he lone old fisherman was the farthest down
in the scale from Geraldine Swaim of any human being who had ever shown
her a favor. He could not have had any interest for her.... But York
Macpherson was correct in his estimate of Jerry. She was a type in
herself alone. She drove far beyond the narrow place by the deep hole
where, with accurate eye and clear skill, she had played a game of
chance with the river and fate and guardian angels. Her tires had cut a
wide, curving gash across the sand of the road.

"My gracious alive! that was a close turn!" she exclaimed, as she caught
sight of her wheel-marks. "No wonder the old Teddy Bear looked scared.
One inch or less! Well, there was that inch. But what for? To enter on
my vast landed--vast sanded--estate in the kingdom of Kansas!"

Jerry smiled grimly in ridicule of her foolish, defrauded self. Then in
a desperate effort to blot out of mind what she had seen she hurled the
gray car madly forward. With the bewildered gropings of a shipwrecked
landsman she was struggling to get her bearings, she for whom the earth
had been especially designed. As the hours passed the road became dry
and sunny, with the north breeze tempering the air to the coolness of a
rare Kansas June day, entirely unlike the hot and windy one on which
Jerry had first come up this valley. She did not, in reality, cover many
miles now, because she made long stops in sheltered places and at times
let the gray machine merely creep on the sunny stretches, but in her
mind she had girdled the universe.

In the late afternoon she turned about wearily, as one who has yet many
leagues of ground to cover before nightfall. The sunlight glistened
along the surface of the river and a richer green gleamed in what had
been the shadowy places earlier in the day; but the driver in the car
paid little heed to the lights and shadows of the way.

"If a man went right with himself." Cornelius Darby's words came
drifting across the girl's mind. "Poor Uncle Cornie! He didn't begin to
live, to me, until he was gone. Maybe he knew what it meant for a man
_not_ to go right with himself. And if a woman went right with herself!"

Jerry halted her car again by the deep hole and looked at nothing where
the Sage Brush waters were rippling over the rough ledge in its bed. For
the first time since she had sat under the oak-trees and looked at the
acres that were hers, Jerry Swaim really found herself on solid ground
again. The bloom ca