Dorothy Dale's engagement

By this time even Ned, dense as he sometimes showed himself to be, was aware of how things stood between the handsome stranger from the West and his cousin Dorothy.

Ned’s heart was particularly warm at this juncture. He spent a good two hours every forenoon writing a long letter to Jennie.

“What under the sun he finds to write about gets me,” declared Tavia. “He must indite sonnets to her eyebrows or the like. I never did believe that Ned White would fall so low as to be a poet.”

“Love plays funny tricks with us,” sighed Dorothy.

“Huh!” ejaculated Tavia, wide-eyed. “Do you feel like writing poetry yourself, Doro Dale? I vum!”

However, to return to Ned, when his letter writing was done he was at the beck and call of the girls or was off with Garry Knapp for the rest of the day. Toward Garry he showed the same friendliness that his mother displayed and the major showed. They all liked the young man from Desert City; and they could not help admiring his character, although they could not believe him either wise or just to Dorothy.

The situation was delicate in the extreme. As Dorothy and Garry had never approached the subject of their secret attachment for each other, and now, of course, did not speak of it to the others, not even Ned could blunder into any opening wherein he might “out with his opinion” to the Westerner.

Garry Knapp showed nothing but the most gentlemanly regard for Dorothy. After that first evening on the ice, he did not often allow himself to be left alone in her company. He knew very well wherein his own weakness lay.

He talked frankly of his future intentions. It had been agreed between him and Major Dale that the old Knapp ranch should be turned over to the Hardin estate lawyers when Garry went back West at a price per acre that was generous, as Garry said, but not so much above the market value that he would be “ashamed to look the lawyers in the face when he took the money.”

Just what Garry would do with these few thousands he did not know. His education had been a classical one. He had taken up nothing special save mineralogy, and that only because of Uncle Terry’s lifelong interest in “prospects.”

“I boned like a good fellow,” he told Ned, “on that branch just to please the old fellow. Of course, I’d tagged along with him on a burro on many a prospecting trip when I was a kid, and had learned a lot of prospector’s lore from the dear old codger.

“But what the old prospector knows about his business is a good deal like what the old-fashioned farmer knows about growing things. He does certain things because they bring results, but the old farmer doesn’t know why. Just so with the old-time prospector. Uncle Terry’s scientific knowledge of minerals wasn’t a spoonful. I showed him things that made his eyes bug out—as we say in the West,” and Garry laughed reminiscently.

“I shouldn’t have thought he’d ever have quarreled with you,” said Ned, having heard this fact from the girls. “You must have been helpful to him.”

“That’s the reef we were wrecked on,” said Garry, shaking his head rather sadly.

“You don’t mean it! How?” queried Ned.

“Why, I’ll tell you. I don’t talk of it much. Of course, you understand Uncle Terry is one of the old timers. He’s lived a rough life and associated with rough men for most of it. And his slant on moral questions is not—well—er—what yours and mine would be, White.”

“I see,” said Ned, nodding. “You collided on a matter of ethics?”

“As you might say,” admitted Garry. “There are abandoned diggings all over the West, especially where gold was found in rich deposits that can now be dug over and, by scientific methods, made to yield comfortable fortunes.

“Why, in the early rush the metal, silver, was not thought of! The miners cursed the black stuff which got in their way and later proved to be almost pure silver ore. Other valuable metals were neglected, too. The miners could see nothing but yellow. They were gold crazy.”

“I see,” Ned agreed. “It must have been great times out there in those early days.”

“Ha!” exclaimed Garry. “For every ounce of gold mined in the old times there was a man wasted. The early gold mining cost more in men than a war, believe me! However, that isn’t the point, or what I was telling you about.

“Some time after I left the university Uncle Terry wanted me to go off on a prospecting trip with him and I went—just for the holiday, you understand. These last few years he hasn’t made a strike. He has plenty of money, anyway; but the wanderlust of the old prospector seizes him and he just has to pack up and go.

“We struck Seeper’s Gulch. It was some strike in its day, about thirty years ago. The gold hunters dug fortunes out of that gulch, and then the Chinese came in and raked over and sifted the refuse. You’d think there wasn’t ten cents worth of valuable metal left in that place, wouldn’t you?”

Ned nodded, keenly interested in the story.

“Well, that’s what the old man thought. He made all kinds of jokes over a squatter’s family that had picketed there and were digging and toiling over the played out claims.

“It seemed that they held legal title to a big patch of the gulch. Some sharper had sawed off the claim on them for good, hard-earned money; and here they were, broke and desperate. Why! there hadn’t been any gold mined there for years and years, and their title, although perfectly legal, wasn’t worth a cent—or so it seemed.

“Uncle Terry tried to show them that. They were stubborn. They had to be, you see,” said Garry, shaking his head. “Every hope they had in the world was right in that God-forsaken gulch.

“Well,” he sighed, “I got to mooning around, impatient to be gone, and I found something. It was so plain that I wonder I didn’t fall over it and break my neck,” and Garry laughed.

“What was it? Not gold?”

“No. Copper. And a good, healthy lead of it. I traced the vein some distance before I would believe it myself. And the bulk of it seemed to lie right inside the boundaries of that supposedly worthless claim those poor people had bought.

“I didn’t dare tell anybody at first. I had to figure out how she could be mined (for copper mining isn’t like washing gold dust) and how the ore could be taken to the crusher. The old roads were pretty good, I found. It wouldn’t be much of a haul from Seeper’s Gulch to town.

“Then I told Uncle Terry—and showed him.”

Ned waited, looking at Garry curiously.

“That—that’s where he and I locked horns,” sighed Garry. “Uncle Terry was for offering to buy the claim for a hundred dollars. He had that much in his jeans and the squatters were desperate—meat and meal all out and not enough gold in the bottom of the pans to color a finger-ring.”

He was silent again for a moment, and then continued:

“I couldn’t see it. To take advantage of the ignorance of that poor family wasn’t a square deal. Uncle Terry lost his head and then lost his temper. To stop him from making any such deal I out with my story and showed those folks just where they stood. A little money would start ’em, and I lent them that——”

“But your Uncle Terry?” asked Ned, curiously.

“Oh, he went off mad. I saw the squatters started right and then made for home. I was some time getting there——”

“You cleaned yourself out helping the owners of the claim?” put in Ned, shrewdly.

“Why—yes, I did. But that was nothing. I’d been broke before. I got a job here and there to carry me along. But when I reached home Uncle Terry had hiked out for Alaska and left a letter with a lawyer for me. I was the one bad egg in the family,” and Garry laughed rather ruefully, “so he said. He’d rather give his money to build a rattlesnake home than to me. So that’s where we stand to-day. And you see, White, I did not exactly prepare myself for any profession or any business, depending as I was on Uncle Terry’s bounty.”

“Tough luck,” announced Ned White.

“It was very foolish on my part. No man should look forward to another’s shoes. If I had gone ahead with the understanding that I had my own row to hoe when I got through school, believe me, I should have picked my line long before I left the university and prepared accordingly.

“I figure that I’m set back several years. With this little bunch of money your uncle is going to pay me for my old ranch I have got to get into something that will begin to turn me a penny at once. Not so easy to do, Mr. White.”

“But what about the folks you steered into the copper mine?” asked Ned.

“Oh, they are making out fairly well. It was no great fortune, but a good paying proposition and may keep going for years. Copper is away up now, you know. They paid me back the loan long ago. But poor old Uncle Terry—well, he is still sore, and I guess he will remain so for the remainder of his natural. I’m sorry for him.”

“And not for yourself?” asked Ned, slyly.

“Why, I’d be glad if he’d back me in something. Developing my ranch into wheat land, for instance. Money lies that way, I believe. But it takes two or three years to get going and lots of money for machinery. Can’t raise wheat out there in a small way. It means tractors, and gangplows and all such things. Whew! no use thinking of that now,” and Garry heaved a final sigh.

He had not asked Ned to keep the tale to himself; therefore, the family knew the particulars of Garry Knapp’s trouble with his uncle in a short time. It was the one thing needed to make Major Dale, at least, desire to keep in touch with the young Westerner.

“I’m not surprised that he looks upon any understanding with Dorothy in the way he does,” the major said to Aunt Winnie. “He is a high-minded fellow—no doubt of it. And I believe he is no namby-pamby. He will go far before he gets through. I’ll prophesy that.”

“But, my dear Major,” said his sister, with a rather tremulous smile, “it may be years before such an honorable young man as Garry Knapp will acquire a competence sufficient to encourage him to come after our Dorothy.”

“Well—er——”

“And they need each other now,” went on Mrs. White, with assurance, “while they are young and can get the good of youth and of life itself. Not after their hearts are starved by long and impatient waiting.”

“Oh, the young idiot!” growled the major, shaking his head.

Aunt Winnie laughed, although there was still a tremor in her voice. “You call him high-minded and an idiot——”

“He is both,” growled Major Dale. “Perhaps, to be cynical, one might say that in this day and generation the two attributes go together! I—I wish I knew the way out.”

“So do I,” sighed Mrs. White. “For Dorothy’s sake,” she added.

“For both their sakes,” said the major. “For, believe me, this young man isn’t having a very good time, either.”

Tavia wished she might “cut the Gordian knot,” as she expressed it. Ned would have gladly shown Garry a way out of the difficulty. And Dorothy Dale could do nothing!

“What helpless folk we girls are, after all,” she confessed to Tavia. “I thought I was being so bold, so brave, in getting Garry to come East. I believed I had solved the problem through father’s aid. And look at it now! No farther toward what I want than before.”

“Garry Knapp is a—a chump!” exclaimed Tavia, with some heat.

“But a very lovable chump,” added Dorothy, smiling patiently. “Oh, dear! It must be his decision, not mine, after all. I tell you, even the most modern of girls are helpless in the end. The man decides.”

Nat came back to North Birchland in haste. It needed only a word—even from his brother—to bring him. Perhaps he would have met Tavia as though no misunderstanding had arisen between them had she been willing to ignore their difficulty.

But when he kissed Dorothy and his mother, and turned to Tavia, she put out her hand and looked Nat sternly in the eye. He knew better than to make a joke of his welcome home with her. She had raised the barrier herself and she meant to keep it up.

“The next time you kiss me it must be in solemn earnest.”

She had said that to Nat and she proposed to abide by it. The old, cordial, happy-go-lucky comradeship could never be renewed. Nat realized that suddenly and dropped his head as he went indoors with his bag.

He had returned almost too late to meet Garry Knapp after all. The Westerner laughingly protested that he had loafed long enough. He had to run down to New York for a day or so to attend to some business for Bob Douglas and then must start West.

“Come back here before you really start for the ‘wild and woolly,’” begged Ned. “We’ll get up a real house party——”

“Tempt me not!” cried Garry, with hand raised. “It is hard enough for me to pull my freight now. If I came again I’d only have to—well! it would be harder, that’s all,” and his usually hopeful face was overcast.

“Remember you leave friends here, my boy,” said the major, when he saw the young man alone the evening before his departure. “You’ll find no friends anywhere who will be more interested in your success than these at The Cedars.”

“I believe you, Major. I wish I could show my appreciation of your kindness in a greater degree by accepting your offer to help me. But I can’t do it. It wouldn’t be right.”

“No. From your standpoint, I suppose it wouldn’t,” admitted the major, with a sigh. “But at least you’ll correspond——”

“Ned and I are going to write each other frequently—we’ve got quite chummy, you know,” and Garry laughed. “You shall all hear of me. And thank you a thousand times for your interest Major Dale!”

“But my interest hasn’t accomplished what I wanted it to accomplish,” muttered the old gentleman, as Garry turned away.

Dorothy showed a brave face when the time came for Garry’s departure. She did not make an occasion for seeing him alone, as she might easily have done. Somehow she felt bound in honor—in Garry’s honor—not to try to break down his decision. She knew he understood her; and she understood Garry. Why make the parting harder by any talk about it?

But Tavia’s observation as Garry was whirled away by Ned in the car for the railway station, sounded like a knell in Dorothy Dale’s ears.

“It’s all off!” remarked Tavia.