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Updated: May 14, 2025
She was older than most of the girls who were her classmates, for the desire and opportunity to acquire an education had come to her at a late day in her teens. She was ambitious, however, and was making fast progress with her college preparatory course. Then came the telegram which she now held, and over which she wept tears of grief. Her name was not really Josepha Modock.
Here for a year or more Josepha attended high school during the winter months, and drove eight and ten-horse teams with a jerkline to the mines in summer, and acquired her new title of Jerkline Jo because of her skill in training and handling the big teams. Pickhandle Modock, however, had reckoned without the automobile truck, which now was fast displacing heavy freight teams.
Back at Palada, Jerkline Jo began hunting up the expert skinners who had pulled the long sash-cord lines for her foster father, and who had drifted to parts unknown since the completion of the paved road that had virtually put Pickhandle Modock out of the running.
So that tells me where your largest camp will be, and at the nearest water to your largest camp the rag town will spring up. Isn't that all logical?" "Sound as a dollar," he told her. "You weren't raised by Pickhandle Modock for nothing, were you?" She rose from her chair.
Both sat with eyes closed, dreaming of the past and the beckoning future. Their dreams were finally interrupted by the reappearance of Mr. John Downer, the mining engineer for the Gold Hills Mining Co., in whose offices they now sat. "Well," he began, smiling, "if you'll come in now, Mr. Floresta would like to have a talk with you. Getting a bit rested, Miss Modock?" Mr.
Modock was the name of her foster father, and he and her foster mother, the latter dead now for ten years, had given the girl the name of Josepha, because, when they had found her a mere baby weeping and lost on the great desert of California, they had discovered a "J" embroidered on her underwear.
Her hair was of a dark chestnut hue, and its beauty and luxuriant growth made it at once the envy and admiration of her fellow students of the Wisconsin boarding school. Her eyes were large and dark and luminous, her nose just far enough short of perfect, her lips full and distracting. Josepha Modock had been two years at Kendrick Hall.
He had come from a tiny tent set back from the road a way, half hidden by junipers and close to a trickling spring. Keddie clamped his brake and stopped his eight, eying the stranger curiously. Keddie, like Heine Schultz and Tom Gulick, had been on the railroad grade with Pickhandle Modock when Jo was a little girl.
She could scarcely believe that lovable, hard-working, grizzled old Pickhandle Modock, the only father she had ever known had gone out of her life forever. The justice of the peace at Palada, who had handled Pickhandle's legal affairs, had sent the telegram, which advised her to return at once, as she was named as the sole heir to her foster father's estate.
In the vernacular of the grade, a gypo man's daughter, if she follows the outfit, is known as a gypo queen. Josepha Modock, then, had grown up in the camp of Pickhandle Modock, and in time had been known as a gypo queen, or shanty queen, and the prettiest one in the business at that. It was when the Salt Lake Road was being built across the Mohave Desert that the baby girl had been found.
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