position of the land.

He had indicated what he considered the topographical location for a house—stood on it facing the valley, and stepped the distance suitably far away to set a garage and figured on a short private road down to the highway. He very plainly was deeply prepossessed with a location John Gilman blamed himself for not having found first. Certainly nature had here grown and walled a dream garden in which to set a house of dreams. So, past midnight, Gilman stood in the sunshine, looking at the face of the girl he had asked to marry him and who had said that she would; and a small doubt crept into his heart, and a feeling that perhaps life might be different for him if Peter Morrison decided to come to Lilac Valley to build his home. Then the sunlight faded, night closed in, but as he went his homeward way John Gilman was thinking, thinking deeply and not at all happily.

CHAPTER VIII

The Bear-cat

“Friday’s child is loving and giving,

But Saturday’s child must work for a living,”

Linda was chanting happily as she entered the kitchen early Saturday morning.

“Katy, me blessing,” she said gaily, “did I ever point out to you the interesting fact that I was born on Saturday? And a de’ilish piece of luck it was, for I have been hustling ever since. It’s bad enough to have been born on Monday and spoiled wash day, but I call Saturday the vanishing point, the end of the extreme limit.”

Katy laughed, and, as always, turned adoring eyes on Linda.

“I am not needing ye, lambie,” she said. “Is it big business in the canyon ye’re having to-day? Shall I be ready to be cooking up one of them God-forsaken Red Indian messes for ye when ye come back?”

Linda held up a warning finger.

“Hist, Katy,” she said. “That is a dark secret. Don’t you be forgetting yourself and saying anything like that before anyone, or I would be ruined entirely.”

“Well, I did think when ye began it,” said Katy, “that of all the wild foolishness ye and your pa had ever gone through with, that was the worst, but that last mess ye worked out was so tasty to the tongue that I thought of it a lot, and I’m kind o’ hankering for more.”

Linda caught Katy and swung her around the kitchen in a wild war dance. Her gayest laugh bubbled clear from the joy peak of her soul.

“Katy,” she said, “if you had lain awake all night trying to say something that would particularly please me, you couldn’t have done better. That was a quaint little phrase and a true little phrase, and I know a little spot that it will fit exactly. What am I doing the day? Well, several things, Katy. First, anything you need about the house. Next, I am going to empty the billiard room and sell some of the excess furniture of the library, and with the returns I am going to buy me a rug and a table and some tools to work with, so I won’t have to clutter up my bedroom with my lessons and things I bring in that I want to save. And then I am going to sell the technical stuff from the library and use that money where it will be of greatest advantage to me. And then, Katy, I am going to manicure the Bear-cat and I am going to drive it again.”

Linda hesitated. Katy stood very still, thinking intently, but finally she said: “That’s all right; ye have got good common sense; your nerves are steady; your pa drilled ye fine. Many’s the time he has bragged to me behind your back what a fine little driver he was making of ye. I don’t know a girl of your age anywhere that has less enjoyment than ye. If it would be giving ye any happiness to be driving that car, ye just go ahead and drive it, lambie, but ye promise me here and now that ye will be mortal careful. In all my days I don’t think I have seen a meaner looking little baste of a car.”

“Of course I’ll be careful, Katy,” said Linda. “That car was not bought for its beauty. Its primal object in this world was to arrive. Gee, how we shot curves, and coasted down the canyons, and gassed up on the level when some poor soul went batty from nerve strain! The truth is, Katy, that you can’t drive very slowly. You have got to go the speed for which it was built. But I have had my training. I won’t forget. I adore that car, Katy, and I don’t know how I have ever kept my fingers off it this long. To-day it gets a bath and a facial treatment, and when I have thought up some way to meet my big problem, you’re going to have a ride, Katy, that will quite uplift your soul. We’ll go scooting through the canyons, and whizzing around the mountains, and roaring along the beach, as slick as a white sea swallow.”

“Now, easy, lambie, easy,” said Katy. “Ye’re planning to speed that thing before ye’ve got it off the jacks.”

“No, that was mere talk,” said Linda. “But, Katy, this is my great day. I feel in my bones that I shall have enough money by night to get me some new tires, which I must have before I can start out in safety.”

“Of course ye must, honey. I would just be tickled to pieces to let ye have what ye need.”

Linda slid her hand across Katy’s lips and gathered her close in her arms.

“You blessed old darling,” she said. “Of course you would, but I don’t need it, Katy. I can sit on the floor to work, if I must, and instead of taking the money from the billiard table to buy a work table, I can buy tires with that. But here’s another thing I want to tell you, Katy. This afternoon a male biped is coming to this house, and he’s not coming to see Eileen. His name is Donald Whiting, and when he tells you it is, and stands very straight and takes off his hat, and looks you in the eye and says, ‘Calling on Miss Linda Strong,’ walk him into the living room, Katy, and seat him in the best chair and put a book beside him and the morning paper; and don’t you forget to do it with a flourish. He is nothing but a high-school kid, but he’s the first boy that ever in all my days asked to come to see me so it’s a big event; and I wish to my soul I had something decent to wear.”

“Well, with all the clothes in this house,” said Katy; and then she stopped and shut her lips tight and looked at Linda with belligerent Irish eyes.

“I know it,” nodded Linda in acquiescence; “I know what you think; but never mind. Eileen has agreed to make me a fair allowance the first of the month, and if that isn’t sufficient, I may possibly figure up some way to do some extra work that will bring me a few honest pennies, so I can fuss up enough to look feminine at times, Katy. In the meantime, farewell, oh, my belovedest. Call me at half-past eight, so I will be ready for business at nine.”

Then Linda went to the garage and began operations. She turned the hose on the car and washed the dust from it carefully. Then she dried it with the chamois skins as she often had done before. She carefully examined the cushioning, and finding it dry and hard, she gave it a bath of olive oil and wiped and manipulated it. She cleaned the engine with extreme care. At one minute she was running to Katy for kerosene to pour through the engine to loosen the carbon. At another she was telephoning for the delivery of oil, gasoline, and batteries for which she had no money to pay, so she charged them to Eileen, ordering the bill to be sent on the first of the month. It seemed to her that she had only a good start when Katy came after her.

The business of appraising the furniture was short, and Linda was well satisfied with the price she was offered for it. After the man had gone she showed Katy the pieces she had marked to dispose of, and told her when they would be called for. She ate a few bites of lunch while waiting for the book man, and the results of her business with him quite delighted Linda. She had not known that the value of books had risen with the price of everything else. The man with whom she dealt had known her father. He had appreciated the strain in her nature which made her suggest that he should number and appraise the books, but she must be allowed time to go through each volume in order to remove any scraps of paper or memoranda which her father so frequently left in books to which he was referring. He had figured carefully and he had made Linda a far higher price than could have been secured by a man. As the girl went back to her absorbing task in the garage, she could see her way clear to the comforts and conveniences and the material that she needed for her work. When she reached the car she patted it as if it had been a living creature.

“Cheer up, nice old thing,” she said gaily. “I know how to get new tires for you, and you shall drink all the gasoline and oil your tummy can hold. Now let me see. What must I do next? I must get you off your jacks; and oh, my gracious! there are the grease cups, and that’s a nasty job, but it must be done; and what is the use of Saturday if I can’t do it? Daddy often did.”

Linda began work in utter absorption. She succeeded in getting the car off the jacks. She was lying on her back under it, filling some of the most inaccessible grease cups, and she was softly singing as she worked:

“The shoes I wear are common-sense shoes——”

At that minute Donald Whiting swung down the street, turned in at the Strong residence, and rang the bell. Eileen was coming down the stairs, dressed for the street. She had inquired for Linda, and Katy had told her that she thought Miss Linda had decided to begin using her car, and that she was in the garage working on it. To Eileen’s credit it may be said that she had not been told that a caller was expected. Linda never before had had a caller and, as always, Eileen was absorbed in her own concerns. Had she got the rouge a trifle brighter on one cheek than on the other? Was the powder evenly distributed? Would the veil hold the handmade curls in exactly the proper place? When the bell rang her one thought might have been that some of her friends were calling for her. She opened the door, and when she learned that Linda was being asked for, it is possible that she mistook the clean, interesting, and well-dressed youngster standing before her for a mechanician. What she said was: “Linda’s working on her car. Go around to the left and you will find her in the garage, and for heaven’s sake, get it right before you let her start out, for we’ve had enough horror in this family from motor accidents.”

Then she closed the door before him and stood buttoning her gloves; a wicked and malicious smile spreading over her face.

“Just possibly,” she said, “that youngster is from a garage, but if he is, he’s the best imitation of the real thing that I have seen in these chaotic days.”

Donald Whiting stopped at the garage door and looked in, before Linda had finished her grease cups, and in time to be informed that he might wear common-sense shoes if he chose. At his step, Linda rolled her black head on the cement floor and raised her eyes. She dropped the grease cup, and her face reddened deeply.

“Oh, my Lord!” she gasped breathlessly. “I forgot to tell Katy when to call me!”

In that instant she also forgot that the stress of the previous four years had accustomed men to seeing women do any kind of work in any kind of costume; but soon Linda realized that Donald Whiting was not paying any particular attention either to her or to her occupation. He was leaning forward, gazing at the car with positively an enraptured expression on his eager young face.

“Shades of Jehu!” he cried. “It’s a Bear-cat!”

Linda felt around her head for the grease cup.

“Why, sure it’s a Bear-cat,” she said with the calmness of complete recovery. “And it’s just about ready to start for its very own cave in the canyon.”

Donald Whiting pitched his hat upon the seat, shook off his coat, and sent it flying after the hat. Then he began unbuttoning and turning back his sleeves.

“Here, let me do that,” he said authoritatively. “Gee! I have never yet ridden in a Bear-cat. Take me with you, will you, Linda?”

“Sure,” said Linda, pressing the grease into the cup with a little paddle and holding it up to see if she had it well filled. “Sure, but there’s no use in you getting into this mess, because I have only got two more. You look over the engine. Did you ever grind valves, and do you think these need it?”

“Why, they don’t need it,” said Donald, “if they were all right when it was jacked up.”

“Well, they were,” said Linda. “It was running like a watch when it went to sleep. But do we dare take it out on these tires?”

“How long has it been?” asked Donald, busy at the engine.

“All of four years,” answered Linda.

Donald whistled softly and started a circuit of the car, kicking the tires and feeling them.

“Have you filled them?” he asked.

“No,” said Linda. “I did not want to start the engine until I had finished everything else.”

“All right,” he said, “I’ll look at the valves first and then, if it is all ready, there ought to be a garage near that we can run to carefully, and get tuned up.”

“There is,” said Linda. “There is one only a few blocks down the street where Dad always had anything done that he did not want to do himself.”

“That’s that, then,” said Donald.

Linda crawled from under the car and stood up, wiping her hands on a bit of waste.

“Do you know what tires cost now?” she asked anxiously.

“They have ’em at the garage,” answered Donald, “and if I were you, I wouldn’t get a set; I would get two. I would put them on the rear wheels. You might be surprised at how long some of these will last. Anyway, that would be the thing to do.”

“Of course,” said Linda, in a relieved tone. “That would be the thing to do.”

“Now,” she said, “I must be excused a few minutes till I clean up so I am fit to go on the streets. I hope you won’t think I forgot you were coming.”

Donald laughed drily.

“When ‘shoes’ was the first word I heard,” he said, “I did not for a minute think you had forgotten.”

“No, I didn’t forget,” said Linda. “What I did do was to become so excited about cleaning up the car that I let time go faster than I thought it could. That was what made me late.”

“Well, forget it!” said Donald. “Run along and jump into something, and let us get our tires and try Kitty out.”

Linda reached up and released the brakes. She stepped to one side of the car and laid her hands on it.

“Let us run it down opposite the kitchen door,” she said, “then you go around to the front, and I’ll let you in, and you can read something a few minutes till I make myself presentable.”

“Oh, I’ll stay out here and look around the yard and go over the car again,” said the boy. “What a bunch of stuff you have got growing here; I don’t believe I ever saw half of it before.”

“It’s Daddy’s and my collection,” said Linda. “Some day I’ll show you some of the things, and tell you how we got them, and why they are rare. To-day I just naturally can’t wait a minute until I try my car.”

“Is it really yours?” asked Donald enviously.

“Yes,” said Linda. “It’s about the only thing on earth that is peculiarly and particularly mine. I haven’t a doubt there are improved models, but Daddy had driven this car only about nine months. It was going smooth as velvet, and there’s no reason why it should not keep it up, though I suspect that by this time there are later models that could outrun it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the boy. “It looks like some little old car to me. I bet it can just skate.”

“I know it can,” said Linda, “if I haven’t neglected something. We’ll start carefully, and we’ll have the inspector at the salesrooms look it over.”

Then Linda entered the kitchen door to find Katy with everything edible that the house afforded spread before her on the table.

“Why, Katy, what are you doing?” she asked.

“I was makin’ ready,” explained Katy, “to fix ye the same kind of lunch I would for Miss Eileen. Will ye have it under the live oak, or in the living room?”

“Neither,” said Linda. “Come upstairs with me, and in the storeroom you’ll find the lunch case and the thermos bottles; and don’t stint yourself, Katy. This is a rare occasion. It never happened before. Probably it will never happen again. Let’s make it high altitude while we are at it.”

“I’ll do my very best with what I happen to have,” said Katy; “but I warn you right now I am making a good big hole in the Sunday dinner.”

“I don’t give two whoops,” said Linda, “if there isn’t any Sunday dinner. In memory of hundreds of times that we have eaten bread and milk, make it a banquet, Katy, and we’ll eat bread and milk to-morrow.”

Then she took the stairway at a bound, and ran to her room. In a very short time she emerged, clad in a clean blouse and breeches’ her climbing boots, her black hair freshly brushed and braided.

“I ought to have something,” said Linda, “to shade my eyes. The glare’s hard on them facing the sun.”

Going down the hall she came to the storeroom, opened a drawer, and picked out a fine black felt Alpine hat that had belonged to her father. She carried it back to her room and, standing at the glass, tried it on, pulling it down on one side, turning it up at the other, and striking a deep cleft across the crown. She looked at herself intently for a minute, and then she reached up and deliberately loosened the hair at her temples.

“Not half bad, all things considered, Linda,” she said. “But, oh, how you do need a tich of colour.”

She ran down the hall and opened the door to Eileen’s room, and going to her chiffonier, pulled out a drawer containing an array of gloves, veils, and ribbons. At the bottom of the ribbon stack, her eye caught the gleam of colour for which she was searching, and she deftly slipped out a narrow scarf of Roman stripes with a deep black fringe at the end. Sitting down, she fitted the hat over her knee, picked up the dressing-table scissors, and ripped off the band. In its place she fitted the ribbon, pinning it securely and knotting the ends so that the fringe reached her shoulder. Then she tried the hat again. The result was blissfully satisfactory. The flash of orange, the blaze of red, the gleam of green, were what she needed.

“Thank you very much, sister mine,” she said, “I know you would be perfectly delighted to loan me this.”

\

CHAPTER IX

One Hundred Per Cent Plus

Then she went downstairs and walked into the kitchen, prepared for what she would see, by what she heard as she approached.

With Katy’s apron tied around his waist, Donald Whiting was occupied in squeezing orange, lemon, and pineapple juice over a cake of ice in a big bowl, preparatory to the compounding of Katy’s most delicious brand of fruit punch. Without a word, Linda stepped to the bread board and began slicing the bread and building sandwiches, while Katy hurried her preparations for filling the lunch box. A few minutes later Katy packed them in the car, kissed Linda good-bye, and repeatedly cautioned Donald to make her be careful.

As the car rolled down the driveway and into the street, Donald looked appraisingly at the girl beside him.

“Is it the prevailing custom in Lilac Valley for young ladies to kiss the cook?” inquired Donald laughingly.

“Now, you just hush,” said Linda. “Katy is not the cook, alone. Katy’s my father, and my mother, and my family, and my best friend——”

“Stop right there,” interposed Donald. “That is quite enough for any human to be. Katy’s a multitude. She came out to the car with the canteen, and when I offered to help her, without any ‘polly foxin’,’ she just said: ‘Sure. Come in and make yourself useful.’ So I went, and I am expecting amazing results from the job she gave me.”

“Come to think of it,” said Linda, “I have small experience with anybody’s cooking except Katy’s and my own, but so far as I know, she can’t very well be beaten.”

Carefully she headed the car into the garage adjoining the salesrooms. There she had an ovation. The manager and several of the men remembered her. The whole force clustered around the Bear-cat and began to examine it, and comment on it, and Linda climbed out and asked to have the carburetor adjusted, while the mechanician put on a pair of tires. When everything was satisfactory, she backed to the street, and after a few blocks of experimental driving, she headed for the Automobile Club to arrange for her license and then turned straight toward Multiflores Canyon, but she did not fail to call Donald Whiting’s attention to every beauty of Lilac Valley as they passed through. When they had reached a long level stretch of roadway leading to the canyon, Linda glanced obliquely at the boy beside her.

“It all comes back as natural as breathing,” she said. “I couldn’t forget it any more than I could forget how to walk, or to swim. Sit tight. I am going to step on the gas for a bit, just for old sake’s sake.”

“That’s all right,” said Donald, taking off his hat and giving his head a toss so that the wind might have full play through his hair. “But remember our tires are not safe. Better not go the limit until we get rid of these old ones, and have a new set all around.”

Linda settled back in her seat, took a firm grip on the wheel, and started down the broad, smooth highway, gradually increasing the speed. The colour rushed to her cheeks. Her eyes were gleaming.

“Listen to it purr!” she cried to Donald. “If you hear it begin to growl, tell me.”

And then for a few minutes they rode like birds on the path of the wind. When they approached the entrance to the canyon, gradually Linda slowed down. She turned an exultant flashing face to Donald Whiting.

“That was a whizzer,” said the boy. “I’ll tell you I don’t know what I’d give to have a car like this for my very own. I’ll bet not another girl in Los Angeles has a car that can go like that.”

“And I don’t believe I have any business with it,” said Linda; “but since circumstances make it mine, I am going to keep it and I am going to drive it.”

“Of course you are,” said Donald emphatically. “Don’t you ever let anybody fool you out of this car, because if they wanted to, it would be just because they are jealous to think they haven’t one that will go as fast.”

“There’s not the slightest possibility of my giving it up so long as I can make the engine turn over,” she said. “I told you how Father always took me around with him, and there’s nothing in this world I am so sure of as I am sure that I am spoiled for a house cat. I have probably less feminine sophistication than any girl of my age in the world, and I probably know more about camping and fishing and the scientific why and wherefore of all outdoors than most of them. I just naturally had such a heavenly time with Daddy that it never has hurt my feelings to be left out of any dance or party that ever was given. The one thing that has hurt is the isolation. Since I lost Daddy I haven’t any one but Katy. Sometimes, when I see a couple of nice, interesting girls visiting with their heads together, a great feeling of envy wells up in my soul, and I wish with all my heart that I had such a friend.”

“Ever try to make one?” asked Donald. “There are mighty fine girls in the High School.”

“I have seen several that I thought I would like to be friends with,” said Linda, “but I am so lacking in feminine graces that I haven’t known how to make advances, in the first place, and I haven’t had the courage, in the second.”

“I wish my sister were not so much older than you,” said Donald.

“How old is your sister?” inquired Linda.

“She will be twenty-three next birthday,” said Donald; “and of all the nice girls you ever saw, she is the queen.”

“Yes,” she assented, “I am sure I have heard your sister mentioned. But didn’t you tell me she had been reared for society?”

“No, I did not,” said Donald emphatically. “I told you Mother believed in dressing her as the majority of other girls were dressed, but I didn’t say she had been reared for society. She has been reared with an eye single to making a well-dressed, cultured, and gracious woman.”

“I call that fine,” said Linda. “Makes me envious of you. Now forget everything except your eyes and tell me what you see. Have you ever been here before?”

“I have been through a few times before, but seems to me I never saw it looking quite so pretty.”

Linda drove carefully, but presently Donald uttered an exclamation as she swerved from the road and started down what appeared to be quite a steep embankment and headed straight for the stream.

“Sit tight,” she said tersely. “The Bear-cat just loves its cave. It knows where it is going.”

She broke through a group of young willows and ran the car into a tiny plateau, walled in a circle by the sheer sides of the canyon reaching upward almost out of sight, topped with great jagged overhanging boulders. Crowded to one side, she stopped the car and sat quietly, smiling at Donald Whiting.

“How about it?” she asked in a low voice.

The boy looked around him, carefully examining the canyon walls, and then at the level, odorous floor where one could not step without crushing tiny flowers of white, cerise, blue, and yellow. Big ferns grew along the walls, here and there “Our Lord’s Candles” lifted high torches not yet lighted, the ambitious mountain stream skipped and circled and fell over its rocky bed, while many canyon wrens were singing.

“Do you think,” she said, “that anyone driving along here at an ordinary rate of speed would see that car?”

“No,” said Donald, getting her idea, “I don’t believe they would.”

“All right, then,” said Linda. “Toe up even and I’ll race YoU to the third curve where you see the big white sycamore.”

Donald had a fleeting impression of a flash of khaki, a gleam of red, and a wave of black as they started. He ran with all the speed he had ever attained at a track meet. He ran with all his might. He ran until his sides strained and his breath came short; but the creature beside him was not running; she was flying; and long before they neared the sycamore he knew he was beaten, so he laughingly cried to her to stop it. Linda turned to him panting and laughing.

“I make that dash every time I come to the canyon, to keep my muscle up, but this is the first time I have had anyone to race with in a long time.”

Then together they slowly walked down the smooth black floor between the canyon walls. As they crossed a small bridge Linda leaned over and looked down.

“Anyone at your house care about ‘nose twister’?” she asked lightly.

“Why, isn’t that watercress?” asked Donald.

“Sure it is,” said Linda. “Anyone at your house like it?”

“Every one of us,” answered Donald. “We’re all batty about cress salad—and, say, that reminds me of something! If you know so much about this canyon and everything in it, is there any place in it where a fellow could find a plant, a kind of salad lettuce, that the Indians used to use?”

“Might be,” said Linda carelessly. “For why?”

“Haven’t you heard of the big sensation that is being made in feminine circles by the new department in Everybody’s Home?” inquired Donald. “Mother and Mary Louise were discussing it the other day at lunch, and they said that some of the recipes for dishes to be made from stuff the Indians used sounded delicious. One reminded them of cress, and when we saw the cress I wondered if I could get them some of the other.”

“Might,” said Linda drily, “if you could give me a pretty good idea of what it is that you want.”

“When you know cress, it’s queer that you wouldn’t know other things in your own particular canyon,” said Donald.

Linda realized that she had overdone her disinterestedness a trifle.

“I suspect it’s miners’ lettuce you want,” she said. “Of course I know where there’s some, but you will want it as fresh as possible if you take any, so we’ll finish our day first and gather it the last thing before we leave.”

How it started neither of them noticed, but they had not gone far before they were climbing the walls and hanging to precarious footings. Her cheeks flushed, her eyes brilliant, her lips laughing, Linda was showing Donald thrifty specimens of that Cotyledon known as “old hen and chickens,” telling him of the rare Echeveria of the same family, and her plunge down the canyon side while trying to uproot it, exulting that she had brought down the plant without a rift in the exquisite bloom on its leaves.

Linda told about her fall, and the two men who had passed at that instant, and how she had met them later, and who they were, and what they were doing. Then Donald climbed high for a bunch of larkspur, and Linda showed him how to turn his back to the canyon wall and come down with the least possible damage to his person and clothing. When at last both of them were tired they went back to the car. Linda spread an old Indian blanket over the least flower-grown spot she could select, brought out the thermos bottles and lunch case, and served their lunch. With a glass of fruit punch in one hand and a lettuce sandwich in the other, Donald smiled at Linda.

“I’ll agree about Katy. She knows how,” he said appreciatively.

“Katy is more than a cook,” said Linda quietly. “She is a human being. She has the biggest, kindest heart. When anybody’s sick or in trouble she’s the greatest help. She is honest; she has principles; she is intelligent. In her spare time she reads good books and magazines. She knows what is going on in the world. She can talk intelligently on almost any subject. It’s no disgrace to be a cook. If it were, Katy would be unspeakable. Fact is, at the present minute there’s no one in all the world so dear to me as Katy. I always talk Irish with her.”

“Well, I call that rough on your sister,” said Donald.

“Maybe it is,” conceded Linda. “I suspect a lady wouldn’t have said that, but Eileen and I are so different. She never has made the slightest effort to prove herself lovable to me, and so I have never learned to love her. Which reminds me—how did you happen to come to the garage?”

“The very beautiful young lady who opened the door mistook me for a mechanician. She told me I would find you working on your car and for goodness’ sake to see that it was in proper condition before you drove it.”

Linda looked at him with wide, surprised eyes in which a trace of indignation was plainly discernible.

“Now listen to me,” she said deliberately. “Eileen is a most sophisticated young lady. If she saw you, she never in this world, thought you were a mechanic sent from a garage presenting yourself at our front door.”

“There might have been a spark of malice in the big blue-gray I eyes that carefully appraised me,” said Donald.

“Your choice of words is good,” said Linda, refilling the punch glass. “‘Appraise’ fits Eileen like her glove. She appraises every thing on a monetary basis, and when she can’t figure that it’s going to be worth an appreciable number of dollars and cents to her—‘to the garage wid it,’ as Katy would say.”

When they had finished their lunch Linda began packing the box and Donald sat watching her.

“At this point,” said Linda, “Daddy always smoked. Do you smoke?”

There was a hint of deeper colour in the boy’s cheeks.

“I did smoke an occasional cigarette,” he said lightly, “up to the day, not a thousand years ago, when a very emphatic young lady who should have known, insinuated that it was bad for the nerves, and going on the presumption that she knew, I haven’t smoked a cigarette since and I’m not going to until I find out whether I can do better work without them.”

Linda folded napkins and packed away accessories thoughtfully. Then she looked into the boy’s eyes.

“Now we reach the point of our being here together,” she said. “It’s time to fight, and I am sorry we didn’t go at it gas and bomb the minute we met. You’re so different from what I thought you were. If anyone had told me a week ago that you would take off your coat and mess with my automobile engine, or wear Katy’s apron and squeeze lemons in our kitchen I would have looked him over for Daddy’s high sign of hysteria, at least. It’s too bad to I have such a good time as I have had this afternoon, and then end with a fight.”

“That’s nothing,” said Donald. “You couldn’t have had as good a time as I have had. You’re like another boy. A fellow can be just a fellow with you, and somehow you make everything you touch mean something it never meant before. You have made me feel that I would be about twice the man I am if I had spent the time I have wasted in plain jazzing around, hunting Cotyledon or trap-door spiders’ nests.”

“I get you,” said Linda. “It’s the difference between a girl reared in an atmosphere of georgette and rouge, and one who has grown up in the canyons with the oaks and sycamores. One is natural and the other is artificial. Most boys prefer the artificial.”

“I thought I did myself,” said Donald, “but to-day has taught me that I don’t. I think, Linda, that you would make the finest friend a fellow ever had. I firmly and finally decline to fight with you; but for God’s sake, Linda, tell me how I can beat that little cocoanut-headed Jap.”

Linda slammed down the lid to the lunch box. Her voice was smooth and even but there was battle in her eyes and she answered decisively: “Well, you can’t beat him calling him names. There is only one way on God’s footstool that you can beat him. You can’t beat him legislating against him. You can’t beat him boycotting him. You can’t beat him with any tricks. He is as sly as a cat and he has got a whole bag full of tricks of his own, and he has proved right here in Los Angeles that he has got a brain that is hard to beat. All you can do, and be a man commendable to your own soul, is to take his subject and put your brain on it to such purpose that you cut pigeon wings around him. What are you studying in your classes, anyway?”

“Trigonometry, Rhetoric, Ancient History, Astronomy,” answered Donald.

“And is your course the same as his?” inquired Linda.

“Strangely enough it is,” answered Donald. “We have been in the same classes all through high school. I think the little monkey——”

“Man, you mean,” interposed Linda.

“‘Man,’” conceded Donald. “Has waited until I selected my course all the way through, and then he has announced what he would take. He probably figured that I had somebody with brains back of the course I selected, and that whatever I studied would be suitable for him.”

“I haven’t a doubt of it,” said Linda. “They are quick; oh! they are quick; and they know from their cradles what it is that they have in the backs of their heads. We are not going to beat them driving them to Mexico or to Canada, or letting them monopolize China. That is merely temporizing. That is giving them fertile soil on which to take the best of their own and the level best of ours, and by amalgamating the two, build higher than we ever have. There is just one way in all this world that we can beat Eastern civilization and all that it intends to do to us eventually. The white man has dominated by his colour so far in the history of the world, but it is written in the Books that when the men of colour acquire our culture and combine it with their own methods of living and rate of production, they are going to bring forth greater numbers, better equipped for the battle of life, than we are. When they have got our last secret, constructive or scientific, they will take it, and living in a way that we would not, reproducing in numbers we don’t, they will beat us at any game we start, if we don’t take warning while we are in the ascendancy, and keep there.”

“Well, there is something to think about,” said Donald Whiting, staring past Linda at the side of the canyon as if he had seen the same handwriting on the wall that dismayed Belshazzar at the feast that preceded his downfall.

“I see what you’re getting at,” he said. “I had thought that there might be some way to circumvent him.”

“There is!” broke in Linda hastily. “There is. You can beat him, but you have got to beat him in an honourable way and in a way that is open to him as it is to you.”

“I’ll do anything in the world if you will only tell me how,” said Donald. “Maybe you think it isn’t grinding me and humiliating me properly. Maybe you think Father and Mother haven’t warned me. Maybe you think Mary Louise isn’t secretly ashamed of me. How can I beat him, Linda?”

Linda’s eyes were narrowed to a mere line. She was staring at the wall back of Donald as if she hoped that Heaven would intercede in her favour and write thereon a line that she might translate to the boy’s benefit.

“I have been watching pretty sharply,” she said. “Take them as a race, as a unit—of course there are exceptions, there always are—but the great body of them are mechanical. They are imitative. They are not developing anything great of their own in their own country. They are spreading all over the world and carrying home sewing machines and threshing machines and automobiles and cantilever bridges and submarines and aeroplanes—anything from eggbeaters to telescopes. They are not creating one single thing. They are not missing imitating everything that the white man can do anywhere else on earth. They are just like the Germans so far as that is concerned.”

“I get that, all right enough,” said Donald. “Now go on. What is your deduction? How the devil am I to beat the best? He is perfect, right straight along in everything.”

The red in Linda’s cheeks deepened. Her eyes opened their widest. She leaned forward, and with her closed fist, pounded the blanket before him.

“Then, by gracious,” she said sternly, “you have got to do something new. You have got to be perfect, plus.”

“‘Perfect, plus?’” gasped Donald.

“Yes, sir!” said Linda emphatically. “You have got to be perfect, plus. If he can take his little mechanical brain and work a thing out till he has got it absolutely right, you have got to go further than that and discover something pertaining to it not hitherto thought of and start something new. I tell you you must use your brains. You should be more than an imitator. You must be a creator!”

Donald started up and drew a deep breath.

“Well, some job I call that,” he said. “Who do you think I am, the Almighty?”

“No,” said Linda quietly, “you are not. You are merely His son, created in His own image, like Him, according to the Book, and you have got to your advantage the benefit of all that has been learned down the ages. We have got to take up each subject in your course, and to find some different books treating this same subject. We have got to get at it from a new angle. We must dig into higher authorities. We have got to coach you till, when you reach the highest note possible for the parrot, you can go ahead and embellish it with a few mocking-bird flourishes. All Oka Sayye knows how to do is to learn the lesson in his book perfectly, and he is 100 per cent. I have told you what you must do to add the plus, and you can do it if you are the boy I take you for. People have talked about the ‘yellow peril’ till it’s got to be a meaningless phrase. Somebody must wake up to the realization that it’s the deadliest peril that ever has menaced white civilization. Why shouldn’t you have your hand in such wonderful work?”

“Linda,” said the boy breathlessly, “do you realize that you have been saying ‘we’? Can you help me? Will you help me?”

“No,” said Linda, “I didn’t realize that I had said ‘we.’ I didn’t mean two people, just you and me. I meant all the white boys and girls of the High School and the city and the state and the whole world. If we are going to combat the ‘yellow peril’ we must combine against it. We have got to curb our appetites and train our brains and enlarge our hearts till we are something bigger and finer and numerically greater than this yellow peril. We can’t take it and pick it up and push it into the sea. We are not Germans and we are not Turks. I never wanted anything in all this world worse than I want to see you graduate ahead of Oka Sayye. And then I want to see the white boys and girls of Canada and of England and of Norway and Sweden and Australia, and of the whole world doing exactly what I am recommending that you do in your class and what I am doing personally in my own. I have had Japs in my classes ever since I have been in school, but Father always told me to study them, to play the game fairly, but to beat them in some way, in some fair way, to beat them at the game they are undertaking.”

“Well, there is one thing you don’t take into consideration,” said Donald. “All of us did not happen to be fathered by Alexander Strong. Maybe we haven’t all got your brains.”

“Oh, pother!” said Linda. “I know of a case where a little Indian was picked up from a tribal battlefield in South America and brought to this country and put into our schools, and there was nothing that any white pupil in the school could do that he couldn’t, so long as it was imitative work. You have got to be constructive. You have got to work out some way to get ahead of them; and if you will take the history of the white races and go over their great achievements in mechanics, science, art, literature—anything you choose—when a white man is constructive, when he does create, he can simply cut circles around the coloured races. The thing is to get the boys and girls of to-day to understand what is going on in the world, what they must do as their share in making the world safe for their grandchildren. Life is a struggle. It always has been. It always will be. There is no better study than to go into the canyons or the deserts and efface yourself and watch life. It’s an all-day process of the stronger annihilating the weaker. The one inexorable thing in the world is Nature. The eagle dominates the hawk; the hawk, the falcon; the falcon, the raven; and so on down to the place where the humming bird drives the moth from his particular trumpet flower. The big snake swallows the little one. The big bear appropriates the desirable cave.”

“And is that what you are recommending people to do?”

“No,” said Linda, “it is not. That is wild. We go a step ahead of the wild, or we ourselves become wild. We have brains, and with our brains we must do in a scientific way what Nature does with tooth and claw. In other words, and to be concrete, put these things in the car while I fold the blanket. We’ll gather our miners’ lettuce and then we’ll go home and search Daddy’s library and see if there is anything bearing in a higher way on any subject you are taking, so that you can get from it some new ideas, some different angle, some higher light, something that will end in speedily prefacing Oka Sayye’s perfect with your pluperfect!”

CHAPTER X

Katy to the Rescue

Linda delivered Donald Whiting at his door with an armload of books and a bundle of miners’ lettuce and then drove to her home in Lilac Valley—in the eye of the beholder on the floor-level macadam road; in her own eye she scarcely grazed it. The smooth, easy motion of the car, the softly purring engine were thrilling. The speed at which she was going was like having wings on her body. The mental stimulus she had experienced in concentrating her brain on Donald Whiting’s problem had stimulated her imagination. The radiant colour of spring; the chilled, perfumed, golden air; the sure sense of having found a friend, had ruffled the plumes of her spirit. On the home road Donald had plainly indicated that he would enjoy spending the morrow with her, and she had advised him to take the books she had provided and lock himself in his room and sweat out some information about Monday’s lessons which would at least arrest his professor’s attention, and lead his mind to the fact that something was beginning to happen. And then she had laughingly added: “To-morrow is Katy’s turn. I told the old dear I would take her as soon as I felt the car was safe. Every day she does many things that she hopes will give me pleasure. This is one thing I can do that I know will delight her.”

“Next Saturday, then?” questioned Donald. And Linda nodded.

“Sure thing. I’ll be thinking up some place extra interesting. Come in the morning if you want, and we’ll take a lunch and go for the day. Which do you like best, mountains or canyons or desert or sea?”

“I like it best wherever what you’re interested in takes you,” said Donald simply.

“All right, then,” answered Linda, “we’ll combine business and pleasure.”

So they parted with another meeting arranged.

When she reached home she found Katy tearfully rejoicing, plainly revealing how intensely anxious she had been. But when Linda told her that the old tires had held, that the car ran wonderfully, that everything was perfectly safe, that she drove as unconsciously as she breathed, and that to-morrow Katy was to go for a long ride, her joy was incoherent.

Linda laughed. She patted Katy and started down the hallway, when she called back: “What is this package?”

“A delivery boy left it special only a few minutes ago. Must be something Miss Eileen bought and thought she would want to-morrow, and then afterward she got this invitation and went on as she was.”

Linda stood gazing at the box. It did look so suspiciously like a dress box.

“Katy,” she said, “I have just about got an irresistible impulse to peep. I was telling Eileen last night of a dress I saw that I thought perfect. It suited me better than any other dress I ever did see. It was at ‘The Mode.’ This box is from ‘The Mode.’ Could there be a possibility that she sent it up specially for me?”

“I think she would put your name on it if she meant it for ye,” said Katy.

“One peep would show me whether it is my dress or not,” said Linda, “and peep I’m going to.”

She began untying the string.

“There’s one thing,” said Katy, “Miss Eileen’s sizes would never fit ye.”

“Might,” conceded Linda. “I am taller than she is, but I could wear her waists if I wanted to, and she always alters her skirts herself to save the fees. Glory be! This is my dress, and there’s a petticoat and stockings to match it. Why, the nice old thing! I suggested hard enough, but in my heart I hardly thought she would do it. Oh, dear, now if I only had some shoes, and a hat.”

Linda was standing holding the jacket in one hand, the stockings in the other, her face flaming. Katy drew herself to full height. She reached over and picked the things from Linda’s fingers.

“If ye know that is your dress, lambie,” she said authoritatively, “ye go right out and get into that car and run to town and buy ye a pair of shoes.”

“But I have no credit anywhere and I have no money, yet,” said Linda.

“Well, I have,” said Katy, “and this time ye’re going to stop your stubbornness and take enough to get ye what you need. Ye go to the best store in Los Angeles and come back here with a pair of shoes that just match those stockings, and ye go fast, before the stores close. If ye’ve got to speed a little, do it in the country and do it judacious.”

“Katy, you’re arriving!” cried Linda. “‘Judicious speeding’ is one thing I learned better than any other lesson about driving a motor car. Three fourths of the driving Father and I did we were speeding judiciously.”

Katy held the skirt to Linda’s waist.

“Well, maybe it’s a little shorter than any you have been wearing, but it ain’t as short as Eileen and all the rest of the girls your age have them, so that’s all right, honey. Slip on your coat.”

Katy’s fingers were shaking as she lifted the jacket and Linda slipped into it.

“Oh, Lord,” she groaned, “ye can’t be wearing that! The sleeves don’t come much below your elbows.”

“You will please to observe,” said Linda, “that they are flowing sleeves and they are not intended to come below the elbows; but it’s a piece of luck I tried it on, for it reminds me that it’s a jacket suit and I must have a blouse. When you get the shoe money, make it enough for a blouse—two blouses, Katy, one for school and one to fuss up in a little.”

Without stopping to change her clothing, Linda ran to the garage and hurried back to the city. It was less than an hour’s run, but she made it in ample time to park her car and buy the shoes. She selected a pair of low oxfords of beautiful colour, matching the stockings. Then she hurried to one of the big dry-goods stores and bought the two waists and an inexpensive straw hat that would harmonize with the suit; a hat small enough to stick, in the wind, with brim enough to shade her eyes. In about two hours she was back with Katy and they were in her room trying on the new clothing.

“It dumbfounds me,” said Linda, “to have Eileen do this for me.”

She had put on the shoes and stockings, a plain georgette blouse of a soft, brownish wood-gray, with a bit of heavy brown silk embroidery decorating the front, and the jacket. The dress was of silky changeable tricolette, the skirt plain. Where a fold lifted and was strongly lighted, it was an exquisite silver-gray; where a shadow fell deeply it was gray-brown. The coat reached half way to the knees. It had a rippling skirt with a row of brown embroidery around it, a deep belt with double buttoning at the waistline, and collar and sleeves in a more elaborate pattern of the same embroidery as the skirt. Linda perched the hat on her head, pulled it down securely, and faced Katy.

“Now then!” she challenged.

“And it’s a perfect dress!” said Katy proudly, “and you’re just the colleen to wear it. My, but I wisht your father could be seeing ye the now.”

With almost reverent hands Linda removed the clothing and laid it away. Then she read a letter from Marian that was waiting for her, telling Katy scraps of it in running comment as she scanned the sheets.

“She likes her boarding place. There are nice people in it. She has got a wonderful view from the windows of her room. She is making friends. She thinks one of the men at Nicholson and Snow’s is just fine; he is helping her all he can, on the course she is taking. And she wants us to look carefully everywhere for any scrap of paper along the hedge or around the shrubbery on the north side of the house. One of her three sheets of plans is missing. I don’t see where in the world it could have gone, Katy.”

Katy spread out her hands in despair.

“There was not a scrap of a sheet of paper in the room when I cleaned it,” she said, “not a scrap. And if I had seen a sheet flying around the yard I would have picked it up. She just must be mistaken about having lost it here. She must have opened her case on the train and lost it there.”

Linda shook her head.

“I put that stuff in the case myself,” she said, “and the clothes on top of it, and she wouldn’t have any reason for taking those things out on the train. I can’t understand, but she did have three rough sketches. She had her heart set on winning that prize and it would be a great help to her, and certainly it was the most comprehensive and convenient plan for a house of that class that I ever have seen. If I ever have a house, she is going to plan it, even if she doesn’t get to plan John Gilman’s as he always used to say that she should. And by the way, Katy, isn’t it kind of funny for Eileen to go away over Sunday when it’s his only holiday?”

“Oh, she’ll telephone him,” said Katy, “and very like, he’ll go down, or maybe he is with her. Ye needn’t waste any sympathy on him. Eileen will take care that she has him so long as she thinks she wants him.”

Later it developed that Eileen had secured the invitation because she was able to produce three most eligible men. Not only was John Gilman with the party, but Peter Morrison and Henry Anderson were there as well. It was in the nature of a hastily arranged celebration, because the deal for three acres of land that Peter Morrison most coveted on the small plateau, mountain walled, in Lilac Valley, was in escrow. He had made a payment on it. Anderson was working on his plans. Contractors had been engaged, and on Monday work would begin. The house was to be built as soon as possible, and Peter Morrison had arranged that the garage was to be built first. This he meant to occupy as a residence so that he could be on hand to superintend the construction of the new home and to protect, as far as possible, the natural beauty and the natural growth of the location.

Early Sunday morning Linda and Katy, with a full lunch box and a full gasolene tank, slid from the driveway and rolled down the main street of Lilac Valley toward the desert.

“We’ll switch over and strike San Fernando Road,” said Linda, “and I’ll scout around Sunland a bit and see if I can find anything that will furnish material for another new dish.”

That day was wonderful for Katy. She trotted after Linda over sandy desert reaches, along the seashore, up mountain trails, and through canyons connected by long stretches of motoring that was more like flying than riding. She was tired but happy when she went to bed. Monday morning she was an interested spectator as Linda dressed for school.

“Sure, and hasn’t the old chrysalis opened up and let out the nicest little lady-bird moth, Katy?” inquired Linda as she smoothed her gray-gold skirts. “I think myself that this dress is a trifle too good for school. When I get my allowance next week I think I’ll buy me a cloth skirt and a couple of wash waists and save this for better; but it really was good of Eileen to take so much pains and send it to me, when she was busy planning a trip.”

Katy watched Linda go, and she noted the new light in her eyes, the new lift of her head, and the proud sureness of her step, and she wondered if a new dress could do all that for a girl; she scarcely believed that it could. And, too, she had very serious doubts about the dress. She kept thinking of it during the day, and when Eileen came, in the middle of the afternoon, at the first words on her lips: “Has my dress come?” Katy felt a wave of illness surge through her. She looked at Eileen so helplessly that that astute reader of human nature immediately Suspected something.

“I sent it special,” she said, “because I didn’t know at the time that I was going to Riverside and I wanted to work on it. Isn’t it here yet?”

Then Katy prepared to do battle for the child of her heart.

“Was the dress ye ordered sent the one Miss Linda was telling ye about?” she asked tersely.

“Yes, it was,” said Eileen. “Linda has got mighty good taste. Any dress she admired was sure to be right. She said there was a beautiful dress at ‘The Mode’. I went and looked, and sure enough there was, a perfect beauty.”

“But she wanted the dress for herself,” said Katy.

“It was not a suitable dress for school,” said Eileen.

“Well, it strikes me,” said Katy, “that it was just the spittin’ image of fifty dresses I’ve seen ye wear to school.

“What do you know about it?” demanded Eileen.

“I know just this,” said Katy with determination. “Ye’ve had one new dress in the last few days and you’re not needin’ another. The blessed Virgin only knows when Miss Linda’s had a dress. She thought ye’d done yourself proud and sent it for her, and she put it on, and a becoming and a proper thing it was too! I advanced her the money myself and sent her to get some shoes to match it since she had her car fixed and could go in a hurry. A beautiful dress it is, and on her back this minute it is!”

Eileen was speechless with anger. Her face was a sickly white and the rouge spots on her cheeks stood a glaring admission.

“Do you mean to tell me?——” she gasped.

“Not again,” said the daughter of Erin firmly, “because I have already told ye wance. Linda’s gone like a rag bag since the Lord knows when. She had a right to the dress, and she thought it was hers, and she took it. And if ye ever want any more respect or obedience or love from the kiddie, ye better never let her know that ye didn’t intend it for her, for nothing was ever quite so fair and right as that she should have it; and while you’re about it you’d better go straight to the store and get her what she is needin’ to go with it, or better still, ye had better give her a fair share of the money of which there used to be such a plenty, and let her get her things herself, for she’s that tasty nobody can beat her when she’s got anything to do with.”

Eileen turned on Katy in a gust of fury.

“Katherine O’Donovan,” she said shrilly, “pack your trunk and see how quick you can get out of this house. I have stood your insolence for years, and I won’t endure it a minute longer!”

Katy folded her red arms and lifted her red chin, and a steel-blue light flashed from her steel-gray eyes.

“Humph!” she said, “I’ll do nothing of the sort. I ain’t working for ye and I never have been no more than I ever worked for your mother. Every lick I ever done in this house I done for Linda and Doctor Strong and for nobody else. Half of this house and everything in it belongs to Linda, and it’s a mortal short time till she’s of age to claim it. Whichever is her half, that half I’ll be staying in, and if ye manage so as she’s got nothing to pay me, I’ll take care of her without pay till the day comes when she can take care of me. Go to wid ye, ye triflin’, lazy, self-possessed creature. Ten years I have itched to tell ye what I thought of ye, and now ye know it.”

As Katy’s rage increased, Eileen became intimidated. Like every extremely selfish person she was a coward in her soul.

“If you refuse to go on my orders,” she said, “I’ll have John Gilman issue his.”

Then Katy set her left hand on her left hip, her lower jaw shot past the upper, her doubled right fist shook precious near the tip of Eileen’s exquisite little nose.

“I’m darin’ ye,” she shouted. “I’m just darin’ ye to send John Gilman in the sound of my voice. If ye do, I’ll tell him every mean and selfish thing ye’ve done to me poor lambie since the day of the Black Shadow. Send him to me? Holy Mither, I wish ye would! If ever I get my chance at him, don’t ye think I won’t be tellin’ him what he has lost, and what he has got? And as for taking orders from him, I am taking my orders from the person I am working for, and as I told ye before, that’s Miss Linda. Be off wid ye, and primp up while I get my supper, and mind ye this, if ye tell Miss Linda ye didn’t mean that gown for her and spoil the happy day she has had, I won’t wait for ye to send John Gilman to me; I’ll march straight to him. Put that in your cigarette and smoke it! Think I’ve lost me nose as well as me sense?”

Then Katy started a triumphal march to the kitchen and cooled down by the well-known process of slamming pots and pans for half an hour. Soon her Irish sense of humor came to her rescue.

“Now, don’t I hear myself telling Miss Linda a few days ago to kape her temper, and to kape cool, and to go aisy. Look at the aise of me when I got started. By gracious, wasn’t I just itching to wallop her?”

Then every art that Katy possessed was bent to the consummation of preparing a particularly delicious dinner for the night.

Linda came in softly humming something to herself about the kind of shoes that you might wear if you chose. She had entered the high school that morning with an unusually brilliant colour. Two or three girls, who never had noticed her before, had nodded to her that morning, and one or two had said: “What a pretty dress you have!” She had caught the flash of approval in the eyes of Donald Whiting, and she had noted the flourish with which he raised his hat when he saw her at a distance, and she knew what he meant when he held up a book, past the covers of which she could see protruding a thick fold of white paper. He had foresworn whatever pleasure he might have thought of for Sunday. He had prepared notes on some subject that he thought would further him. The lift of his head, the flourish of his hat, and the book all told Linda that he had struggled, and that he felt the struggle had brought an exhilarating degree of success. That had made the day particularly bright for Linda. She had gone home with a feeling of uplift and exultation in her heart. As she closed the front door she cried up the stairway: “Eileen, are you there?”

“Yes,” answered a rather sulky voice from above.

Linda ascended, two steps at a bound.

“Thank you over and over, old thing!” she cried as she raced down the hallway. “Behold me! I never did have a more becoming dress, and Katy loaned me money, till my income begins, to get shoes and a little scuff hat to go with it. Aren’t I spiffy?”

She pirouetted in the doorway. Eileen gripped the brush she was wielding, tight.

“You have good taste,” she said. “It’s a pretty dress, but You’re always howling about things being suitable. Do you call that suitable for school?”

“It certainly is an innovation for me,” said Linda, “but there are dozens of dresses of the same material, only different cut and colours in the High School to-day. As soon as I get my money I’ll buy a skirt and some blouses so I won’t have to wear this all the time; but I surely do thank you very much, and I surely have had a lovely day. Did you have a nice time at Riverside?”

Eileen slammed down the brush and turned almost a distorted face to Linda. She had temper to vent. In the hour’s reflection previous to Linda’s coming, she realized that she had reached the limit with Katy. If she antagonized her by word or look, she would go to John Gilman, and Eileen dared not risk what she would say.

“No, I did not have a lovely time,” she said. “I furnished the men for the party and I expected to have a grand time, but the first thing we did was to run into that inflated egotist calling herself Mary Louise Whiting, and like a fool, Janie Brunson introduced her to Peter Morrison. I had paired him with Janie on purpose to keep my eye on him.”

Linda tried hard but she could not suppress a chuckle: “Of course you would!” she murmured softly.

Eileen turned her back. That had been her first confidence to Linda. She was so aggrieved at that moment that she could have told unanswering walls her tribulations. It would have been better if she had done so. She might have been able to construe silence as sympathy. Linda’s laughter she knew exactly how to interpret. “Served you right,” was what it meant.

“I hadn’t the least notion you would take an interest in anything concerning me,” she said. “People can talk all they please about Mary Louise Whiting being a perfect lady but she is a perfect beast. I have met her repeatedly and she has always ignored me, and yesterday she singled out for her special attention the most desirable man in my party——”

“‘Most desirable,’” breathed Linda. “Poor John! I see his second fiasco. Lavender crystals, please!”

Eileen caught her lip in mortification. She had not intended to say what she thought.

“Well, you can’t claim,” she hurried on to cover her confusion, “that it was not an ill-bred, common trick for her to take possession of a man of my party, and utterly ignore me. She has everything on earth that I want; she treats me like a dog, and she could give me a glorious time by merely nodding her head.”

“I am quite sure you are mistaken,” said Linda. “From what I’ve heard of her, she wouldn’t mistreat anyone. Very probably what she does is merely to feel that she is not acquainted with you. You have an unfortunate way, Eileen, of defeating your own ends. If you wanted to attract Mary Louise Whiting, you missed the best chance you ever could have had, at three o’clock Saturday afternoon, when you maliciously treated her only brother as you would a mechanic, ordered him to our garage, and shut our door in his face.”

Eileen turned to Linda. Her mouth fell open. A ghastly greenish white flooded her face.

“What do you mean?” she gasped.

“I mean,” said Linda, “that Donald Whiting was calling on me, and you purposely sent him to the garage.”

Crash down among the vanities of Eileen’s dressing table went her lovely head, and she broke into deep and violent sobs. Linda stood looking at her a second, slowly shaking her head. Then she turned and went to her room.

Later in the evening she remembered the Roman scarf and told Eileen of what she had done, and she was unprepared for Eileen’s reply: “That scarf always was too brilliant for me. You’re welcome to it if you want it.”

“Thank you,” said Linda gravely, “I want it very much indeed.”

CHAPTER XI

Assisting Providence

Linda went to the library to see to what state of emptiness it had been reduced by the removal of several pieces of furniture she had ordered taken away that day. As she stood on the threshold looking over the room as usual, a throb of loving appreciation of Katy swept through her heart. Katy had been there before her. The room had been freshly swept and dusted, the rugs had been relaid, the furniture rearranged skilfully, and the table stood at the best angle to be lighted either by day or night. On the table and the mantel stood big bowls of lovely fresh flowers. Linda was quite certain that anyone entering the room for the first time would have felt it completely furnished, and she doubted if even Marian would notice the missing pieces. Cheered in her heart, she ran up to the billiard room, and there again Katy had preceded her. The windows were shining. The walls and floor had been cleaned. Everything was in readiness for the new furniture. Her heart full of gratitude, Linda went to her room, prepared her lessons for the next day, and then drew out her writing materials to answer Marian’s letter. She wrote:

I have an acute attack of enlargement of the heart. So many things have happened since your leaving. But first I must tell you about your sketch. We just know you did not leave it here. Katy says there was not a scrap in our bedroom when she cleaned it; and as she knows you make plans and how precious they are to you, I guarantee she would have saved it if she had found anything looking like a parallelogram on a piece of paper. And I have very nearly combed the lawn, not only the north side, but the west, south, and east; and then I broke the laws and went over to your house and crawled through a basement window and worked my way up, and I have hunted every room in it, but there is nothing there. You must have lost that sketch after you reached San Francisco. I hope to all that’s peaceful you did not lay it down in the offices of Nicholson and Snow, or where you take your lessons. I know nothing about architecture, but I do know something about comfort in a home, and I thought that was the most comfortable and convenient-looking house I ever had seen.

Now I’ll go on and tell you all the news, and I don’t know which is the bigger piece to burst on you first. Would you be more interested in knowing that Peter Morrison has bought three acres on the other side of the valley from us and up quite a way, or in the astonishing fact that I have a new dress, a perfect love of a dress, really too good for school? You know there was blood in my eye when you left, and I didn’t wait long to start action. I have managed to put the fear of God into Eileen’s heart so that she has agreed to a reasonable allowance for me from the first of next month; but she must have felt at least one small wave of contrition when I told her about a peculiarly enticing dress I had seen at The Mode. She sent it up right away, and Katy, blessed be her loving footprints, loaned me money to buy a blouse and some shoes to match, so I went to school to-day looking very like the Great General Average, minus rouge, lip-stick, hair-dress, and French heels.

I do hope you will approve of two things I have done.

Then Linda recounted the emptying of the billiard room, the inroads in the library, the listing of the technical books, and what she proposed to do with the money. And then, her face slightly pale and her fingers slightly trembling, she wrote:

And, Marian dear, I hope you won’t be angry with me when I tell you that I have put the Bear-cat into commission and driven it three times already. It is running like the feline it is, and I am being as careful as I can. I know exactly how you will feel. It is the same feeling that has held me all these months, when I wouldn’t even let myself think of it. But something happened at school one day, Marian. You know the Whitings? Mary Louise Whiting’s brother is in the senior class. He is a six-footer, and while he is not handsome he is going to be a real man when he is fully developed, and steadied down to work. One day last week he made it his business to stop me in the hall and twit me about my shoes, and incidentally to ask me why I didn’t dress like the other girls; and some way it came rougher than if it had been one of the girls. The more I thought about it the more wronged I felt, so I ended in a young revolution that is to bring me an income, a suitable place to work in and has brought me such a pretty dress. I think it has brought Eileen to a sense of at least partial justice about money, and it brought me back the Bear-cat. You know the proudest moment of my life was when Father would let me drive the little beast, and it all came back as natural as breathing. Please don’t worry, Marian. Nothing shall happen, I promise you.

It won’t be necessary to tell you that Katy is her darling old self, loyal and steadfast as the sun, and quite as necessary and as comforting to me. And I have a couple of other interests in life that are going to—I won’t say make up for your absence, because nothing could do that—but they are going to give me something interesting to think about, something agreeable to work at, while you are gone. But, oh, Marian, do hurry. Work all day and part of the night. Be Saturday’s child yourself if you must, just so you get home quick, and where your white head makes a beacon light for the truest, lovingest pal you will ever have,

Linda.

Linda laid down the pen, slid down in her chair, and looked from the window across the valley, and she wondered if in her view lay the location that had been purchased by Peter Morrison. She glanced back at her letter and sat looking at the closing lines and the signature.

“Much good that will do her,” she commented. “When a woman loves a man and loves him with all her heart, as Marian loved John, and when she loses him, not because she has done a single unworthy thing herself, but because he is so rubber spined that he will let another woman successfully intrigue him, a lot of comfort she is going to get from the love of a schoolgirl!”

Linda’s eyes strayed to the window again, and traveled down to the city and up the coast, all the way to San Francisco, and out of the thousands of homes there they pictured a small, neat room, full of Marian’s belongings, and Marian herself bending over a work table, absorbed in the final draft of her precious plans. Linda could see Marian as plainly as she ever had seen her, but she let her imagination run, and she fancied that when Marian was among strangers and where no one knew of John Gilman’s defection, that hers might be a very heavy heart, that hers might be a very sad face. Then she went to planning. She had been desolate, heart hungry, and isolated herself. First she had endured, then she had fought; the dawn of a new life was breaking over her hill. She had found work she was eager to do. She could put the best of her brain, the skill of her fingers, the creative impulse of her heart, into it.

She was almost sure that she had found a friend. She had a feeling that when the coming Saturday had been lived Donald Whiting would be her friend. He would want her advice and her help in his work. She would want his companionship and the stimulus of his mind, in hers. What Linda had craved was a dear friend among the girls, but no girl had offered her friendship. This boy had, so she would accept what the gods of time and circumstance provided. It was a very wonderful thing that had happened to her. Now why could not something equally wonderful happen to Marian? Linda wrinkled her brows and thought deeply.

“It’s the worst thing in all this world to work and work with nobody to know about it and nobody to care,” thought Linda. “Marian could break a record if she thought John Gilman cared now as he used to. It’s almost a necessary element to her success. If he doesn’t care, she ought to be made to feel that somebody cares. This thing of standing alone, since I have found a friend, appeals to me as almost insupportable. Let me think.”

It was not long until she had worked out a scheme for putting an interest in Marian’s life and giving her something for which to work, until a more vital reality supplanted it. The result was that she took some paper, went down to the library, and opening the typewriter, wrote a letter. She read it over, making many changes and corrections, and then she copied it carefully. When she came to addressing it she was uncertain, but at last she hit upon a scheme of sending it in the care of Nicholson and Snow because Marian had told her that she meant to enter their contest immediately she reached San Francisco, and she would have left them her address. On the last reading of the letter she had written, she decided that it was a manly, straightforward production, which should interest and attract any girl. But how was she to sign it? After thinking deeply for a long time, she wrote “Philip Sanders, General Delivery,” and below she added a postscript:

To save you the trouble of inquiring among your friends as to who Philip Sanders is, I might as well tell you in the beginning that he isn’t. He is merely an assumption under which I shall hide my personality until you let me know whether it is possible that you could become even slightly interested in me, as a small return for the very deep and wholesome interest abiding in my heart for you.

“Abiding,” said Linda aloud. “It seems to me that there is nothing in all the world quite so fine as a word. Isn’t ‘abiding’ a good word? Doesn’t it mean a lot? Where could you find one other word that means being with you and also means comforting you and loving you and sympathizing with you and surrounding you with firm walls and a cushioned floor and a starry roof? I love that word. I hope it impresses Marian with all its wonderful meaning.”

She went back to her room, put both letters into her Geometry, and in the morning mailed them. She stood a long time hesitating with the typewritten letter in her hand, but finally dropped it in the letter box also.

“It will just be something,” she said, “to make her think that some man appreciates her lovely face and doesn’t care if her hair is white, and sees how steadfast and fine she is.”

And then she slowly repeated, “‘steadfast,’ that is another fine word. It has pearls and rubies all over it.”

After school that evening she visited James Brothers’ and was paid the full amount of the appraisement of her furniture. Then she went to an art store and laid in a full supply of the materials she needed for the work she was trying to do. Her fingers were trembling as she handled the boxes of water colours and selected the brushes and pencils for her work, and sheets of drawing paper upon which she could do herself justice. When the transaction was finished, she had a few dollars remaining. As she put them in her pocket she said softly:

“That’s gasolene. Poor Katy! I’m glad she doesn’t need her money, because she is going to have to wait for the allowance or the sale of the books or on Jane Meredith. But it’s only a few days now, so that’ll be all right.”

CHAPTER XII

The Lay of the Land

Linda entered the street car for her daily ride to Lilac Valley. She noticed Peter Morrison and Henry Anderson sitting beside each other, deeply engrossed in a drawing. She had been accustomed to ride in the open section of the car as she liked the fresh air. She had a fleeting thought of entering the body of the car and sitting where they would see her; and then a perverse spirit in Linda’s heart said to her:

“That is precisely what Eileen would do. You sit where you belong.”

Whereupon Linda dropped into the first vacant seat she could reach, but it was only a few moments before Peter Morrison, looking up from the plans he was studying, saw her, and lifting his hat, beckoned her to come and sit with him. They made room for her between them and spreading the paper across her lap, all three of them began to discuss the plans for the foundation for Peter’s house. Anderson had roughly outlined the grounds, sketching in the trees that were to be saved, the spring, and the most available route for reaching the road. The discussion was as to where the road should logically enter the grounds, and where the garage should stand.

“Which reminds me,” said Linda—“haven’t you your car with you? Or was that a hired one you were touring in?”

“Mine,” said Peter Morrison, “but we toured so far, it’s in the shop for a general overhauling to-day.”

“That being the case,” said Linda, “walk home with me and I’ll take you to your place in mine and bring you back to the cars, if you only want to stay an hour or two.”

“Why, that would be fine,” said Peter. “You didn’t mention, the other evening, that you had a car.”

“No,” said Linda, “I had been trying to keep cars out of my thought for a long time, but I could endure it no longer the other day, so I got mine out and tuned it up. If you don’t mind stacking up a bit, three can ride in it very comfortably.”

That was the way it happened that Linda walked home after school that afternoon between Peter Morrison and his architect, brought out the Bear-cat, and drove them to Peter’s location.

All that day, workmen had been busy under the management of a well-instructed foreman, removing trees and bushes and stones and clearing the spot that had been selected for the garage and approximately for the house.

The soft brownish gray of Linda’s dress was exactly the colour to intensify the darker brown of her eyes. There was a fluctuating red in her olive cheeks, a brilliant red framing her even white teeth. Once dressed so that she was satisfied with the results, Linda immediately forgot her clothes, and plunged into Morrison’s plans.

“Peter,” she said gravely, with Peter perfectly cognizant of the twinkle in her dark eyes, “Peter, you may save money in a straight-line road, but you’re going to sin against your soul if you build it. You’ll have to economize in some other way, and run your road around the base of those boulders, then come in straight to the line here, and then you should swing again and run out on this point, where guests can have one bewildering glimpse of the length of our blue valley, and then whip them around this clump of perfumy lilac and elders, run them to your side entrance, and then scoot the car back to the garage. I think you should place the front of your house about here.” Linda indicated where. “So long as you’re buying a place like this you don’t want to miss one single thing; and you do want to make the very most possible out of every beauty you have. And you mustn’t fail to open up and widen the runway from that energetic, enthusiastic spring. Carry it across your road, sure. It will cost you another little something for a safe bridge, but there’s nothing so artistic as a bridge with a cold stream running under it. And think what a joyful time I’ll have, gathering specimens for you of every pretty water plant that grows in my particular canyon. Any time when you’re busy in your library and you hear my car puffing up the incline and around the corner and rattling across the bridge, you’ll know that I am down here giving you a start of watercress and miners’ lettuce and every lovely thing you could mention that likes to be nibbled or loved-up, while it dabbles its toes in the water.”

Peter Morrison looked at Linda reflectively. He looked for such a long moment that Henry Anderson reached a nebulous conclusion. “Fine!” he cried. “Every one of those suggestions is valuable to an inexperienced man. Morrison, shan’t I make a note of them?”

“Yes, Henry, you shall,” said Peter. “I am going to push this thing as fast as possible, so far as building the garage is concerned and getting settled in it. After that I don’t care if I live on this spot until we know each other by the inch, before I begin building my home. At the present minute it appeals to me that ‘home’ is about the best word in the language of any nation. I have a feeling that what I build here is going to be my home, very possibly the only one I shall ever have. We must find the spot on which the Lord intended that a house should grow on this hillside, and then we must build that house so that it has a room suitable for a workshop in which I may strive, under the best conditions possible, to get my share of the joy of life and to earn the money that I shall require to support me and entertain my friends; and that sounds about as selfish as anything possibly could. It seems to be mostly ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ and it’s not the real truth concerning this house. I don’t believe there is a healthy, normal man living who has not his dream. I have no hesitation whatever in admitting that I have mine. This house must be two things. It has got to be a concrete workshop for me, and it has got to be an abstract abiding place for a dream. It’s rather difficult to build a dream house for a dream lady, so I don’t know what kind of a fist I am going to make of it.”

Linda sat down on a boulder and contemplated her shoes for a minute. Then she raised her ever-shifting, eager, young eyes to Peter, and it seemed to him as he looked into them that there were little gold lights flickering at the bottom of their darkness.

“Why, that’s just as easy,” she said. “A home is merely a home. It includes a front porch and a back porch and a fireplace and a bathtub and an ice chest and a view and a garden around it; all the rest is incidental. If you have more money, you have more incidentals. If you don’t have so much, you use your imagination and think you have just as much on less.”

“Now, I wonder,” said Peter, “when I find my dream lady, if she will have an elastic imagination.”

“Haven’t you found her yet?” asked Linda casually.

“No,” said Peter, “I haven’t found her, and unfortunately she hasn’t found me. I have had a strenuous time getting my start in life. It’s mostly a rush from one point of interest to another, dropping at any wayside station for refreshment and the use of a writing table. Occasionally I have seen a vision that I have wanted to follow, but I never have had time. So far, the lady of this house is even more of a dream than the house.”

“Oh, well, don’t worry,” said Linda comfortingly. “The world is full of the nicest girls. When you get ready for a gracious lady I’ll find you one that will have an India-rubber imagination and a great big loving heart and Indian-hemp apron strings so that half a dozen babies can swing from them.”

Morrison turned to Henry Anderson.

“You hear, Henry?” he said. “I’m destined to have a large family. You must curtail your plans for the workroom and make that big room back of it into a nursery.”

“Well, what I am going to do,” said Henry Anderson, “is to build a place suitable for your needs. If any dream woman comes to it, she will have to fit herself to her environment.”

Linda frowned.

“Now, that isn’t a bit nice of you,” she said, “and I don’t believe Peter will pay the slightest attention to you. He’ll let me make you build a lovely room for the love of his heart, and a great big bright nursery on the sunny side for his small people.”

“I never believed,” said Henry Anderson, “in counting your chickens before they are hatched. There are a couple of acres around Peter’s house, and he can build an addition as his needs increase.”

“Messy idea,” said Linda promptly. “Thing to do, when you build a house, is to build it the way you want it for the remainder of your life, so you don’t have to tear up the scenery every few years, dragging in lumber for expansion. And I’ll tell you another thing. If the homemakers of this country don’t get the idea into their heads pretty soon that they are not going to be able to hold their own with the rest of the world, with no children, or one child in the family, there’s a sad day of reckoning coming. With the records at the patent office open to the world, you can’t claim that the brain of the white man is not constructive. You can look at our records and compare them with those of countries ages and ages older than we are, which never discovered the beauties of a Dover egg-beater or a washing machine or a churn or a railroad or a steamboat or a bridge. We are head and shoulders above other nations in invention, and just as fast as possible, we are falling behind in the birth rate. The red man and the yellow man and the brown man and the black man can look at our egg-beaters and washing machines and bridges and big guns, and go home and copy them; and use them while rearing even bigger families than they have now. If every home in Lilac Valley had at least six sturdy boys and girls growing up in it with the proper love of country and the proper realization of the white man’s right to supremacy, and if all the world now occupied by white men could make an equal record, where would be the talk of the yellow peril? There wouldn’t be any yellow peril. You see what I mean?”

Linda lifted her frank eyes to Peter Morrison.

“Yes, young woman,” said Peter gravely, “I see what you mean, but this is the first time I ever heard a high-school kid propound such ideas. Where did you get them?”

“Got them in Multiflores Canyon from my father to start with,” said Linda, “but recently I have been thinking, because there is a boy in High School who is making a great fight for a better scholarship record than a Jap in his class. I brood over it every spare minute, day or night, and when I say my prayers I implore high Heaven to send him an idea or to send me one that I can pass on to him, that will help him to beat that Jap.”

“I see,” said Peter Morrison. “We’ll have to take time to talk this over. It’s barely possible I might be able to suggest something.”

“You let that kid fight his own battles,” said Henry Anderson roughly. “He’s no proper bug-catcher. I feel it in my bones.”

For the first time, Linda’s joy laugh rang over Peter Morrison’s possession.

“I don’t know about that,” she said gaily. “He’s a wide-awake specimen; he has led his class for four years when the Jap didn’t get ahead of him. But, all foolishness aside, take my word for it, Peter, you’ll be sorry if you don’t build this house big enough for your dream lady and for all the little dreams that may spring from her heart.”

“Nightmares, you mean,” said Henry Anderson. “I can’t imagine a bunch of kids muddying up this spring and breaking the bushes and using slingshots on the birds.”

“Yes,” said Linda with scathing sarcasm, “and wouldn’t our government be tickled to death to have a clear spring and a perfect bush and a singing bird, if it needed six men to go over the top to handle a regiment of Japanese!”

Then Peter Morrison laughed.

“Well, your estimate is too low, Linda,” he said in his nicest drawling tone of voice. “Believe me, one U. S. kid will never march in a whole regiment of Japanese. They won’t lay down their guns and walk to surrender as bunches of Germans did. Nobody need ever think that. They are as good fighters as they are imitators. There’s nothing for you to do, Henry, but to take to heart what Miss Linda has said. Plan the house with a suite for a dream lady, and a dining room, a sleeping porch and a nursery big enough for the six children allotted to me.”

“You’re not really in earnest?” asked Henry Anderson in doubting astonishment.

“I am in the deepest kind of earnest,” said Peter Morrison. “What Miss Linda says is true. As a nation, our people are pampering themselves and living for their own pleasures. They won’t take the trouble or endure the pain required to bear and to rear children; and the day is rolling toward us, with every turn of the planet one day closer, when we are going to be outnumbered by a combination of peoples who can take our own tricks and beat us with them. We must pass along the good word that the one thing America needs above every other thing on earth is homes and hearts big enough for children, as were the homes of our grandfathers, when no joy in life equaled the joy of a new child in the family, and if you didn’t have a dozen you weren’t doing your manifest duty.”

“Well, if that is the way you see the light, we must enlarge this house. As designed, it included every feminine convenience anyway. But when I build my house I am going to build it for myself.”

“Then don’t talk any more about being my bug-catcher,” said Linda promptly, “because when I build my house it’s going to be a nest that will hold six at the very least. My heart is perfectly set on a brood of six.”

Linda was quite unaware that the two men were studying her closely, but if she had known what was going on in their minds she would have had nothing to regret, because both of them found her very attractive, and both of them were wondering how anything so superficial as Eileen could be of the same blood as Linda.

“Are we keeping you too late?” inquired Peter.

“No,” said Linda, “I am as interested as I can be. Finish everything you want to do before we go. I hope you’re going to let me come over often and watch you with your building. Maybe I can get an idea for some things I want to do. Eileen and I have our house divided by a Mason and Dixon line. On her side is Mother’s suite, the dining room, the living room and the front door. On mine there’s the garage and the kitchen and Katy’s bedroom and mine and the library and the billiard room. At the present minute I am interested in adapting the library to my requirements instead of Father’s, and I am emptying the billiard room and furnishing it to make a workroom. I have a small talent with a brush and pencil, and I need some bare walls to tack my prints on to dry, and I need numerous places for all the things I am always dragging in from the desert and the canyons; and since I have the Bear-cat running, what I have been doing in that line with a knapsack won’t be worthy of mention.”

“How did it come,” inquired Henry Anderson, “that you had that car jacked up so long?”

“Why, hasn’t anybody told you,” asked Linda, “about our day of the Black Shadow?”

“John Gilman wrote me when it happened,” said Peter softly, “but I don’t believe it has been mentioned before Henry. You tell him.”

Linda turned to Henry Anderson, and with trembling lips and paling cheeks, in a few brief sentences she gave him the details. Then she said to Peter Morrison in a low voice: “And that is the why of Marian Thorne’s white head. Anybody tell you that?”

“That white head puzzled me beyond anything I ever saw,” he said. “I meant to ask John about it. He used to talk to me and write to me often about her, and lately he hasn’t; when I came I saw the reason, and so you see I felt reticent on the subject.”

“Well, there’s nothing the matter with my tongue,” said Linda. “It’s loose at both ends. Marian was an expert driver. She drove with the same calm judgment and precision and graceful skill that she does everything else, but the curve was steep and something in the brakes was defective. It broke with a snap and there was not a thing she could do. Enough was left of the remains of the car to prove that. Ten days afterward her head was almost as white as snow. Before that it was as dark as mine. But her body is just as young and her heart is just as young and her face is even more beautiful. I do think that a white crown makes her lovelier than she was before. I have known Marian ever since I can remember, and I don’t know one thing about her that I could not look you straight in the eye and tell you all about. There is not a subterfuge or an evasion or a small mean deceit in her soul. She is the brainiest woman and the biggest woman I know.”

“I haven’t a doubt of it,” said Peter Morrison. “And while you are talking about nice women, we met a mighty fine one at Riverside on Sunday. Her name is Mary Louise Whiting. Do you know her?”

“Not personally,” said Linda. “I don’t recall that I ever saw her. I know her brother, Donald. He is the high-school boy who is having the wrestle with the Jap.”

“I liked her too,” said Henry Anderson. “And by the way, Miss Linda, haven’t bug-catchers any reputation at all as nest builders? Is it true that among feathered creatures the hen builds the home?”

“No, it’s not,” said Linda promptly. “Male birds make a splendid record carrying nest material. What is true is that in the majority of cases the female does the building.”

“Well, what I am getting at,” said Henry Anderson, “is this. Is there anything I can do to help you with that billiard room that you’re going to convert to a workroom? What do you lack in it that you would like to have? Do you need more light or air, or a fireplace, or what? When you take us to the station, suppose you drive us past your house and give me a look at that room and let me think over it a day or two. I might be able to make some suggestion that would help you.”

“Now that is positively sweet of you,” said Linda. “I never thought of such a thing as either comfort or convenience. I thought I had to take that room as it stands and do the best I could with it, but since you mention it, it’s barely possible that more air might be agreeable and also more light, and if there could be a small fireplace built in front of the chimney where it goes up from the library fireplace, it certainly would be a comfort, and it would add something to the room that nothing else could. “No workroom really has a soul if you can’t smell smoke and see red when you go to it at night.”

“You little outdoor heathen,” laughed Peter Morrison. “One would think you were an Indian.”

“I am a fairly good Indian,” said Linda. “I have been scouting around with my father a good many years. How about it, Peter? Does the road go crooked?”

“Yes,” said Peter, “the road goes crooked.”

“Does the bed of the spring curve and sweep across the lawn and drop off to the original stream below the tree-tobacco clump there?”

“If you say so, it does,” said Peter.

“Including the bridge?” inquired Linda.

“Including the bridge,” said Peter. “I’ll have to burn some midnight oil, but I can visualize the bridge.”

“And is this house where you ‘set up your rest,’ as you so beautifully said the other night at dinner, going to lay its corner stone and grow to its roof a selfish house, or is it going to be generous enough for a gracious lady and a flight of little footsteps?”

Peter Morrison took off his hat. He turned his face toward the length of Lilac Valley and stood, very tall and straight, looking far away before him. Presently he looked down at Linda.

“Even so,” he said softly. “My shoulders are broad enough; I have a brain; and I am not afraid to work. If my heart is not quite big enough yet, I see very clearly how it can be made to expand.”

“I have been told,” said Linda in a low voice, “that Mary Louise Whiting is a perfect darling.”

Peter looked at her from the top of her black head to the tips of her brown shoes. He could have counted the freckles bridging her nose. The sunburn on her cheeks was very visible; there was something arresting in the depth of her eyes, the curve of her lips, the lithe slenderness of her young body; she gave the effect of something smoldering inside that would leap at a breath.

“I was not thinking of Miss Whiting,” he said soberly.

Henry Anderson was watching. Now he turned his back and commenced talking about plans, but in his heart he said: “So that’s the lay of the land. You’ve got to hustle yourself, Henry, or you won’t have the ghost of a show.”

Later, when they motored down the valley and stopped at the Strong residence, Peter refused to be monopolized by Eileen. He climbed the two flights of stairs with Henry Anderson and Linda and exhausted his fund of suggestions as to what could be done to that empty billiard room to make an attractive study of it. Linda listened quietly to all their suggestions, and then she said:

“It would be fine to have another window, and a small skylight would be a dream, and as for the fireplace you mention, I can’t even conceive how great it would be to have that; but my purse is much more limited than Peter’s, and while I have my school work to do every day, my earning capacity is nearly negligible. I can only pick up a bit here and there with my brush and pencil—place cards and Easter cards and valentines, and once or twice magazine covers, and little things like that. I don’t see my way clear to lumber and glass and bricks and chimney pieces.”

Peter looked at Henry, and Henry looked at Peter, and a male high sign, ancient as day, passed between them.

“Easiest thing in the world,” said Peter. “It’s as sure as shooting that when my three or four fireplaces, which Henry’s present plans call for, are built, there is going to be all the material left that can be used in a light tiny fireplace such as could be built on a third floor, and when the figuring for the house is done it could very easily include the cutting of a skylight and an extra window or two here, and getting the material in with my stuff, it would cost you almost nothing.”

Linda’s eyes opened wide and dewy with surprise and pleasure.

“Why, you two perfectly nice men!” she said. “I haven’t felt as I do this minute since I lost Daddy. It’s wonderful to be taken care of. It’s better than cream puffs with almond flavoring.”

Henry Anderson looked at Linda keenly.

“You’re the darndest kid!” he said. “One minute you’re smacking your lips over cream puffs, and the next you’re going to the bottom of the yellow peril. I never before saw your combination in one girl. What’s the explanation?” For the second time that evening Linda’s specialty in rapture floated free.

“Bunch all the component parts into the one paramount fact that I am Saturday’s child,” she said, “so I am constantly on the job of working for a living, and then add to that the fact that I was reared by a nerve specialist.”

Then they went downstairs, and the men refused both Eileen’s and Linda’s invitation to remain for dinner. When they had gone Eileen turned to Linda with a discontented and aggrieved face.

“In the name of all that’s holy, what are you doing or planning to do?” she demanded.

“Not anything that will cost you a penny beyond my natural rights,” said Linda quietly.

“That is not answering my question,” said Eileen. “You’re not of age and you’re still under the authority of a guardian. If you can’t answer me, possibly you can him. Shall I send John Gilman to ask what I want to know of you?”

“When did I ever ask you any questions about what you chose to do?” asked Linda. “I am merely following the example that you have previously set me. John Gilman and I used to be great friends. It might help both of us to have a family reunion. Send him by all means.”

“You used to take pride,” suggested Eileen, “in leading your class.”

“And has anyone told you that I am not leading my class at the present minute?” asked Linda.

“No,” said Eileen, “but what I want to point out to you is that the minute you start running with the boys you will quit leading your class.”

“Don’t you believe it,” said Linda quietly. “I’m not built that way. I shan’t concentrate on any boy to the exclusion of chemistry and geometry, never fear it.”

Then she thoughtfully ascended the stairs and went to work.

Eileen went to her room and sat down to think; and the more she thought, the deeper grew her anger and chagrin; and to the indifference that always had existed in her heart concerning Linda was added in that moment a new element. She was jealous of her. How did it come that a lanky, gangling kid in her tees had been paid a visit by the son of possibly the most cultured and influential family of the city, people of prestige, comfortable wealth, and unlimited popularity? For four years she had struggled to gain an entrance in some way into Louise Whiting’s intimate circle of friends, and she had ended by shutting the door on the only son of the family. And why had she ever allowed Linda to keep the runabout? It was not proper that a young girl should own a high powered car like that. It was not proper that she should drive it and go racing around the country, heaven knew where, and with heaven knew whom. Eileen bit her lip until it almost bled. Her eyes were hateful and her hands were nervous as she reviewed the past week. She might think any mean thing that a mean brain could conjure up, but when she calmed down to facts she had to admit that there was not a reason in the world why Linda should not drive the car she had driven for her father, or why she should not take with her Donald Whiting or Peter Morrison or Henry Anderson. The thing that rankled was that the car belonged to Linda. The touring car which she might have owned and driven, had she so desired, lay in an extremely slender string of pearls around her neck at that instant. She reflected that if she had kept her car and made herself sufficiently hardy to drive it, she might have been the one to have taken Peter Morrison to his home location and to have had many opportunities for being with him.

“I’ve been a fool,” said Eileen, tugging at the pearls viciously. “They are nothing but a little bit of a string that looks as if I were trying to do something and couldn’t, at best. What I’ve got to do is to think more of myself. I’ve got to plan some way to prevent Linda from being too popular until I really get my mind made up as to what I want to do.”

CHAPTER XIII

Leavening the Bread of Life

“‘A house that is divided against itself cannot stand,’” quoted Linda. “I must keep in mind what Eileen said, not that there is the slightest danger, but to fall behind in my grades is a thing that simply must not happen. If it be true that Peter and Henry can so easily and so cheaply add a few improvements in my workroom in connection with Peter’s building, I can see no reason why they shouldn’t do it, so long as I pay for it. I haven’t a doubt but that there will be something I can do for Peter, before he finishes his building, that he would greatly appreciate, while, since I’m handy with my pencil, I might be able to make a few head and tail pieces for some of his articles that would make them more attractive. I don’t want to use any friend of mine: I don’t want to feel that I am not giving quite as much as I get, but I think I see my way clear, between me and the Bear-cat, to pay for all the favours I would receive in altering my study.

“First thing I do I must go through Father’s books and get the money for them, so I’ll know my limitation when I come to select furniture. And I don’t know that I am going to be so terribly modest when it comes to naming the sum with which I’ll be satisfied for my allowance. Possibly I shall exercise my age-old prerogative and change my mind; I may just say ‘half’ right out loud and stick to it. And there’s another thing. Since the editor of Everybody’s Home has started my department and promised that if it goes well he will give it to me permanently, I can certainly depend on something from that. He has used my Introduction and two instalments now. I should think it might be fair to talk payments pretty soon. He should give me fifty dollars for a recipe with its perfectly good natural history and embellished with my own vegetable and floral decorations.

“In the meantime I think I might buy my work table and possibly an easel, so I can have real room to spread out my new material and see how it would feel to do one drawing completely unhampered. I’ll order the table to-night, and then I’ll begin on the books, because I must have Saturday free; and I must be thinking about the most attractive and interesting place I can take Donald to. I just have to keep him interested until he gets going of his own accord, because he shall beat Oka Sayye. I wouldn’t let Donald say it but I don’t mind saying myself to myself with no one present except myself that in all my life I have never seen anything so mask-like as the stolid little square head on that Jap. I have never seen anything I dislike more than the oily, stiff, black hair standing up on it like menacing bristles. I have never had but one straight look deep into his eyes, but in that look I saw the only thing that ever frightened me in looking into a man’s eyes in my whole life. And there is one thing that I have to remember to caution Donald about. He must carry on this contest in a perfectly open, fair, and above-board way, and he simply must not antagonize Oka Sayye. There are so many of the Japs. They all look so much alike, and there’s a blood brotherhood between them that will make them protect each other to the death against any white man. It wouldn’t be safe for Donald to make Oka Sayye hate him. He had far better try to make him his friend and put a spirit of honest rivalry into his heart; but come to think of it, there wasn’t anything like that in my one look into Oka Sayye’s eyes. I don’t know what it was, but whatever it was it was something repulsive.”

With this thought in her mind Linda walked slowly as she approached the High School the next time. Far down the street, over the walks and across the grounds, her eyes were searching eagerly for the tall slender figure of Donald Whiting. She did not see him in the morning, but at noon she encountered him in the hall.

“Looking for you,” he cried gaily when he saw her. “I’ve got my pry in on Trig. The professor’s interested. Dad fished out an old Trig that he used when he was a boy and I have some new angles that will keep my esteemed rival stirring up his gray matter for some little time.”

“Good for you! Joyous congratulations! You’ve got the idea!” cried Linda. “Go to it! Start something all along the line, but make it something founded on brains and reason and common sense. But, Donald, I was watching for you. I wanted to say a word.”

Donald Whiting bent toward her. The faintest suspicion of a tinge of colour crept into his cheeks.

“That’s fine,” he said. “What was it you wanted?”

“Only this,” she said in almost a breathless whisper. “There is nothing in California I am afraid of except a Jap, and I am afraid of them, not potentially, not on account of what all of us know they are planning in the backs of their heads for the future, but right here and now, personally and physically. Don’t antagonize Oka Sayye. Don’t be too precipitate about what you’re trying to do. Try to make it appear that you’re developing ideas for the interest and edification of the whole class. Don’t incur his personal enmity. Use tact.”

“You think I am afraid of that little jiu-jitsu?” he scoffed. “I can lick him with one hand.”

“I haven’t a doubt of it,” said Linda, measuring his height and apparent strength and fitness. “I haven’t a doubt of it. But let me ask you this confidentially: Have you got a friend who would slip in and stab him in the back in case you were in an encounter and he was getting the better of you?”

Donald Whiting’s eyes widened. He looked at Linda amazed.

“Wouldn’t that be going rather far?” he asked. “I think I have some fairly good friends among the fellows, but I don’t know just whom I would want to ask to do me that small favour.”

“That is precisely the point,” cried Linda. “You haven’t a friend you would ask; and you haven’t a friend who would do it, if you did. But don’t believe for one second that Oka Sayye hasn’t half a dozen who would make away with you at an unexpected time and in a secluded place, and vanish, if it would in any way further Oka Sayye’s ambition, or help establish the supremacy of the Japanese in California.”

“Um-hm,” said Donald Whiting.

He was looking far past Linda and now his eyes were narrowed in thought. “I believe you’re right about it.”

“I’ve thought of you so often since I tried to spur you to beat Oka Sayye,” said Linda. “I feel a sort of responsibility for you. It’s to the honour and glory of all California, and the United States, and the white race everywhere for you to beat him, but if any harm should come to you I would always feel that I shouldn’t have urged it.”

“Now that’s foolishness,” said Donald earnestly. “If I am such a dub that I didn’t have the ambition to think up some way to beat a Jap myself, no matter what happens you shouldn’t regret having been the one to point out to me my manifest duty. Dad is a Harvard man, you know, and that is where he’s going to send me, and in talking about it the other night I told him about you, and what you had said to me. He’s the greatest old scout, and was mightily interested. He went at once and opened a box of books in the garret and dug out some stuff that will be a big help to me. He’s going to keep posted and see what he can do; he said even worse things to me than you did; so you needn’t feel that you have any responsibility; besides that, it’s not proved yet that I can beat Oka Sayye.”

“Yes, it is!” said Linda, sending a straight level gaze deep into his eyes. “Yes, it is! Whenever a white man makes up his mind what he’s going to do, and puts his brain to work, he beats any man, of any other colour. Sure you’re going to beat him.”

“Fat chance I have not to,” said Donald, laughing ruefully. “If I don’t beat him I am disgraced at home, and with you; before I try very long in this highly specialized effort I am making, every professor in the High School and every member of my class is bound to become aware of what is going on. You’re mighty right about it. I have got to beat him or disgrace myself right at the beginning of my nice young career.”

“Of course you’ll beat him,” said Linda.

“At what hour did you say I should come, Saturday?”

“Oh, come with the lark for all I care,” said Linda. “Early morning in the desert is a mystery and a miracle, and the larks have been there just long enough to get their voices properly tuned for their purest notes.”

Then she turned and hurried away. Her first leisure minute after reaching home she went to the library wearing one of Katy’s big aprons, and carrying a brush and duster. Beginning at one end of each shelf, she took down the volumes she intended to sell, carefully dusted them, wiped their covers, and the place on which they had stood, and then opened and leafed through them so that no scrap of paper containing any notes or memoranda of possible value should be overlooked. It was while handling these volumes that Linda shifted several of the books written by her father, to separate them from those with which she meant to part. She had grown so accustomed to opening each book she handled and looking through it, that she mechanically opened the first one she picked up and from among its leaves there fell a scrap of loose paper. She picked it up and found it was a letter from the publishers of the book. Linda’s eyes widened suddenly as she read:

My dear Strong:

Sending you a line of congratulations. You have gone to the head of the list of “best sellers” among medical works, and the cheque I draw you for the past six months’ royalties will be considerably larger than that which goes to your most esteemed contemporary on your chosen subject.

Very truly yours,

The signature was that of Frederic Dickman, the editor of one of the biggest publishing houses of the country.

“Hm,” she said to herself softly. “Now that is a queer thing. That letter was written nearly five years ago. I don’t know why I never thought of royalties since Daddy went. I frequently heard him mention them before. I suppose they’re being paid to John Gilman as administrator, or to the Consolidated Bank, and cared for with Father’s other business. There’s no reason why these books should not keep on selling. There are probably the same number of young men, if not a greater number, studying medicine every year. I wonder now, about these royalties. I must do some thinking.”

Then Linda began to examine books more carefully than before. The letter she carried with her when she went to her room; but she made a point of being on the lawn that evening when John Gilman came, and after talking to him a few minutes, she said very casually: “John, as Father’s administrator, does a royalty from his medical books come to you?”

“No,” said Gilman. “It is paid to his bank.”

“I don’t suppose,” said Linda casually, “it would amount to enough to keep one in shoes these inflated days.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” said John testily. “I have seen a few of those cheques in your Father’s time. You should be able to keep fairly well supplied with shoes.”

“So I should,” said Linda drily. “So I should.”

Then she led him to the back of the house and talked the incident out of his mind as cleverly as possible by giving him an intensive botanical study of Cotyledon. But she could not interest him quite so deeply as she had hoped, for presently he said: “Eileen tells me that you’re parting with some of the books.”

“Only technical ones for which I could have no possible use,” said Linda. “I need clothes, and have found that had I a proper place to work in and proper tools to work with, I could earn quite a bit with my brush and pencil, and so I am trying to get enough money together to fit up the billiard room for a workroom, since nobody uses it for anything else.”

“I see,” said John Gilman. “I suppose running a house is extremely expensive these days, but even so the income from your estate should be sufficient to dress a schoolgirl and provide for anything you would want in the way of furnishing a workroom.”

“That’s what I have always thought myself,” said Linda; “but Eileen doesn’t agree with me, and she handles the money. When the first of the month comes, we are planning to go over things together, and she is going to make me a proper allowance.”

“That is exactly as it should be,” said Gilman. “I never realized till the other night at dinner that you have grown such a great girl, Linda. That’s fine! Fix your workroom the way you would like to have it, and if there’s anything I can do to help you in any way, you have only to command me. I haven’t seen you often lately.”

“No,” said Linda, “but I don’t feel that it is exactly my fault. Marian and I were always pals. When I saw that you preferred Eileen, I kept with Marian to comfort her all I could. I don’t suppose she cared, particularly. She couldn’t have, or she would at least have made some effort to prevent Eileen from monopolizing you. She probably was mighty glad to be rid of you; but since you had been together so much, I thought she might miss you, so I tried to cover your defection.”

John Gilman’s face flushed. He stood very still, while he seemed deeply thoughtful.

“Of course you were free to follow your inclinations, or Eileen’s machinations, whichever you did follow,” Linda said lightly, “but ‘them as knows’ could tell you, John, as Katy so well puts it, that you have made the mistake of your young life.”

Then she turned and went to the garage, leaving John to his visit with Eileen.

The Eileen who took possession of John was an Eileen with whom he was not acquainted. He had known, the night of the dinner party, that Eileen was pouting, but there had been no chance to learn from her what her grievance was, and by the next time they met she was a bundle of flashing allurement, so he ignored the occurrence. This evening, for the first time, it seemed to him that Eileen was not so beautiful a woman as he had thought her. Something had roiled the blood in her delicate veins until it had muddied the clear freshness of her smooth satiny skin. There was discontent in her eyes, which were her most convincing attraction. They were big eyes, wide open and candid. She had so trained them through a lifetime of practice that she could meet other eyes directly while manipulating her most dextrous evasion. Whenever Eileen was most deceptively subtle, she was looking straight at her victim with the innocent appeal of a baby in her gaze.

John Gilman had had his struggle. He had succeeded. He had watched, and waited, and worked incessantly, and when his opportunity came he was ready. Success had come to such a degree that in a short time he had assured himself of comfort for any woman he loved. He knew that his appearance was quite as pleasing as that of his friend. He knew that in manner and education they were equals. He was now handling large business affairs. He had made friends in high places. Whenever Eileen was ready, he would build and furnish a home he felt sure would be equal, if not superior, to what Morrison was planning. Why had Eileen felt that she would envy any woman who shared life with Peter Morrison?

All that day she had annoyed him, because there must have been in the very deeps of his soul “a still, small voice” whispering to him that he had not lived up to the best traditions of a gentleman in his course with Marian. While no definite plans had been made, there had been endless assumption. Many times they had talked of the home they would make together. When he reached the point where he decided that he never had loved Marian as a man should love the woman he marries, he felt justified in turning to Eileen, but in his heart he knew that if he had been the man he was pleased to consider himself, he would have gone to Marian Thorne and explained, thereby keeping her friendship, while he now knew that he must have earned her contempt.

The day at Riverside had been an enigma he could not solve. Eileen was gay to a degree that was almost boisterous. She had attracted attention and comment which no well-bred woman would have done.

The growing discontent in John’s soul had increased under Linda’s direct attack. He had known Linda since she was four years old and had been responsible for some of her education. He had been a large influence in teaching Linda from childhood to be a good sport, to be sure she was right and then go ahead, and if she hurt herself in the going, to rub the bruise, but to keep her path.

A thing patent to the eye of every man who turned an appraising look upon Linda always had been one of steadfast loyalty. You could depend upon her. She was the counterpart of her father; and Doctor Strong had been loved by other men. Wherever he had gone he had been surrounded. His figure had been one that attracted attention. When he had spoken, his voice and what he had to say had commanded respect. And then there had emanated from him that peculiar physical charm which gives such pleasing and distinguished personality to a very few people in this world. This gift too had descended to Linda. She could sit and look straight at you with her narrow, interested eyes, smile faintly, and make you realize what she thought and felt without opening her lips. John did not feel very well acquainted with the girl who had dominated the recent dinner party, but he did see that she was attractive, that both Peter Morrison and Henry Anderson had been greatly amused and very much entertained by her. He had found her so interesting himself that he had paid slight attention to Eileen’s pouting.

To-night he was forced to study Eileen, for the sake of his own comfort to try to conciliate her. He was uncomfortable because he was unable to conduct himself as Eileen wished him to, without a small sickening disgust creeping into his soul. Before the evening was over he became exasperated, and ended by asking flatly: “Eileen, what in the dickens is the matter with you?”

It was a new tone and a new question on nerves tensely strung.

“If you weren’t blind you’d know without asking,” retorted Eileen hotly.

“Then I am ‘blind,’ for I haven’t the slightest notion. What have I done?”

“Isn’t it just barely possible,” asked Eileen, “that there might be other people who would annoy and exasperate me? I have not hinted that you have done anything, although I don’t know that it’s customary for a man calling on his betrothed to stop first for a visit with her sister.”

“For the love of Mike!” said John Gilman. “Am I to be found fault with for crossing the lawn a minute to see how Linda’s wild garden is coming on? I have dug and helped set enough of those plants to justify some interest in them as they grow.”

“And the garden was your sole subject of conversation?” inquired Eileen, implied doubt conveyed nicely.

“No, it was not,” answered Gilman, all the bulldog in his nature coming to the surface.

“As I knew perfectly,” said Eileen. “I admit that I’m not feeling myself. Things began going wrong recently, and everything has gone wrong since. I think it all began with Marian Thorne’s crazy idea of selling her home and going to the city to try to ape a man.”

“Marian never tried to ape a man in her life,” said John, instantly yielding to a sense of justice. “She is as strictly feminine as any woman I ever knew.”

“Do you mean to say that you think studying architecture is a woman’s work?” sneered Eileen.

“Yes, I do,” said Gilman emphatically. “Women live in houses. They’re in them nine tenths of the time to a man’s one tenth. Next to rocking a cradle I don’t know of any occupation in this world more distinctly feminine than the planning of comfortable homes for homekeeping people.”

Eileen changed the subject swiftly. “What was Linda saying to you?” she asked.

“She was showing me a plant, a rare Echeveria of the Cotyledon family, that she tobogganed down one side of Multiflores Canyon and delivered safely on the roadway without its losing an appreciable amount of ‘bloom’ from its exquisitely painted leaves.”

Eileen broke in rudely. “Linda has missed Marian. There’s not a possible thing to make life uncomfortable for me that she is not doing. You needn’t tell me you didn’t see and understand her rude forwardness the other night!”

“No, I didn’t see it,” said John, “because the fact is I thought the kid was positively charming, and so did Peter and Henry because both of them said so. There’s one thing you must take into consideration, Eileen. The time has come when she should have clothes and liberty and opportunity to shape her life according to her inclinations. Let me tell you she will attract attention in georgette and laces.”

“And where are the georgette and laces to come from?” inquired Eileen sarcastically. “All outgo and no income for four years is leaving the Strong finances in mighty precarious shape, I can tell you.”

“All right,” said Gilman, “I’m financially comfortable now. I’m ready. Say the word. We’ll select our location and build our home, and let Linda have what there is of the Strong income till she is settled in life. You have pretty well had all of it for the past four years.”

“Yes,” said Eileen furiously, “I have ‘pretty well’ had it, in a few little dresses that I have altered myself and very frequently made entirely. I have done the best I could, shifting and skimping, and it’s not accomplished anything that I have really wanted. According to men, the gas and the telephone and the electric light and the taxes and food and cook pay for themselves. All a woman ever spends money on is clothes!”

“Eileen,” chuckled John Gilman, “this sounds exactly as if we were married, and we’re not, yet.”

“No,” said Eileen, “thank heaven we’re not. If it’s come to the place where you’re siding with everybody else against me, and where you’re more interested in what my kid sister has to say to you than you are in me, I don’t think we ever shall be.”

Then, from stress of nerve tension and long practice, some big tears gushed up and threatened to overflow Eileen’s lovely eyes. That never should happen, for tears are salt water and they cut little rivers through even the most carefully and skillfully constructed complexion, while Eileen’s was looking its worst that evening. She hastily applied her handkerchief, and John Gilman took her into his arms; so the remainder of the evening it was as if they were not married. But when John returned to the subject of a home and begged Eileen to announce their engagement and let him begin work, she evaded him, and put him off, and had to have time to think, and she was not ready, and there were many excuses, for none of which Gilman could see any sufficient reason. When he left Eileen that night, it was with a heavy heart.

CHAPTER XIV

Saturday’s Child

Throughout the week Linda had worked as never during her life previously, in order to save Saturday for Donald Whiting. She ran the Bear-cat down to the garage and had it looked over once more to be sure that everything was all right. Friday evening, on her way from school, she stopped at a grocery where she knew Eileen kept an account, and for the first time ordered a few groceries. These she carried home with her, and explained to Katy what she wanted.

Katy fully realized that Linda was still her child, with no thought in her mind save standing at the head of her classes, carrying on the work she had begun with her father, keeping up her nature study, and getting the best time she could out of life in the open as she had been taught to do from her cradle.

Katy had not the slightest intention of opening her lips to say one word that might put any idea into the head of her beloved child, but she saw no reason why she herself should not harbor all the ideas she pleased.

Whereupon, actuated by a combination of family pride, love, ambition in her chosen profession, Katy made ready to see that on the morrow the son of Frederick Whiting should be properly nourished on his outing with Linda.

At six o’clock Saturday morning Linda ran the Bear-cat to the back door, where she and Katy packed it. Before they had finished, Donald Whiting came down the sidewalk, his cheeks flushed with the exercise of walking, his eyes bright with anticipation, his cause forever won—in case he had a cause—with Katy, because she liked the wholesome, hearty manner in which he greeted Linda, and she was dumbfounded when he held out his hand to her and said laughingly: “Blessed among women, did you put in a fine large consignment of orange punch?”

“No,” said Katy, “I’ll just tell ye flat-footed there ain’t going to be any punch, but, young sir, you’re eshcortin’ a very capable young lady, and don’t ye bewail the punch, because ye might be complimenting your face with something ye would like a hape better.”

“Can’t be done, Katy,” cried Donald.

“Ye must have a poor opinion of us,” laughed Katy, “if ye are thinking ye can get to the end of our limitations in one lunch. Fourteen years me and Miss Linda’s been on this lunch-box stunt. Don’t ye be thinkin’ ye can exhaust us in any wan trip, or in any wan dozen.”

So they said good-bye to Katy and rolled past Eileen’s room on the way to the desert. Eileen stood at the window watching them, and never had her heart been so full of discontent and her soul the abiding place of such envy or her mind so busy. Just when she had thought life was going to yield her what she craved, she could not understand how or why things should begin to go wrong.

As the Bear-cat traversed Lilac Valley, Linda was pointing out Peter Morrison’s location. She was telling Donald Whiting where to find Peter’s articles, and what a fine man he was, and that he had promised to think how he could help with their plan to make of Donald a better scholar than was Oka Sayye.

“Well, I call that mighty decent of a stranger,” said Donald.

“But he is scarcely more of a stranger than I am,” answered Linda. “He is a writer. He is interested in humanity. It’s the business of every man in this world to reach out and help every boy with whom he comes in contact into the biggest, finest manhood possible. He only knows that you’re a boy tackling a big job that means much to every white boy to have you succeed with, and for that reason he’s just as interested as I am. Maybe, when we come in this evening, I’ll run up to his place, and you can talk it over with him. If your father helped you at one angle, it’s altogether probable that Peter Morrison could help you at another.”

Donald Whiting rubbed his knee reflectively. He was sitting half turned in the wide seat so that he might watch Linda’s hands and her face while she drove.

“Well, that’s all right,” he said heartily. “You can write me down as willing and anxious to take all the help I can get, for it’s going to be no microscopic job, that I can tell you. One week has waked up the Jap to the fact that there’s something doing, and he’s digging in and has begun, the last day or two, to speak up in class and suggest things himself. Since I’ve been studying him and watching him, I have come to the conclusion that he is much older than I am. Something he said in class yesterday made me think he had probably had the best schooling Japan could give him before he came here. The next time you meet him look for a suspicion of gray hairs around his ears. He’s too blamed comprehensive for the average boy of my age. You said the Japs were the best imitators in the world and I have an idea in the back of my head that before I get through with him, Oka Sayye is going to prove your proposition.”

Linda nodded as she shot the Bear-cat across the streetcar tracks and headed toward the desert. The engine was purring softly as it warmed up. The car was running smoothly. The sun of early morning was shining on them through bracing, salt, cool air, and even in the valley the larks were busy, and the mocking birds, and from every wayside bush the rosy finches were singing. All the world was coming to the exquisite bloom of a half-tropical country. Up from earth swept the heavy odors of blooming citrus orchards, millions of roses, and the overpowering sweetness of gardens and cultivated flowers; while down from the mountains rolled the delicate breath of the misty blue lilac, the pungent odour of California sage, and the spicy sweet of the lemonade bush. They were two young things, free for the day, flying down a perfect road, adventuring with Providence. They had only gone a few miles when Donald Whiting took off his hat, stuffed it down beside him, and threw back his head, shaking his hair to the wind in a gesture so soon to become familiar to Linda. She glanced across at him and found him looking at her. A smile broke over her lips. One of her most spontaneous laughs bubbled up in her throat.

“Topping, isn’t it!” she cried gaily.

“It’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” answered Donald Whiting instantly. “Our car is a mighty good one and Dad isn’t mean about letting me drive it. I can take it frequently and can have plenty of gas and take my crowd; but lordy, I don’t believe there’s a boy or girl living that doesn’t just positively groan when they see one of these little gray Bear-cats go loping past. And I never even had a ride in one before. I can’t get over the fact that it’s yours. It wouldn’t seem so funny if it belonged to one of the fellows.”

With steady hand and gradually increasing speed, Linda put the Bear-cat over the roads of early morning. Sometimes she stopped in the shade of pepper, eucalyptus, or palm, where the larks were specializing in their age-old offertory. And then again they went racing until they reached the real desert. Linda ran the car under the shade of a tall clump of bloom-whitened alders. She took off her hat, loosened the hair at her temples, and looked out across the long morning stretch of desert.

“It’s just beginning to be good,” she said. She began pointing with her slender hand. “That gleam you see over there is the gold of a small clump of early poppies. The purple beyond it is lupin. All these exquisite colours on the floor are birds’-eyes and baby blue eyes, and the misty white here and there is forget-me-not. It won’t be long til thousands and thousands of yucca plants will light their torches all over the desert and all the alders show their lacy mist. Of course you know how exquisitely the Spaniards named the yucca ‘Our Lord’s Candles.’ Isn’t that the prettiest name for a flower, and isn’t it the prettiest thought?”

“It certainly is,” answered Donald.

“Had any experience with the desert?” Linda asked lightly.

“Hunted sage hens some,” answered Donald.

“Oh, well, that’ll be all right,” said Linda. “I wondered if you’d go murdering yourself like a tenderfoot.”

“What’s the use of all this artillery?” inquired Donald as he stepped from the car.

“Better put on your hat. You’re taller than most of the bushes; you’ll find slight shade,” cautioned Linda. “The use is purely a matter of self-protection. The desert has got such a de’il of a fight for existence, without shade and practically without water, that it can’t afford to take any other chance of extermination, and so it protects itself with needles here and spears there and sabers at other places and roots that strike down to China everywhere. First thing we are going to get is some soap.”

“Great hat!” exclaimed Donald. “If you wanted soap why didn’t you bring some?”

“For all you know,” laughed Linda, “I may be going to education you up a little. Dare you to tell me how many kinds of soap I can find to-day that the Indians used, and where I can find it.”

“Couldn’t tell you one to save my life,” said Donald.

“And born and reared within a few miles of the desert!” scoffed Linda. “Nice Indian you’d make. We take our choice to-day between finding deer-brush and digging for amole, because the mock oranges aren’t ripe enough to be nice and soapy yet. I’ve got the deer-brush spotted, and we’ll pass an amole before we go very far. Look for a wavy blue-green leaf like a wide blade of grass and coming up like a lily.”

So together they went to the deer-brush and gathered a bunch of flowers that Linda bound together with some wiry desert grass and fastened to her belt. It was not long before Donald spied an amole, and having found one, discovered many others growing near. Then Linda led the way past thorns and brush, past impenetrable beds of cholla, until they reached a huge barrel cactus that she had located with the glasses. Beside this bristling monstrous growth Linda paused, and reached for the axe, which Donald handed to her. She drew it lightly across the armor protecting the plant.

“Short of Victrola needles?” she inquired. “Because if you are, these make excellent ones. A lot more singing quality to them than the steel needles, not nearly so metallic.”

“Well, I am surely going to try that,” said Donald. “Never heard of such a thing.”

Linda chopped off a section of plant. Then she picked one of the knives from the bucket and handed it to him.

“All right, you get what you want,” she said, “while I operate on the barrel.”

She set her feet firmly in the sand, swung the axe, and with a couple of deft strokes sliced off the top of the huge plant, and from the heart of it lifted up half a bucketful of the juicy interior, with her dipper.

“If we didn’t have drink, here is where we would get it, and mighty good it is,” she said, pushing down with the dipper until she formed a small pool in the heart of the plant which rapidly filled. “Have a taste.”

“Jove, that is good!” said Donald. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Show you later,” laughed Linda. “Think I’ll take a sip myself.”

Then by a roundabout route they started on their return to the car. Once Linda stopped and gathered a small bunch of an extremely curious little plant spreading over the ground, a tiny reddish vine with quaint round leaves that looked as if a drop of white paint rimmed with maroon had fallen on each of them.

“I never saw that before,” said Donald. “What are you going to do with it?”

“Use it on whichever of us gets the first snake bite,” said Linda. “That is rattlesnake weed and if a poisonous snake bites you, score each side of the wound with the cleanest, sharpest knife you have and then bruise the plant and bind it on with your handkerchief, and forget it.”

“Is that what you do?” inquired Donald.

“Why sure,” said Linda, “that is what I would do if a snake were so ungallant as to bite me, but there doesn’t seem to be much of the antagonistic element in my nature. I don’t go through the desert exhaling the odour of fright, and so snakes lie quiescent or slip away so silently that I never see them.”

“Now what on earth do you mean by that?” inquired Donald.

“Why that is the very first lesson Daddy ever taught me when he took me to the mountains and the desert. If you are afraid, your system throws off formic acid, and the animals need only the suspicion of a scent of it to make them ready to fight. Any animal you encounter or even a bee, recognizes it. One of the first things that I remember about Daddy was seeing him sit on the running board of the runabout buckling up his desert boots while he sang to me,

‘Let not your heart be troubled

Neither let it be afraid,’

as he got ready to take me on his back and go into the desert for our first lesson; he told me that a man was perfectly safe in going to the forest or the desert or anywhere he chose among any kind of animals if he had sufficient self-control that no odour of fear emanated from him. He said that a man was safe to make his way anywhere he wanted to go, if he started his journey by recognizing a blood brotherhood with anything living he would meet on the way; and I have heard Enos Mills say that when he was snow inspector of Colorado he traveled the crest of the Rockies from one end of the state to the other without a gun or any means of self-defense.”

“Now, that is something new to think about,” said Donald.

“And it’s something that is very true,” said Linda. “I have seen it work times without number. Father and I went quietly up the mountains, through the canyons, across the desert, and we would never see a snake of any kind, but repeatedly we would see men with guns and dogs out to kill, to trespass on the rights of the wild, and they would be hunting for sticks and clubs and firing their guns where we had passed never thinking of lurking danger. If you start out in accord, at one with Nature, you’re quite as safe as you are at home, sometimes more so. But if you start out to stir up a fight, the occasion is very rare on which you can’t succeed.”

“And that reminds me,” said Donald, with a laugh, “that a week ago I came to start a fight with you. What has become of that fight we were going to have, anyway?”

“You can search me,” laughed Linda, throwing out her hands in a graceful gesture. “There’s not a scrap of fight in my system concerning you, but if Oka Sayye were having a fight with you and I were anywhere around, you’d have one friend who would help you to handle the Jap.”

Donald looked at Linda thoughtfully.

“By the great hocus-pocus,” he said, “you know, I believe you! If two fellows were having a pitched battle most of the girls I know would quietly faint or run, but I do believe that you would stand by and help a fellow if he needed it.”

“That I surely would,” said Linda; “but don’t you say ‘most of the girls I know’ and then make a statement like that concerning girls, because you prove that you don’t know them at all. A few years ago, I very distinctly recall how angry many women were at this line in one of Kipling’s poems:

The female of the species is more deadly than the male,

and there was nothing to it save that a great poet was trying to pay womanhood everywhere the finest compliment he knew how. He always has been fundamental in his process of thought. He gets right back to the heart of primal things. When he wrote that line he was not really thinking that there was a nasty poison in the heart of a woman or death in her hands. What he was thinking was that in the jungle the female lion or tiger or jaguar must go and find a particularly secluded cave and bear her young and raise them to be quite active kittens before she leads them out, because there is danger of the bloodthirsty father eating them when they are tiny and helpless. And if perchance a male finds the cave of his mate and her tiny young and enters it to do mischief, then there is no recorded instance I know of in which the female, fighting in defense of her young, has not been ‘more deadly than the male.’ And that is the origin of the much-discussed line concerning the female of the species, and it holds good fairly well down the line of the wild. It’s even true among such tiny things as guinea pigs and canary birds. There is a mother element in the heart of every girl. Daddy used to say that half the women in the world married the men they did because they wanted to mother them. You can’t tell what is in a woman’s heart by looking at her. You must bring her face to face with an emergency before you can say what she’ll do, but I would be perfectly willing to stake my life on this: There is scarcely a girl you know who would see you getting the worst of a fight, say with Oka Sayye, or someone who meant to kill you or injure you, who would not pick up the first weapon she could lay her hands on, whether it was an axe or a stick or a stone, and go to your defense, and if she had nothing else to fight with, I have heard of women who put up rather a tidy battle with their claws. Sounds primitive, doesn’t it?”

“It sounds true,” said Donald reflectively. “I see, young lady, where one is going to have to measure his words and think before he talks to you.”

“Pretty thought!” said Linda lightly. “We’ll have a great time if you must stop to consider every word before you say it.”

“Well, anyway,” said Donald, “when are we going to have that fight which was the purpose of our coming together?”

“Why, we’re not ever going to have it,” answered Linda. “I have got nothing in this world to fight with you about since you’re doing your level best to beat Oka Sayye. I have watched your head above the remainder of your class for three years and wanted to fight with you on that point.”

“Now that’s a queer thing,” said Donald, “because I have watched you for three years and wanted to fight with you about your drygoods, and now since I’ve known you only such a short while, I don’t care two whoops what you wear. It’s a matter of perfect indifference to me. You can wear French heels or baby pumps, or go barefoot. You would still be you.”

“Is it a truce?” asked Linda.

“No, ma’am,” said Donald, “it’s not a truce. That implies war and we haven’t fought. It’s not armed neutrality; it’s not even watchful waiting. It’s my friend, Linda Strong. Me for her and her for me, if you say so.”

He reached out his hand. Linda laid hers in it, and looking into his eyes, she said: “That is a compact. We’ll test this friendship business and see what there is to it. Now come on; let’s run for the canyon.”

It was only a short time until the Bear-cat followed its trail of the previous Saturday, and, rushing across the stream, stopped at its former resting place, while Linda and Donald sat looking at the sheer-walled little room before them.

“I can see,” said Linda, “a stronger tinge in the green. There are more flowers in the carpet. There is more melody in the birds’ song. We are going to have a better time than we had last Saturday. First let’s fix up our old furnace, because we must have a fire to-day.”

So they left the car, and under Linda’s direction they reconstructed the old fireplace at which the girl and her father had cooked when botanizing in Multiflores. In a corner secluded from wind, using the wall of the canyon for a back wall, big boulders the right distance apart on each side, and small stones for chinking, Linda superintended the rebuilding of the fireplace.

She unpacked the lunch box, set the table, and when she had everything in readiness she covered the table, and taking a package, she carried it on a couple of aluminium pie pans to where her fire was burning crisply. With a small field axe she chopped a couple of small green branches, pointed them to her liking, and peeled them. Then she made a poker from one of the saplings they had used to move the rocks, and beat down her fire until she had a bright bed of deep coals. When these were arranged exactly to her satisfaction, she pulled some sprays of deer weed bloom from her bundle and, going down to the creek, made a lather and carefully washed her hands, tucking the towel she used in drying them through her belt. Then she came back to the fire and, sitting down beside it, opened the package and began her operations. On the long, slender sticks she strung a piece of tenderloin beef, about three inches in circumference and one fourth of an inch in thickness, then half a slice of bacon, and then a slice of onion. This she repeated until her skewer would bear no more weight. Then she laid it across the rocks walling her fire, occasionally turning it while she filled the second skewer. Then she brought from the car the bucket of pulp she had taken from the barrel cactus, transferred it to a piece of cheesecloth and deftly extracted the juice. To this she added the contents of a thermos bottle containing a pint of sugar that had been brought to the boiling point with a pint of water and poured over some chopped spearmint to which had been added the juice of half a dozen lemons and three or four oranges. From a small, metal-lined compartment, Linda took a chunk of ice and dropped it into this mixture.

She was sitting on the ground, one foot doubled under her, the other extended. She had taken off her hat; the wind and the bushes had roughened her hair. Exercise had brought deep red to her cheeks and her lips. Happiness had brought a mellow glow to her dark eyes. She had turned back her sleeves, and her slender hands were fascinatingly graceful in their deft handling of everything she touched. They were a second edition of the hands with which Alexander Strong had felt out defective nerve systems and made delicate muscular adjustments. She was wholly absorbed in what she was doing. Sitting on the blanket across from her Donald Whiting was wholly absorbed in her and he was thinking. He was planning how he could please her, how he could earn her friendship. He was admitting to himself that he had very little, if anything, to show for hours of time that he had spent in dancing, at card games, beach picnics, and races. All these things had been amusing. But he had nothing to show for the time he had spent or the money he had wasted. Nothing had happened that in any way equipped him for his battle with Oka Sayye. Conversely, this girl, whom he had resented, whom he had criticized, who had claimed his notice only by her radical difference from the other girls, had managed, during the few minutes he had first talked with her in the hall, to wound his pride, to spur his ambition, to start him on a course that must end in lasting and material benefit to him even if he failed in making a higher record of scholarship than Oka Sayye. It was very certain that the exercise he was giving his brain must be beneficial. He had learned many things that were intensely interesting to him and he had not even touched the surface of what he could see that she had been taught by her father or had learned through experience and personal investigation. She had been coming to the mountains and the canyons alone, for four years doing by herself what she would have done under her father’s supervision had he lived. That argued for steadfastness and strength of character. She would not utter one word of flattery. She would say nothing she did not mean. Watching her intently, Donald Whiting thought of all these things. He thought of what she had said about fighting for him, and he wondered if it really was true that any girl he knew would fight for him. He hardly believed it when he remembered some of his friends, so entirely devoted to personal adornment and personal gratification. But Linda had said that all women were alike in their hearts. She knew about other things. She must know about this. Maybe all women would fight for their young or for their men, but he knew of no other girl who could drive a Bear-cat with the precision and skill with which Linda drove. He knew no other girl who was master of the secrets of the desert and the canyons and the mountains. Certainly he knew no other girl who would tug at great boulders and build a fireplace and risk burning her fingers and scorching her face to prepare a meal for him. So he watched Linda and so he thought.

At first he thought she was the finest pal a boy ever had, and then he thought how he meant to work to earn and keep her friendship; and then, as the fire reddened Linda’s cheeks and she made running comments while she deftly turned her skewers of brigand beefsteak, food that half the Boy Scouts in the country had been eating for four years, there came an idea with which he dallied until it grew into a luring vision.

“Linda,” he asked suddenly, “do you know that one of these days you’re going to be a beautiful woman?”

Linda turned her skewers with intense absorption. At first he almost thought she had not heard him, but at last she said quietly: “Do you really think that is possible, Donald?”

“You’re lovely right now!” answered the boy promptly.

“For goodness’ sake, have an eye single to your record for truth and veracity,” said Linda. “Doesn’t this begin to smell zippy?”

“It certainly does,” said Donald. “It’s making me ravenous. But honest, Linda, you are a pretty girl.”

“Honest, your foot!” said Linda scornfully. “I am not a pretty girl. I am lean and bony and I’ve got a beak where I should have a nose. Speaking of pretty girls, my sister, Eileen, is a pretty girl. She is a downright beautiful girl.”

“Yes,” said Donald, “she is, but she can’t hold a candle to you. How did she look when she was your age?”

“I can’t remember Eileen,” said Linda, “when she was not exquisitely dressed and thinking more about taking care of her shoes than anything else in the world. I can’t remember her when she was not curled, and even when she was a tiny thing Mother put a dust of powder on her nose. She said her skin was so delicate that it could not bear the sun. She never could run or play or motor much or do anything, because she has always had to be saved for the sole purpose of being exquisitely beautiful. Talk about lilies of the field, that’s what Eileen is! She is an improvement on the original lily of the field—she’s a lily of the drawing room. Me, now, I’m more of a Joshua tree.”

Donald Whiting laughed, as Linda intended that he should.

A minute afterward she slid the savory food from a skewer upon one of the pie pans, tossed back the cover from the little table, stacked some bread-and-butter sandwiches beside the meat and handed the pan to Donald.

“Fall to,” she said, “and prove that you’re a man with an appreciative tummy. Father used to be positively ravenous for this stuff. I like it myself.”

She slid the food from the second skewer to a pan for herself, settled the fire to her satisfaction and they began their meal. Presently she filled a cup from the bucket beside her and handed it to Donald. At the same time she lifted another for herself.

“Here’s to the barrel cactus,” she said. “May the desert grow enough of them so that we’ll never lack one when we want to have a Saturday picnic.”

Laughingly they drank this toast; and the skewers were filled a second time. When they could eat no more they packed away the lunch things, buried the fire, took the axe and the field glasses, and started on a trip of exploration down the canyon. Together they admired delicate and exquisite ferns growing around great gray boulders. Donald tasted hunters’ rock leek, and learned that any he found while on a hunting expedition would furnish a splendid substitute for water. Linda told him of rare flowers she lacked and what they were like and how he would be able to identify what she wanted in case he should ever find any when he was out hunting or with his other friends. They peeped into the nesting places of canyon wrens and doves and finches, and listened to the exquisite courting songs of the birds whose hearts were almost bursting with the exuberance of spring and the joy of home making. When they were tired out they went back to the dining room and after resting a time, they made a supper from the remnants of their dinner. When they were seated in the car and Linda’s hand was on the steering wheel, Donald reached across and covered it with his own.

“Wait a bit,” he said. “Before we leave here I want to ask you a question and I want you to make me a promise.”

“All right,” said Linda. “What’s your question?”

“What is there,” said Donald, “that I can do that would give you such pleasure as you have given me?”

Linda could jest on occasions, but by nature she was a serious person. She looked at Donald reflectively.

“Why, I think,” she said at last, “that having a friend, having someone who understands and who cares for the things I do, and who likes to go to the same places and to do the same things, is the biggest thing that has happened to me since I lost my father. I don’t see that you are in any way in my debt, Donald.”

“All right then,” said the boy, “that brings me to the promise I want you to make me. May we always have our Saturdays together like this?”

“Sure!” said Linda, “I would be mightily pleased. I’ll have to work later at night and scheme, maybe. By good rights Saturday belongs to me anyway because I am born Saturday’s child.”

“Well, hurrah for Saturday! It always was a grand old day,” said Donald, “and since I see what it can do in turning out a girl like you, I’ve got a better opinion of it than ever. We’ll call that settled. I’ll always ask you on Friday at what hour to come, and hereafter Saturday is ours.”

“Ours it is,” said Linda.

Then she put the Bear-cat through the creek and on the road and, driving swiftly as she dared, ran to Lilac Valley and up to Peter Morrison’s location.

She was amazed at the amount of work that had been accomplished. The garage was finished. Peter’s temporary work desk and his cot were in it. A number of his personal belongings were there. The site for his house had been selected and the cellar was being excavated.

Linda descended from the Bear-cat and led Donald before Peter.

“Since you’re both my friends,” she said, “I want you to know each other. This is Donald Whiting, the Senior I told you about, Mr. Morrison. You know you said you would help him if you could.”

“Certainly,” said Peter. “I am very glad to know any friend of yours, Miss Linda. Come over to my workroom and let’s hear about this.”

“Oh, go and talk it over between yourselves,” said Linda. “I am going up here to have a private conversation with the spring. I want it to tell me confidentially exactly the course it would enjoy running so that when your house is finished and I come to lay out your grounds I will know exactly how it feels about making a change.”

“Fine!” said Peter. “Take your time and become extremely confidential, because the more I look at the location and the more I hear the gay chuckling song that that water sings, the more I am in love with your plan to run it across the lawn and bring it around the boulder.”

“It would be a downright sin not to have that water in a convenient place for your children to play in, Peter,” said Linda.

“Then that’s all settled,” said Peter. “Now, Whiting, come this way and we’ll see whether I can suggest anything that will help you with your problem.”

“Whistle when you are ready, Donald,” called Linda as she turned away.

Peter Morrison glanced after her a second, and then he led Donald Whiting to a nail keg in the garage and impaled that youngster on the mental point of a mental pin and studied him as carefully as any scientist ever studied a rare specimen. When finally he let him go, his mental comment was: “He’s a mighty fine kid. Linda is perfectly safe with him.”

CHAPTER XV

Linda’s Hearthstone

Early the following week Linda came from school one evening to find a load of sand and a heap of curiously marked stones beside the back door.

“Can it possibly be, Katy,” she asked, “that those men are planning to begin work on my room so soon? I am scared out of almost seven of my five senses. I had no idea they would be ready to begin work until after I had my settlement with Eileen or was paid for the books.”

“Don’t ye be worried,” said Katy. “There’s more in me stocking than me leg, and you’re as welcome to it as the desert is welcome to rain, an’ nadin’ it ’most as bad.”

“Anyway,” said Linda, “it will surely take them long enough so that I can pay by the time they finish.”

But Linda was not figuring that back of the projected improvements stood two men, each of whom had an extremely personal reason for greatly desiring to please her. Peter Morrison had secured a slab of sandstone. He had located a marble cutter to whom he meant to carry it, and was spending much thought that he might have been using on an article in trying to hit upon exactly the right line or phrase to build in above Linda’s fire—something that would convey to her in a few words a sense of friendship and beauty.

While Peter gazed at the unresponsive gray sandstone and wrote line after line which he immediately destroyed, Henry Anderson explored the mountain and came in, red faced and perspiring, from miles of climbing with a bright stone in each hand, or took the car to bring in small heaps too heavy to carry that he had collected near the roads. They were two men striving for the favour of the same girl. How Linda would have been amused had she understood the situation, or how Eileen would have been provoked, neither of the men knew nor did they care.

The workmen came after Linda left and went before her return. Having been cautioned to silence, Katy had not told her when work actually began; and so it happened that, going to her room one evening, she unlocked the door and stepped inside to face the completed fireplace. The firebox was not very large but ample. The hearthstone was a big sheet of smooth gray sandstone. The sides and top were Henry’s collection of brilliant boulders, carefully and artistically laid in blue mortar, and over the firebox was set Peter’s slab of gray sandstone. On it were four deeply carved lines. The quaint Old English lettering was filled even to the surface with a red mortar, while the capitals were done in dull blue. The girl slowly read:

Voiceless stones, with Flame-tongues Preach

Sermons struck from Nature’s Lyre;

Notes of Love and Trust and Hope

Hourly sing in Linda’s Fire.

In the firebox stood a squat pair of black andirons, showing age and usage. A rough eucalyptus log waited across them while the shavings from the placing of the mantel and the cutting of the windows were tucked beneath it. Linda stood absorbed a minute. She looked at the skylight, flooding the room with the light she so needed coming from the right angle. She went over to the new window that gave her a view of the length of the valley she loved and a most essential draft. When she turned back to the fireplace her hands were trembling.

“Now isn’t that too lovely of them?” she said softly. “Isn’t that altogether wonderful? How I wish Daddy were here to sit beside my fire and share with me the work I hope to do here.”

In order to come as close to him as possible she did the next best thing. She sat down at her table and wrote a long letter to Marian, telling her everything she could think of that would interest her. Then she re-read with extreme care the letter she had found at the Post Office that day in reply to the one she had written Marian purporting to come from an admirer. Writing slowly and thinking deeply, she answered it. She tried to imagine that she was Peter Morrison and she tried to say the things in that letter that she thought Peter would say in the circumstances, because she felt sure that Marian would be entertained by such things as Peter would say. When she finished, she read it over carefully, and then copied it with equal care on the typewriter, which she had removed to her workroom.

When she heard Katy’s footstep outside her door, she opened it and drew her in, slipping the bolt behind her. She led her to the fireplace and recited the lines.

“Now ain’t they jist the finest gentlemen?” said Katy. “Cut right off of a piece of the same cloth as your father. Now some way we must get together enough money to get ye a good-sized rug for under your work table, and then ye’ve got to have two bits of small ones, one for your hearthstone and one for your aisel; and then ye’re ready, colleen, to show what ye can do. I’m so proud of ye when I think of the grand secret it’s keepin’ for ye I am; and less and less are gettin’ me chances for the salvation of me soul, for every night I’m a-sittin’ starin’ at the magazines ye gave me when I ought to be tellin’ me beads and makin’ me devotions. Ain’t it about time the third was comin’ in?”

“Any day now,” said Linda in a whisper. “And, Katy, you’ll be careful? That editor must think that ‘Jane Meredith’ is full of years and ripe experience. I probably wouldn’t get ten cents, no not even a for-nothing chance, if he knew those articles were written by a Junior.”

“Junior nothing!” scoffed Katy. “There was not a day of his life that your pa did not spend hours drillin’ ye in things the rest of the girls in your school never heard of. ’Tain’t no high-school girl that’s written them articles. It’s Alexander Strong speakin’ through the medium of his own flesh and blood.”

“Why, so it is, Katy!” cried Linda delightedly. “You know, I never thought of that. I have been so egoistical I thought I was doing them myself.”

“Paid ye anything yet?” queried Katy.

“No,” said Linda, “they haven’t. It seems that the amount of interest the articles evoke is going to decide what I am to be paid for them, but they certainly couldn’t take the recipe and the comments and the sketch for less than twenty-five or thirty dollars, unless recipes are like poetry. Peter said the other day that if a poet did not have some other profession to support him, he would starve to death on all he was paid for writing the most beautiful things that ever are written in all this world. Peter says even an effort to write a poem is a beautiful thing.”

“Well, maybe that used to be the truth,” said Katy as she started toward the door, “but I have been reading some things labeled ‘poetry’ in the magazines of late, and if the holy father knows what they mean, he’s even bigger than ever I took him to be.”

“Katy,” said Linda, “we are dreadful back numbers. We are letting this world progress and roll right on past us without a struggle. We haven’t either one been to a psycho-analyst to find out the colour of our auras.”

“Now God forbid,” said Katy. “I ain’t going to have one of them things around me. The colours I’m wearin’ satisfy me entoirely.”

“And mine are going to satisfy me very shortly, now,” laughed Linda, “because to-morrow is my big day with Eileen. Next time we have a minute together, old dear, I’ll have started my bank account.”

“Right ye are,” said Katy, “jist exactly right. You’re getting such a great girl it’s the proper thing ye should be suitably dressed, and don’t ye be too modest.”

“The unfortunate thing about that, Katy, is that I intimated the other day that I would be content with less than half, since she is older and she should have her chance first.”

“Now ain’t that jist like ye?” said Katy. “I might have known ye would be doing that very thing.”

“After I have gone over the accounts,” said Linda, “I’ll know better what to demand. Now fly to your cooking, Katy, and let me sit down at this table and see if I can dig out a few dollars of honest coin; but I’m going to have hard work to keep my eyes on the paper with that fireplace before me. Isn’t that red and blue lettering the prettiest thing, Katy, and do you notice that tiny ‘P. M.’ cut down in the lower left-hand corner nearly out of sight? That, Katy, stands for ‘Peter Morrison,’ and one of these days Peter is going to be a large figure on the landscape. The next Post he has an article in I’ll buy for you.”

“It never does,” said Katy, “to be makin’ up your mind in this world so hard and fast that ye can’t change it. In the days before John Gilman got bewitched out of his senses I did think, barrin’ your father, that he was the finest man the Lord ever made; but I ain’t thought so much of him of late as I did before.”

“Same holds good for me,” said Linda.

“I’ve studied this Peter,” continued Katy, “like your pa used to study things under his microscope. He’s the most come-at-able man. He’s got such a kind of a questionin’ look on his face, and there’s a bit of a stoop to his shoulders like they had been whittled out for carryin’ a load, and there’s a kind of a whimsy quiverin’ around his lips that makes me heart stand still every time he speaks to me, because I can’t be certain whether he is going to make me laugh or going to make me cry, and when what he’s sayin’ does come with that little slow drawl, I can’t be just sure whether he’s meanin’ it or whether he’s jist pokin’ fun at me. He said the quarest thing to me the other day when he was here fiddlin’ over the makin’ of this fireplace. He was standin’ out beside your desert garden and I come aven with him and I says to him: ‘Them’s the rare plants Miss Linda and her pa have been goin’ to the deserts and the canyons, as long as he lived, to fetch in; and then Miss Linda went alone, and now the son of Judge Whiting, the biggest lawyer in Los Angeles, has begun goin’ with her. Ain’t it the brightest, prettiest place?’ I says to him. And he stood there lookin’, and he says to me: ‘No, Katy, that is a graveyard.’ Now what in the name of raison was the man meanin’ by that?”

Linda stared at the hearth motto reflectively.

“A graveyard!” she repeated. “Well, if anything could come farther from a graveyard than that spot, I don’t know how it would do it. I haven’t the remotest notion what he meant. Why didn’t you ask him?”

“Well, the truth is,” said Katy, “that I proide myself on being able to kape me mouth shut when I should.”

“I’ll leave to think over it,” said Linda. “At present I have no more idea than you in what respect my desert garden could resemble a graveyard. Oh! yes, there’s one thing I wanted to ask you, Katy. Has Eileen been around while this room was being altered?”

“She came in yesterday,” answered Katy, “when the hammerin’ and sawin’ was goin’ full blast.”

“What I wanted to find out’” said Linda, “was whether she had been here and seen this room or not, because if she hasn’t and she wants to see it, now is her time. After I get things going here and these walls are covered with drying sketches this room is going to be strictly private. You see that you keep your key where nobody gets hold of it.”

“It’s on a string round me neck this blessed minute,” said Katy. “I didn’t see her come up here, but ye could be safe in bettin’ anything ye’ve got that she came.”

“Yes, I imagine she did,” said Linda. “She would be sufficiently curious that she would come to learn how much I have spent if she had no other interest in me.”

She looked at the fireplace reflectively.

“I wonder,” she said, “what Eileen thought of that and I wonder if she noticed that little ‘P. M.’ tucked away down there in the corner.”

“Sure she did,” said Katy. “She has got eyes like a cat. She can see more things in a shorter time than anybody I ever knew.”