Starr, of the Desert | Page 4

to have a new suit." Helen May retrenched
herself behind the declaration. "And it's going to be gray. And a gray
hat with a dove-colored band and the bow in the back. And tan shoes,"
she added implacably, daintily lifting the roof off her cream puff to see
how generous had been the filling.
"Who? Me?" Vic launched himself in among them and slid spinelessly
into his chair as only a lanky boy can slide. "Happy thought! Only I'll
have bottle green for mine. A fellow stepped on my roof this afternoon,
so--"
"You'll wear a cap then--or go bareheaded and claim it's to make your
hair grow." Helen May regarded him coldly. "Lots of fellows do. You
don't get a single new dud before the fourth, Vic Stevenson."
"Oh, don't I?" Vic drawled with much sarcasm, and pulled two dollars
from his trousers pocket, displaying them with lofty triumph. "I get a
new hat to-morrow, Miss Stingy."
"Vic, where did you get that money?" Helen May's eyes flamed to the
battle. "Have you been staying out of school and hanging around those
picture studios?"
"Yup--at two dollars per hang," Vic mouthed, spearing a stuffed green
pepper dexterously. "Fifty rehearsals for two one-minute scenes of
honorable college gangs honorably hailing the hee-ro. Waugh! Where'd
you get these things--or did the cat bring it in? Stuffed with laundry
soap, if you ask me. Why don't you try that new place on Spring?"
"Vic Stevenson!" Helen May began in true sisterly disapprobation. "Is
that getting you anywhere in your studies? A few more days out of
school, and--"
Peter's thoughts turned inward. He did not even hear the half playful,
half angry dispute between these two. Vic was a heady youth, much
given to rebelling against the authority of Helen May who bullied or

wheedled as her mood and the emergency might impel, as sisters do the
world over. Peter was thinking of his two hundred dollars saved against
disaster; and a third of that to go for life insurance on the tenth, which
was just one row down on the calendar; and Helen May going the way
her mother had gone--unless she lived out of doors "like an Indian" in
Arizona or--Peter's mind refused to name again the remote, inaccessible
places where Helen May might evade the penalty of being the child of
her mother and of poverty.
Gray hat for Peter or bottle-green hat for Vic--what did it matter if
neither of them ever again owned a hat, if Helen May must stay here in
the city and face the doom that had been pronounced upon her? What
did anything matter, if Babe died and left him plodding along alone?
Vic did not occur to him consolingly. Vic was a responsibility; a
comfort he was not. Like many men, Peter could not seem to
understand his son half as well as he understood his daughter. He could
not see why Vic should frivol away his time; why he should have all
those funny little conceits and airs of youth; why he should lord it over
Helen May who was every day proving her efficiency and her strength
of character anew. If Helen May went the way her mother had gone,
Peter felt that he would be alone, and that life would be quite bare and
bleak and empty of every incentive toward bearing the little daily
burdens of existence.
He got up with his hand going instinctively to his back to ease the ache
there, and went out upon the porch and stood looking drearily down
upon the asphalted street, where the white paths of speeding
automobiles slashed the dusk like runaway sunbeams on a frolic. Then
the street lights winked and sputtered and began to glow with white
brilliance.
Arizona or New Mexico or Colorado! Peter knew what the doctor had
in mind. Vast plains, unpeopled, pure, immutable in their calm; stars
that came down at night and hung just over your head, making the
darkness alive with their bright presence; a little cottage hunched
against a hill, a candle winking cheerily through the window at the stars;
the cries of night birds, the drone of insects, the distant howling of a

coyote; far away on the boundary of your possessions, a fence of
barbed wire stretching through a hollow and up over a hill; distance and
quiet and calm, be it day or night. And Helen May coming through the
sunlight, riding a gentle-eyed pony; Helen May with her deep-gold hair
tousled in the wind, and with health dancing in her eyes that were the
color of a ripe chestnut, odd contrast to her hair; Helen May with the
little red spots gone from her cheek bones, and with tanned skin and
freckles on her nose and a laugh on