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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.
The horses kept on past the station, but by throwing his weight on one rein Teeters ran them over the flat in a circle until they were winded. Then he brought them dripping and exhausted to the platform, where he said civilly to a bystander, indicating a convenient pickhandle: "If you'll jest knock the 'off' leader down if he bats an eyelash when the train pulls in, I'll be much obliged to you."
And he boasted, "When the cat sits on the pickhandle, brass buttons must go." By that time Herman knew that the "cat" meant sabotage. He had nodded slowly. "But it is dangerous," was his later comment. "Sometimes they will learn, and then?" His caution had exasperated Rudolph almost to frenzy.
Pickhandle Modock had taken a little piece of work from Grace Brothers, and was on his way across the sandy wastes to pitch camp and begin operations. His outfit was to be one of the first to arrive, and as yet no definite line of travel had been established to the work.
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.
He preferred to sit and dwell on bygone days with the one-time queen of Pickhandle Modock's gypo camp, to listen to the account of her father's rise and fall and his subsequent untimely death, and of the girl's ambitions and life in the Middle Western school. They told many a story, these old-timers of the nomadic camps, and had many a laugh over quaint remembrances.
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.
Slowly Pickhandle Modock prospered in the years that followed, for he was a thrifty, hard-working man. The child, whom they had named Josepha, grew to girlhood, and reached young womanhood as a sprite of the camps a gypo queen. The Modocks were uneducated people, but knew it, and strove to make amends by educating the girl to the best of their ability.
The village hack was running no more now, so friends carried her baggage for her to the house on the hill, where lay the body of Pickhandle Modock. Friends stayed with her that night. The funeral was solemnized next day. In all the world, now, Jerkline Jo had not the semblance of a relative, so far as she knew.
She bravely and silently packed her treasured belongings, bade a dry-eyed good-by to her tearful instructors and classmates, and set her face toward the Western desert to learn the worst, and meet it as hard-fighting old Pickhandle Modock would have wished her to meet it as a girl called Jerkline Jo should meet life's threatening defeats.
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