trange
sense of sorrow, and a strange new purpose would not have found a place
in Joe Thomson's heart then. With a perception much keener than her own,
he read Jerry's mind that night as she had never tried to read it
herself.

"I'm better up on soils and farm products than on civic problems and
social economy and such. Dry farming, clerking, sewing, household
economics in somebody's cook-shack, teaching school, giving music
lessons, canvassing for magazines--the Sage Brush girls do things like
these. I wish I could name a calling more suitable for you, but this is
the only line I can offer," Joe said, thinking how impossible it would
be for the girl beside him to fit into the workaday world of the Sage
Brush Valley. On the next ranch to his own up the river a fair-haired,
sun-browned girl was working in the harvest-field this season to save
the price of a hired hand, toward going to college that fall. Jolly,
strong-handed, strong-hearted Thelma Ekblad, whose name was yet to
adorn an alumni record of the big university proud to call her its
product. Jerry Swaim would never thrive in the same soil with this stout
Norwegian.

They were standing on the porch steps now, and the white moonbeams
glorified Jerry's beauty, for the young ranchman, as she looked up at
him with a smile on her lips and eyes full of light, a sudden decision
giving new character to her countenance. The suddenness of it, that was
her mother's child. The purpose, that was the reflection of Jim Swaim's
mind.

"I'm on the other side of my Rubicon. I'm going to teach mathematics in
the New Eden high-school. Will you help me to keep across the river?
There's an inspiration for me in the things that you can do?"

"You! Teach mathematics! They always have a man to teach that!" Joe
exclaimed, wondering behind his words if he only dreamed that she had
asked him to help to keep her across her Rubicon, or if she had really
said such a beautiful thing to him, Joe Thomson, sand-fighter and
general loser, who wouldn't be downed.

"Oh, I don't wonder you are surprised! I always jump quickly when I do
move. You think I couldn't teach A, B, C, the known quantities, let
alone x, y, z, the unknown quantities, don't you?" Jerry said, gaily.
"When I went to school I was a flunker in languages and sciences. I was
weak in boarding-school embroidery, too, because I never cared for those
things, nor was I ever made to study anything unless I chose to do it.
But I was s