Adventure, July 1, 1928 — page 108: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

102 that day, as if the old earth had decided to start life all over again with the Briggses. There was a moon, and the new tender leaves of the aspens about the cabin made patterns on it that twinkled. You could almost feel the soft wooly anemones thrusting up their oval spear points out- side. The feel of it all had got into Rosie’s heart and driven out some of her fears. She even had her old banjo in her lap. She wanted to prove to him that she meant to help him to be happy. She touched the strings and began to sing. She knew only the songs that had been popular a good while ago—“Daisy”, “Two Little Girls in Blue’, “‘SSweet Rosie O’Grady”’ and one or two more of the same sort. These, to her, were “music” — all there was of it. She sang: “Daisy, Daisy,¥give me your answer true. I'm half crazy, just for the love of you” . , and felt a load slipping from her heart as the snow slips from the summit of Gray Dome Mountain when warm weather comes. “Gosh!” Jim murmured. “You ain’t sung that sence—” He let the sentence die. His eyes smiled above his grizzling brown mus- tache and beard. She wanted to put down the banjo and go to him and touch his hand. But she went on singing, pleased that she remembered the tune so well, that her voice rang out so clear and true, and Jim came and sat close beside her. A strange, deliciously sweet odor crept in under the smells of growing things and wet earth out there on the dripping moun- tainside. She felt just then that Jim was as steadfast and as sure to stand by as the huge silver spruce that the cabin was built against. She let her cheek rest on the shoulder of his coat. - “It won't be a stylish marriage, For I can’t afford a carriage .. . The odor came more strongly. It was like orange flowers. She smiled at the senti- ALMA ann PAUL ELLERBE mental notion. Orange flowers on the side of Gray Dome— “But you’d look sweet—upon the seat OF a bicycle built—”’ The odor came from Jim’s coat. It said suddenly, “Lorraine Schoon- maker,” as plainly as Jim’s lips could have said it. To smell it was to see the girl standing behind the counter in the Gray Dome Dry Goods Company’s store. Probably there was no one in town who would have failed to connect her with that perfume. A knife seemed to unfold inside of Rosie. It cut her song off in the middle of the line and brought her upright in her chair with a gasp. *‘What’s the matter?” Jim said, startled. She got to her feet. She almost came straight out with it. That would have been like her. It was what she wanted to do. But for the first time in many years she was afraid. She stared at Jim with deep revulsion. Suddenly he was part of an elemental horror that she had climbed out of long ago and that now was closing around her again. “JI hadn’t ought to’ve sung that,” she said thickly. “It—makes me think too much of the old days,” and went stumbling off to the bedroom. He followed her and stood around, say- ing things to comfort her, and finally she pretended that her mood had passed. But when she lay still at last by his side and thought about Lorraine Schoonma- ker, hard lines pulled at the corners of her mouth that hadn’t been there for fifteen years. Long after all traces of it had van- ished, she fancied that the air was faintly touched with the perfume of orange flowers. “Women” would have been bad enough, but he would have tired of them and come back. There’d be no coming back from this girl of twenty-one, clever and hard of mind and soft and pink of body, with the first taste of what money could do fresh in her mouth. Men didn’t come back from the Schoonmaker women. Behind Lorraine, comnlicloooks.com