Zeph

HELEN JACKSON (H. H.),
AUTHOR OF
“RAMONA,” “A CENTURY OF DISHONOR,” “VERSES,” “BITS OF TRAVEL,”
“BITS OF TRAVEL AT HOME,” “BITS OF TALK ABOUT HOME
MATTERS,” “BITS OF TALK FOR YOUNG FOLKS,” “MERCY
PHILBRICK’S CHOICE,” “HETTY’S STRANGE HISTORY,”
“NELLY’S SILVER MINE,” “LETTERS FROM A CAT,”
“MAMMY TITTLEBACK AND HER FAMILY,”
“THE HUNTER CATS OF CONNORLOA.”

BOSTON:
ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1885.

[4]

Copyright, 1885,
By Roberts Brothers.

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.

[5]

I.

The long Colorado twilight was over. But it was not yet quite lamplight time by the clock, and Miss Sophy Burr was sitting in a brown study at her kitchen window. This was the time she always took to make a swift retrospect in her mind of the results, profitable or otherwise, of the day just ended. She could think better in the dark, and the small economy of doing without a lamp until the last possible minute gave her a distinct pleasure. She was the strangest mixture of generosity and stinginess ever poured into human mould, her boarders said; and nobody knew better than they, for there was not a boarder in the [6]house who had not been with her at least a year: some five and some six, and one old couple—Mr. and Mrs. Jones—had been with her ten. They were in Colorado for their health,—Mr. Jones for Mrs. Jones’s, and vice versa Mrs. Jones for Mr. Jones’s; so they always declared, a rare instance of uniformity in conjugal needs. They began with Miss Sophy in the year when she began, and the town began,—almost before Miss Sophy fairly began; for all she had in way of a house then was a tent with a sort of fly attachment for a kitchen, and the boarders ate their meals in Miss Sophy’s bedroom; or, to put it differently, Miss Sophy was obliged, owing to the scarcity of accommodations and the rush of custom, to sleep temporarily in her dining-room. That sounds better than to say that her boarders dined in her bedroom.

This was ten years ago. But to look at Pendar Basin to-day, and to recall what it was [7]then, one would say it must have been nearer twenty, so marvellously had the colony grown and developed. It was now what is called a “thriving” place of some six thousand people,—all active, all making money, none rich, none very poor, few of any pretence to what is called in older places “social position,” but all or nearly all of fair intelligence and good business education in their respective callings.

It had the making of a town in it,—a superb site, good water, the command of two mountain passes through which must go up and out of the Basin all the freight for two large mining districts in the west and in the south. A railroad, one of the main Colorado lines, brought in the supplies to be thus shipped, and kept it, moreover, in close relation with the outside world. On the whole, a very lucky little village was Pendar Basin; and especially lucky were those who came in the beginning, in the “tent and coyote” days, as they were called, and had seen [8]the lots they bought then for hundreds of dollars boom up into value rated by thousands.

Miss Sophy had not ten dollars in the world when she began. Her story was a sad one, but its details do not belong here. She had come out from New England to Colorado to join her lover; found him dead, buried only the week before her arrival, his last words full of anguished anxiety on her account, for he had not been successful, and had nothing to leave her except a grave to be tended; and the first thing the poor soul did, was to spend a few of her dollars in building a high fence around the bare sandy mound which hid her lover from her sight. Then she hired a tent, put out her sign, rolled up her sleeves, and went to work to earn money enough to carry her home. But the spell of the wilderness seized hold upon her, and she never went; and now there was not in all the town a better-known, a more universally respected woman than Miss Sophy: respected by the [9]women because of her helpful cheery nature and exceeding decorum of conduct; respected by the men because she had a “level head” and “owned considerable property,”—surest passports to favor in the minds of business men.

As Miss Sophy sat revolving in her mind the relative proportions between what she had expended and what she had received on the day just closed, a frown deepened on her forehead. The balance did not please her. The margin of profit which she had prescribed to herself as a uniform rule had been diminished by injudicious luxury added to dinner.

“’Twas the jelly,” she said to herself. “That was what did it. But I can’t bring myself to give roast mutton without it. Capers come cheaper and go farther. I’ll boil oftener.”

At least hundreds of times in the last eight years Miss Sophy had come to this or similar resolutions; but they always failed her when the instant arrived for putting them into practice. [10]Her love of a good dinner herself, and her still keener love of the approbation she won by setting it before others, kept up perpetual warfare with her savingness, and being two to one, often came off victorious,—often enough to keep up her reputation for setting the best table in the town; not often enough, however, to prevent her making money in the long run, and coming out at the end of the year with a creditable surplus ahead.

Just as Miss Sophy had said, half aloud, the last words of her soliloquy, she heard a faint knock at the door,—an irresolute, vacillating sort of knock, which aroused her curiosity at once.