The Snowflake herald., 1917-07-06

Eds marriage to Alaire had been in
evitable. They had been playmates,
and their parents had considered the
union a consummation of their own
lifelong friendship. Upon her mothers
death Alaire had been sent abroad and
there she remained while "Young Ed"
attended an eastern college. For any
child the experience would have been
a lonesome one, and through it the
mOtherless Texas girl had grown into
an imaginative, sentimental person, liv-
ing in a make-believe world, peopled,
for the most part, with the best
remembered figures of romance and
fiction. There were, of course, some
few flesh-and-blOod heroes among the
rest, and of these the finest and the
noblest had been "Young Ed" Austin.
When she came home to marry,
Alaire was still very much of a child,
and she still considered Ed her knight.
AS for him, he was captivated by this
splendid, handsome girl, whom he re-
membered only as a shy, red-headed
little comrade.
AS Las Palmas had been the elder
Austins wedding gift to his son, so
Alaire's dOWry from her father had
been La Feria, a grant of lands across
the Rio Grande beyond the twenty
league belt by which Mexico fatuously
strives to guard her border. And to
Las Palmas had come the bride and
fO Two 10 fO 411nir
children.
But rarely has there been a shorter
honeymoon, seldom swifter awaken
ing Within six months "Young Ed"
had killed his wife's love and had him
self became an alcoholic. Other vices
so multiplied that what few virtues
the young man had inherited were
soon chOked To the bride the truth
had come as a stunning tragedy. The
wreck of her hopes and glad imagin-
ings left her sick, bewildered, in the
face of "the thing that couldn't"
Nor had the effect of this transfor-
nation in young Ed" been any less
painful to his father. When the truth
was borne in upon him Enthusiastically,
and the girl-wife remained firm in her
refusal to divorce her husband, the un-
derstanding had been reached by
which the management of Las Palmas
was placed absolutely in her hands.
OF course the truth became public,
as it always does. "YOung Ed' Aus
tins life became a scorn and a kissing
among his neighbors. They were not
unduly fastidious, these neighbors, and
they knew that hot blood requires more
than a generation to cool, but every
thing Ed did outraged them. In trying
to show their sympathy for his wife
they succeeded in wOunding her more
deeply, and Alaire withdrew into her
self. She had changed. The alteration
reached to the very bone and marrow
of her being. At first the general pity
had wounded her, then it had offended,
and finally angered her. That people
should notice her affliction, particu-
larry when she strove SO desperately
to hide it, seemed the height of inso-
lence.
The management of Las Palmas was
almost her only relief. Having sprung
from a family of ranchers, the work
came easy, and she grew to like it-as
well as she could like anything with
that ever-present pain in her breast.
Las Palmas had prospered to admira-
tiOn, and La Feria would have pros
pered equally had it not been for the
armed unrest of the country across the
border. No finer stock than the ''Box
A" was to be found anywhere. But
Alaire had not confined her efforts to
cattle; she had improved the breed of
BOX AZ horses, too, and hand IN tand
with this work she had carried on "a
series of agricultural experiments. For
instance, she had started a grove of
paper-shelled pecans, which was soon
due to bear; the ranchhouse and its
clump of palms was all but hidden by
a forest of strange trees, which were
reported to ripen everything from
mothballs to bicycle tires. Blaze Jones
was perhaps responsible for this re-
port, for Alaire had shown him sew
eral thousand eucalyptus saplings and
some ornamental rubber plants.
"That Miz Austin is a money-makin'
piece of furniture" he once told his
daughter PalOma. 'Tm no mechanical
adder count mOstly on my fingers
but her and me calculated the profits
on them eucher - what's their name
trees Sand it gave me a splittin' head.
ache. She'll be a drug queen, sure"
'Why don't you follow her exam.
ple?" asked Palma. "We have plenty
of land"
Blaze, in truth, was embarrassed by
the size of his holdings, but he shook
his head. mo, I'm too old to go ram
pagin' after new gods. l amt cot the
imagination to raise anything more
complicated than a mortgage; but if
l was younger, I'd organize myself up
and do away with that Ed Austin. I'd
sure help him to an untimely end and
then I'd marry them pecan groves, and
blooded herds, and drugstore orchards