t know what it was costing her--till she
was gone."

There was another silence. In the orchestra, out beyond the palms and
screens of the Venetian room, the first violin was playing the
_Humoresque_. The girl leaned forward slightly, watching Jimmie's face.
Her lips were parted, and an unexpected sympathy softened her eyes.

"She had been a school teacher back in Iowa," he resumed, "and long winter
evenings and Sundays when she could, she always had her books out. Up to
the year I was twenty, she taught me all I knew. She tried her best to
make a man of me, and I can see now how she turned my mind to journalism.
She said some day there was going to be an opening for a newspaper right
there in the Columbia desert. Where a great river received the waters of
another big stream, there was bound to be a city. She saw farther than we
did. The High Line canal was only a pipe dream then, but she believed it
would come true. When she died, we hadn't the heart to stay on with the
ranch, so Dad gave it to me, to sell for what I could get, and went back
to Iowa. He said he had promised her he would give me a chance at the
State University, and that was the best he could do. And, well, you see I
had to come to the U. of W. to stay, and I was used to work. I did all
sorts of stunts out of hours and managed to pull through the second
semester. Then I hiked over the mountains to the Wenatchee valley and
earned enough that summer vacation to tide me over the next year. I had a
friend there in the sage-brush country, a station agent named Bailey, who
had blown a thousand dollars into a tract of desert land he hadn't seen
off the map. He was the kind of fellow to call himself all kinds of a
fool, then go ahead and make that ground pay his money back. He saw a way
to bring it under irrigation and had it cleared and set to apples. But,
while he was waiting for the trees to grow, he put in fillers of alfalfa
and strawberries. He was operating for the new Milwaukee railroad then,
and hired me to harvest his crops. They paid my wages and the two Japs I
had to help, with a snug profit. And his trees were doing fine; thrifty,
every one in the twenty acres. Last year they began to bear, only a few
apples to a tree, but for flavor and size fit for Eden. This year he is
giving up his position with the Milwaukee; his orchards are going to make
him rich. And he wrote me the other day that the old ranch I threw away is
coming under the new High Line d