Page:Frank Owen - Woman Without Love (1949 reprint).djvu/54

 "All right," he agreed, "we'll do it. Write up a few 'ads' and I'll put them in when I drive in to Fort Wayne this afternoon."

"Why are you going to Fort Wayne?" she asked. "Do you, too, need a change?"

"None of your damn business," he snapped. "I'm running this place. I'm boss here."

"That sounds like an old melodrama," she said.

She smiled reflectively. Yekial was a poor fool. His name should be Yokel. Why, he wasn't capable of running anything that was living. He could flay the farm because it was without feeling, without life.

It was a week before they received any answers at all to their advertisements and Yekial commenced to grow worried.

"I'm a damn fool!" he spat out. "I wasted that money. I should never have listened to a woman."

"You are a damn fool," she agreed, "and so was the simple woman who listened to you. But I do not think your money has been wasted."

Nor was it. For the next morning a carriage stopped at the door, driven by Ted Taylor who did the public hacking in the vicinity. His equipage met all the trains. He helped his single passenger to alight, a tall extremely thin young fellow about twenty-five or twenty-six. Yekial was far off in the fields but Mary was there to meet him. She thought that she had never seen a man with a face so pale or eyes so haggard, nor had she ever beheld such a charming smile.

"My name," he said, "is Steve Garland. I don't know what kind of a garland but you are so beautiful I wish it were a garland of roses that I might lay it at your feet."

The quality of his voice was extremely interesting. Yet in his tone was an underlying note of cynicism as though he were laughing at the world.

"I believe you advertised that you had a room to rent," he said.

"I have several," she replied.

"One will be quite enough," he assured her. "Although my body is falling apart, up till now it has never been separated. It always sleeps in one piece."