JERKLINE JO
About six months previous to Hiram Hooker's momentous debut into the
world outside of the big trees of Mendocino County, a girl stood in her
dormitory room at Kendrick Hall and read a telegram with tear-dimmed
eyes.
This girl was Miss Josepha Modock. She was twenty-two, and Providence
had been kind to her--nay, lavish. She was straight and sturdy and
strong. 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. 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. 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.
At that time Peter Modock--"Pickhandle" Modock--had been what is known
in railroad-construction circles as a gypo man, or shanty man. A gypo
man is an impecunious construction contractor whose light, haphazard
outfit of teams and tools makes it necessary for him to subcontract in
the lightest dirt work from a slightly better equipped subcontractor,
who in turn has taken a subcontract from the main contractors in a big
piece of railroad building. 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. 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. A terrific sandstorm came up, and the
outfit became lost on the desert, where men and teams wandered about
without water for many perilous hours, some time in the midst of which
the human atom afterward called Josepha was found.
She had been sole mistress of a tiny camp tucked away in a
half-sheltered little arroyo, over which spiked yucca palms stood guard
and helped to break the wind and check the drifting sands. There were
provisioned pack bags there, and the blowing sand had not entirely
covered the small hoof prints of several burros. A corral of corky
yucca trunks held the child a prisoner, and more trunks had been laid
on the walls to form a roof, which kept off coyotes. In here they
found her sobbing, suffering for water, abandoned by her elders, while
slowly but surely the sand was sifting in to bury her alive.
All trails leading to or from the spot had been wiped out. The child
was cautiously given water and food, and the suffering contractor's
party camped there, hoping for the return of the man or men who had
left the baby to such dangers in the merciless desert. But no one came
to claim her that day nor during the ensuing night; so next morning
Pickhandle's outfit set out to search desperately to better their own
alarming conditions, and took the child along. Modock left behind a
note explaining their action and informing whoever was responsible how
he might eventually be connected with, whereupon the child would be
returned.
That day the sandstorm subsided, and the outfit stumbled upon the road
to their destination. They found water before noon, and camped there
to recuperate. Here also, when they took their leave, they left word
of their appropriation of the baby girl. Later, when they had reached
their camp site and settled down, Modock, having received no
communication relative to the child, returned on horseback and sought
for the spot where she had been found. At last it was discovered, and
it was quite apparent that during the ten days' interval no one had
been there. The pack bags with the supplies, and the few miners' tools
that lay about, were all but buried in the sands. Modock's note was
still there.
Deciding that the baby's guardians or parents had perished in the
storm, Pickhandle Modock took the articles for the purpose of
identification, if some one ever should claim the child, and returned
with them to his camp, greatly to the joy of motherly Anna Modock, his
wife. Anna Modock had no children, and now she loved the desert waif
as if the child had been her own.
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. When the contractor had prospered to the point where he
needed and could afford a bookkeeper, he employed a gray-haired
derelict of the grade, half of whose duties were to educate Josepha.
The old man loved the child and did his best by her, guiding her
successfully through the elementary branches and succeeding in
implanting in her mind what is known as a common-school education. She
learned rapidly, but showed no particular interest in her studies.
With the work of the grade she was enraptured. At ten she was driving
a slip team, loading and dumping without the help of any one. Later
she drove wheeler teams, then snap teams, and even the six-horse plow
teams. She became a wonderful horsewoman, and, when in the West,
entered contests at rodeos in trick riding, riding buckers and
so-called outlaws, and won many prizes. Horses and mules loved her.
Her voice or her hand spoke to them in a language that they seemed to
know. She could break a colt to steady work in half the time required
by any man she had ever met. It was said that the only thing a horse
or mule would not do for her was to talk, whereupon Josepha trained a
colt to "talk," just to prove that her understanding of animals was
virtually unlimited.
So Joshepha Modock grew to young womanhood, admired, loved, and spoiled
by the thousands of nomad laborers who knew her. At eighteen she could
truthfully boast of a hundred proposals of marriage, and some of them
had been worth an ambitious girl's consideration. Gypo Jo they called
her, and she was known all over the West, where her foster father's
operations were confined, and stories of her beauty and horsewomanship
had gone East and North and South, for railroad-construction laborers
are a nomadic brood and repeat their tales and traditions from coast to
coast.
Then Pickhandle Modock, whose wife had died some years before, made the
move which finally brought his mounting prospects to the verge of ruin.
Just when he was on the point of being recognized as a contractor of
consequence, and owned a big, fine outfit of stock and tents and
implements, he decided to change his activities to those of a freighter.
Numerous railroad projects were being launched in the West, and most of
the lines were bound to extend through countries difficult to access.
Contractors preferred to have their freight hauled to them by regular
freighters, so that every team of their own could be put on the task of
railroad building. Or so Pickhandle Modock reasoned.
Accordingly he sold his construction outfit, and with the proceeds
bought heavy freight wagons and heavy young teams, and launched forth
in his new career. For a year or more he followed railroad camps with
his heavy freight outfit; then he suddenly decided that he was getting
too old for camp life and to be eternally moving about. So when a new
gold mine was opened up in the mountains that overlook southern
California's desert, he moved into the little frontier town of Palada,
forty miles from the new mines, and got the freighting contract from
this railroad point up into the mountains.
He bought out the town's largest store, and set up a blacksmith and
wagoner's shop to keep his great wagons in repair and his hard-working
teams shod. 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. Here,
too, she required [Transcriber's note: acquired?] her thirst for an
education, and, torn between her new ambition and her love for the big
outdoors and her devoted mules and horses, she at last set off for
Wisconsin for her preparatory course at Kendrick Hall.
Pickhandle Modock, however, had reckoned without the automobile truck,
which now was fast displacing heavy freight teams. While as yet the
road into the mountains was not in the best shape for trucks, at least
during winter months, still the noisy transporters of freight, of the
lower tonnage capacity, were taking a great deal of business from him.
Then the road on the other side of the mountains, connecting with the
big coast-side cities, was paved; and this ended Pickhandle Modock's
career as a jerkline freighter. The town of Palada, too, degenerated
from an active little supply point to a stagnating desert village, with
no visible means of support, and Pickhandle Modock found himself with a
big stock of goods on hand with no one to buy, and with sixty or more
heavy freight horses eating their heads off in their corrals.
His circumstances went from bad to worse, but he had carefully kept all
this from his adopted daughter, in the preparatory school in the Middle
West. Consequently the blithe and lovable Jerkline Jo knew nothing of
the state of affairs when the telegram announcing her father's death
reached her that fateful morning.
It stunned her at first. 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. The telegram--a night letter
and a long one--hinted of things of which she had not even dreamed, an
prepared her for financial disappointments.
She at once realized that her school days at Kendrick Hall were ended,
just when the future looked so bright. She would have entered college
next year, and this, too, she must now forego, just when her ambition
was at its height.
But she had been through many discouragements as a gypo queen, and she
did not flinch. She had known poverty--even actual want--had fought
mud and sandstorms and cold and heat and rain that hampered work for
weeks and months. In her was the indomitable spirit of the pioneer.
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.