LITMIR.BIZ

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it had wandered in her school-girl vacations--in a possible future spent by his side. She brought her fancy back again sharply. She had other things to think of now; but there must always be something between her and Tarvin different from her relation to any other man. They had lived in the same house on the prairie at the end of the section, and had risen to take up the same desolate life together morning after morning. The sun brought the morning greyly up over the sad grey plain, and at night left them alone together in the midst of the terrible spaces of silence. They broke the ice together in the muddy river near the section-house, and Tarvin carried her pail back for her. A score of other men lived under the same roof, but it was Tarvin who was kind. The others ran to do what she asked them to do. Tarvin found things to do, and did them while she slept. There was plenty to do. Her mother had a family of twenty-five, twenty of whom were boarders--the men working in one capacity or another directly under Sheriff. The hands engaged in the actual work of building the railroad lived in huge barracks near by, or in temporary cabins or tents. The Sheriffs had a house; that is, they lived in a structure with projecting eaves, windows that could be raised or lowered, and a verandah. But this was the sum of their conveniences, and the mother and daughter did their work alone with the assistance of two Swedes, whose muscles were firm but whose cookery was vague.

      Tarvin helped her, and she learned to lean on him; she let him help her, and Tarvin loved her for it. The bond of work shared, of a mutual dependence, of isolation, drew them to each other; and when Kate left the section-house for school there was a tacit understanding between them. The essence of such an understanding, of course, lies in the woman's recognition of it. When she came back from school for the first holiday, Kate's manner did not deny her obligation, but did not confirm the understanding, and Tarvin, restless and insistent as he was about other things, did not like to force his claim upon her. It wasn't a claim he could take into court.

      This kind of forbearance was well enough while he expected to have her always within reach, while he imagined for her the ordinary future of an unmarried girl. But when she said she was going to India she changed the case. He was not thinking of courtesy or forbearance, or of the propriety of waiting to be formally accepted as he talked to her on the bridge, and afterward in the evenings. He ached with his need for her, and with the desire to keep her.

      But it looked as if she were going--going in spite of everything he could say, in spite of his love. He had made her believe in that, if it was any comfort; and it was real enough to her to hurt her, which was a comfort!

      Meanwhile she was costing him much, in one way and another, and she liked him well enough to have a conscience about it. But when she would tell him that he must not waste so much time and thought on her, he would ask her not to bother her little head about him: he saw more in her than he did in real estate or politics just then he knew what he was about.

      'I know,' returned Kate. 'But you forget what a delicate position you put me in. I don't want to be responsible for your defeat. Your party will say I planned it.'

      Tarvin made a positive and unguarded remark about his party, to which Kate replied that if he didn't care she must; she couldn't have it said, after the election, that he had neglected his canvass for her, and that her father had won his seat in consequence.

      'Of course,' she added frankly, 'I want father to go to the State legislature, and I don't want you to go, because if you win the election, he can't; but I don't want to help prevent you from getting in.'

      'Don't worry about your father getting that seat, young lady!' cried Tarvin. 'If that's all you've got to lie awake about, you can sleep from now until the Three C.'s comes to Topaz. I'm going to Denver myself this fall, and you'd better make your plans to come along. Come! How would it suit you to be the speaker's wife, and live on Capitol Hill?'

      Kate liked him well enough to go half credulously with him in his customary assumption that the difference between his having anything he wanted and his not having it, was the difference between his wanting it and his not wanting it.

      'Nick!' she exclaimed, deriding but doubtful, 'you won't be speaker!'

      'I'd undertake to be governor, if I thought the idea would fetch you. Give me a word of hope, and you'll see what I'd do!'

      'No, no!' she said, shaking her head.'My governors are all Rajahs, and they live a long way from here.'

      'But say, India's half the size of the United States. Which State are you going to?'

      'Which----?'

      'Ward, township, county, section? What's your post-office address?'

      'Rhatore, in the province of Gokral Seetarun, Rajputana, India.'

      'All that!' he repeated despairingly. There was a horrible definiteness about it; it almost made him believe she was going. He saw her drifting hopelessly out of his life into a land on the nether rim of the world, named out of the Arabian Nights and probably populated out of them. 'Nonsense, Kate! You're not going to try to live in any such heathen fairyland. What's it got to do with Topaz, Kate? What's it got to do with home? You can't do it, I tell you. Let them nurse themselves. Leave it to them! Or leave it to me! I'll go over myself, turn some of their pagan jewels into money, and organise a nursing corps on a plan that you shall dictate. Then we'll be married, and I'll take you out to look at my work. I'll make a go of it. Don't say they're poor. That necklace alone would fetch money enough to organise an army of nurses! If your missionary told the truth in his sermon at church the other night, it would pay the national debt. Diamonds the size of hens' eggs, yokes of pearls, coils of sapphires the girth of a man's wrist, and emeralds until you can't rest--and they hang all that around the neck of an idol, or keep it stored in a temple, and call on decent white girls to come out and help nurse them! It's what I call cheek.'

      'As if money could help them! It's not that. There's no charity or kindness or pity in money, Nick; the only real help is to give yourself.'

      'All right. Then give me too! I'll go along,' he said, returning to the safer humorous view.

      She laughed, but stopped herself suddenly. 'You mustn't come to India, Nick. You won't do that? You won't follow me! You shan't.'

      'Well, if I get a place as rajah, I don't say I wouldn't. There might be a dollar in it.'

      'Nick! They wouldn't let an American be a rajah.'

      It is strange that men to whom life is a joke find comfort in women to whom it is a prayer.

      'They might let him run a rajah, though,' said Tarvin, undisturbed; 'and it might be the softer snap. Rajahing itself is classed extra hazardous, I think.'

      'How?'

      'By the accident insurance companies--double premium. None of my companies would touch the risk. They might take a vizier, though,' he added meditatively. 'They come from that Arabian Nights section, don't they?'

      'Well, you are not to come,' she said definitively. 'You must keep away. Remember that.'

      Tarvin got up suddenly. 'Oh, good-night! Good-night!' he cried.

      He shook himself together impatiently, and waved her from him with a parting gesture of rejection and cancellation. She followed him into the passage, where he was gloomily taking his hat from its wonted peg; but he would not even let her help him on with his coat.

      No man can successfully conduct a love-affair and a political canvass at the same time. It was perhaps the perception of this fact that had led Sheriff to bend an approving eye on the attentions which his opponent in the coming election had lately been paying his daughter. Tarvin had always been interested in Kate, but not so consecutively and intensely. Sheriff was stumping the district and was seldom at home, but in his irregular appearances at Topaz he smiled stolidly on his rival's occupation. In looking forward to an easy victory over him in the joint debate at Cañon City, however, he had perhaps relied too much on the younger man's absorption. Tarvin's consciousness that he had not been playing his party fair had lately chafed against his pride of success. The result was irritation, and Kate's prophecies and insinuations were pepper on an open wound.

      The Cañon City meeting was set down for the night

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