"It's no use," he said to himself, sadly. "I wish it might have been, but it ain't. I ain't such a fool I can't see a door when it's shut right before me. I'm blessed to be her friend, and I'll be it if the heavens drop. I'm in my Waterloo an' must just wade across an' shake myself. That's all." His sunny nature always overcame his disappointments, but from that hour in an upper niche of his heart's shrine he placed Jerry's image, one of the beautiful things of life he might do homage to but could never possess. "They's just one favor I want to ask of you," he said, aloud, "an' that is that you'll go with me to call on mother out to the cemetery sometimes. I'd like her to know you, too. She was good, and a good mother just lives on." Jerry's cheek paled a shade, but she said, graciously: "I'll be glad to do that, Mr. Ponk. Maybe it will make me a little less rebellious, and you will be doing me the favor." Ponk's face beamed with pleasure at her words the while a real tear rolled unnoticed down his cheek. That night marked the beginning of a new spiritual life for Jerry Swaim. XIV JIM SWAIM'S WISH The next morning, when Jerry Swaim was ready to go to the bank, her pretty beaded bag seemed light as she lifted it, and when she opened her purse she found it empty. Then she sat down and stared at herself in the mirror opposite her. "Well, what next? Go mad or go back East? This must be the last ditch," she murmured. "Joe Thomson said he didn't _go_ mad, but he did _get_ mad. I'm mad clear to my Swaim toes, and I'm not going to take another bump. It's been nothing but bumps ever since I reached the junction of the main line with the Sage Brush branch back in June, and I'm tired of it. Gene Wellington said the West got the better of his father. The East seems to have gotten the best of his father's son." Across her mind swept the thought of how easy Gene's way was being made for him in the East, and how the way of the West for her had to be fought over inch by inch. "Neither East nor West shall get me." She tossed her head imperiously, for Jim Swaim's chin, York Macpherson would have said, was in command, and the dreamy eyes were flashing fire. An hour later Ponk's gray runabout was spinning off the miles of the trail down the Sage Brush, with Jerry Swaim's hands gripping the wheel firmly, though her cheeks were pink with excitement. Where a road from the west crossed the trail, the stream cut through a ledge of shale, leaving a little bluffy bank on either side, with a bridge standing high above the water. Joe Thomson, in a big farm wagon, had just met his neighbor, Thelma Ekblad, in her plain car, at the end of the bridge, when Jerry's horn called her approach. Before they had time to shift aside the gray car swept by with graceful curve, missing the edge of the bridge abutment by an eyelash.