So O-liver saw them. He had been riding all the afternoon on Mary Pick. He had gone up into the Cañon of the Honey Pots. No one knew it by that name but O-liver, but at all the houses one could buy honey. Up and down the road were little stands on which were set forth glasses and jars of amber sweet. The bees flashed like motes in the sunlight, the air was heavy with the fragrance of the flowers which yielded their largess to the marauders.
It was dark when he rode down toward the town. It lay before him, all twinkling lights. Above it hung a thin moon and countless stars. It might have been a fairy town under the kindly cover of the night.
But when he reached the central square the illusion ceased. It was what men had made it--sordid, cheap. He stopped Mary Pick under a pepper tree and surveyed the scene.
Jane and her basket were the center of an excited group. She had almost reached the end of her supplies, and some one had suggested auctioning off the remainder. Jane had protested, but her protests had not availed. She had turned to Tommy for help, to Henry, to Atwood. They had done their best. But the man who led the crowd had an object in his leadership. It was Tillotson of the little hotel--red-faced, whisky-soaked.
"Sandwich Jane, Sandwich Jane!" he shouted. "That's the name for her, boys."
And they took it up and shouted "Sandwich Jane!"
It was at this moment that O-liver stopped under the pepper tree. The bright light fell directly on Jane's distressed face. He saw the swept-back brightness of her hair, her clear-cut profile, her white skin, her white teeth. But he saw more than this. "By Jove," he said, "she's a lady!"
If he had been talking to the men he would have said "Gosh!" It was only when he was alone that he permitted himself the indulgence of more formal language.
That Jane was harried he could see. And suddenly he rode forward on Mary Pick.
The crowd made way for him expectantly. There were always interesting developments when O-liver was on the scene.
"Gentlemen," he said, "let the lady speak for herself. I am not sure what you are trying to do, but it is evidently something she doesn't want done."
Jane flashed a grateful glance up at him. He was the unknown knight throwing down the gauntlet in her defense. He was different from the others--his voice was different.
"They want to auction off my sandwiches," she explained, "and they won't listen."
"I'm sure they will listen." O-liver on Mary Pick, with his hat off and his mane tossed back, might have been Henry of the white plumes. "Of course they'll listen."
And they did!
Jane stood on her box and addressed them.
"I don't want to get any more for my sandwiches than they are worth," she said earnestly. "I make good ones, and I sell them for twenty cents because they are the best of their kind. I am glad you like them. I want to earn my living and my mother's. She is sick, and I have to stay at home with her. And I don't mind being called 'Sandwich Jane.' It's a good name and I shall use it in my business. But I don't like being treated as you have treated me to-night. If it happens again I shall have to stop selling sandwiches; and I'd be sorry to have that happen, and I hope you'd be sorry too."
Her little speech was over. She stepped down composedly from the box, folded her cloth and picked up her basket. She said "Thank you" to O-liver, "Come on" to Tommy, and walked from among them with her light step and free carriage; and they stared after her.
O-liver sitting later in front of the post-office with his satellites round him found himself compelled to listen to praise of Jane.
"She's made a hit," Atwood said earnestly. "When a woman talks like that it's the straight goods."
Henry agreed. "She's got grit. It's her kind that get ahead. But it's a pity that she's got to work to make a living."
Atwood, too, thought it was a pity. And presently he and Henry fell into silence as they fitted Jane into various dreams. Atwood's dream had to do with a mansion high on Frisco's hills. But Henry saw her beside him in his long and lovely car. He saw her, too, in a fur coat.
V
"I feel," said Jane, "like a murderer." Tommy and O-liver had stopped at her front gate to leave her some books.
"Why?" It was O-liver who asked it.
"Come and see." She led them round the house. Death and destruction reigned.
"I poured gasoline into the ants' nests and set them on fire--and now look at them!"
There were a few survivors toiling among the ruins.
"They are taking out the dead bodies," Jane explained. "It's so human that it's tragic. I'll never do it again."
"You can't let them eat you up."
"I know. It's one of the puzzles." She sat looking down at them. "How busy they are!"
"Too busy," O-liver stated. "They are worse than bees. There are at least some drones in the hive."
"Poor drones," said Jane.
"Why?" quickly.
"To miss the best."
"Is work the best?"
She said "Yes," adding after a little: "I don't just mean making sandwiches. That's just a beginning. There's everything ahead."
She said it as if the world were hers. O-liver, in spite of himself, was thrilled. "How do you know that everything is ahead?"
"I shall make it come"--securely.
They sat in silence for a while; then O-liver said: "I have brought you a book."
It was an old copy of Punch.
"I shall like it," she said. "Sometimes the evenings are dull when my work is over."
"Dullness comes for me when work begins."
Her straight gaze met his. "You say that with your lips; you don't mean it."
"How do you know?"
"I'm not sure how I know. But you haven't found the thing yet that you like--the incentive."
"Tommy wants me to go into politics. He and Henry Bittinger. Henry says I ought to be President." O-liver chuckled.
But she took it seriously. "Why not? You've the brains and the magnetism. Can't you see how the crowd draws to you on Saturday nights?"
"Like bees round a honey pot? Yes." His face grew suddenly stern. "But so will mosquitoes buzz round a stagnant pool."
"You're not a stagnant pool and you know it."
"What am I?"
She made a sudden gesture as if she gave him up. "Sometimes I think you are like the sea--on a lazy day--with a storm brewing."
He wondered as he went home--what storm?
He had seen a good deal of Jane since that Saturday night when he had championed her cause. It had been fall then, with the hills brown and the berries red on the pepper trees. It was spring now, with all the world green and growing.
She had spoken of him to Tommy, and Tommy had been a faithful go-between. He had played upon their mutual love of books. At first O-liver had sent her books, then he had taken them. He had met her mother, had seen her in her home doing feminine things, sewing on lengths of pink and blue--filling the vases with the flowers that he brought.
And as they had met and talked his veins had been filled with new wine. He had never known intimately such a woman. His mother transplanted from the East by her marriage to a Western man had turned her eyes always backward. Her son had been born in the East, he had spent his holidays and vacations with his Eastern relatives. He had gone to an Eastern school to prepare for an Eastern college. Except for this one obsession with regard to her son's education his mother was self-centered. She was an idolized wife, a discontented woman--- she had shown O-liver no heights to which to aspire.
And so he had not aspired. He had spent his days in what might be termed, biblically, riotous living. His mother had hoped for an aristocratic and Eastern marriage. When he married Fluffy Hair she had allowed him three thousand a year and had asked him not to bring his wife to see her. His father had refused to give him a penny. O-liver's wild oats and wilfulness cut him off, he ruled, from parental consideration. "You are not my son," he had said sternly. "If the time ever comes when you can say you are sorry, I'll see you."
O-liver having married Fluffy Hair had found her also self-centered--not a lady like his mother, but fundamentally of the same type. Neither of them had made him feel that he might be more than he was. They had always shrunk him to their own somewhat small patterns.
Jane's philosophy came to him therefore like a long-withheld stimulant. "You might be President of the United States."
When Henry or Atwood or Tommy had said it to him he had laughed. When Jane said it he did not laugh.
VI
And so it came about that one day he rose and went to his father. And he said: "Dad, will you kill the fatted calf?"
His father lived in a great Tudor house which gave the effect of age but was not old. It had a minstrels' gallery, a big hall and a little hall, mullioned windows and all the rest of it. It had been built because of a whim of his wife's. But O-liver's father in the ten years he had lived in it had learned to love it. But more than he loved the house he loved the hills that sloped away from it, the mountains that towered above it, the sea that lay at the foot of the cliff.
"It is God's country," he would say with long-drawn breath. He had been born and bred in this golden West. All the passion he might have given to his alien wife and alien son was lavished on this land which was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.