By the time dinner was over and more dishes ready to be washed, the cook's wounded pride was under control. Her few tears had left no marks on her face. Babe, helping her, did not even know that there had been a shower.

Babe was excited; her chewing was more energetic even than usual. It smacked audibly.

"Say, Sheila, wot'll you wear to-night?" she yelled above the clatter.

"Wear?" repeated Sheila.

"To the dance, you silly! What did you think I meant—to bed?"

Sheila's tired pallor deepened a little. "I am not going to the dance."

"Not going?" Babe put down a plate. "What do you mean? Of course you're going! You've gotta go. Say—Momma, Pap, Girlie"—she ran, at a sort of sliding gallop across the oilcloth through the swinging door into the dining-room—"will you listen to this? Sheila says she's not going to the dance!"

"Well," said "Momma" audibly, "she'd better. I'm agoin' to put out the fires, and the house'll be about 12 below."

Sylvester murmured, "Oh, we must change that."

And Girlie said nothing.

"Well," vociferated Babe. "I call it too mean for words. I've just set my heart on her meeting some of the folks and getting to know Millings. She's been here a whole two weeks and she hasn't met a single fellow but Dickie, and he don't count, and she hasn't even got friendly with any of the girls. And I wanted her to see one of our real swell affairs. Why—just for the credit of Millings, she's gotta go."

"Why fuss her about it, if she don't want to?" Girlie's soft voice was poured like oil on the troubled billows of Babe's outburst.

"I'll see to her," Sylvester's chair scraped the floor as he rose. "I know how to manage girls. Trust Poppa!"

He pushed through the door, followed by Babe. Sheila looked up at him helplessly. She had her box under her feet, and so was not entirely hidden by the dishpan. She drew up her head and faced him.

"Mr. Hudson," she began—"please! I can't go to a dance. You know I can't—"

"Nonsense!" said Pap. "In the bright lexicon of youth there's no such word as 'can't.' Say, girl, you can and you must. I won't have Babe crying her eyes out and myself the most unpopular man in Millings. Say, leave your dishes and go up and put on your best duds."

"That's talking," commented Babe.

In the dining-room "Momma" said, "Hmp!" and Girlie was silent.

Sheila looked at her protector. "But, you see, Mr. Hudson, I—I—it was only a month ago—" She made a gesture with her hands to show him her black dress, and her lips trembled.

Pap walked round to her and patted her shoulder. "I know," he said. "I savvy. I get you, little girl. But, say, it won't do. You've got to begin to live again and brighten up. You're only seventeen and that's no age for mourning, no, nor moping. You must learn to forget, at least, that is"—for he saw the horrified pain of her eyes—"that is, to be happy again. Yes'm. Happiness—that's got to be your middle name. Now, Miss Sheila, as a favor to me!"

Sheila put up both her hands and pushed his from her shoulder. She ran from him past Babe into the dining-room, where, as she would have sped by, "Momma" caught her by the arm.

"If you're not aimin' to please him," said "Momma" harshly, "wot are you here for?"

Sheila looked at her unseeingly, pulled herself away, and went upstairs on wings. In her room the tumult, held down all through the ugly, cluttered, drudging day, broke out and had its violent course. She flew about the room or tossed on the bed, sobbing and whispering to herself. Her wound bled freely for the first time since it had been given her by death. She called to her father, and her heart writhed in the grim talons of its loneliness. That was her first agony and then came the lesser stings of "Momma's" insults, and at last, a fear. An incomprehensible fear. She began to doubt the wisdom of her Western venture. She began to be terrified at her situation. All about her lay a frozen world, a wilderness, so many thousand miles from anything that she and her father had ever known. And in her pocket there was no penny for rescue or escape. Over her life brooded powerfully Sylvester Hudson, with his sallow face and gentle, contemplative eyes. He had brought her to his home. Surely that was an honorable and generous deed. He had given her over to the care and protection of his wife and daughters. But why didn't Mrs. Hudson like it? Why did she tighten her lips and pull her nostrils when she looked at her helper? And what was the sinister, inner meaning of those two speeches ... about the purpose of her being in the house at all? "An ornament on the parlor mantel" ... "aiming to please him...." Of the existence of a sinister, inner meaning, "Momma's" voice and look left no doubt.

Something was wrong. Something was hideously wrong. And to whom might she go for help or for advice? As though to answer her question came a foot-step on the stair. It was a slow, not very heavy step. It came to her door and there followed a sharp but gentle rap.

"Who is it?" asked Sheila. And suddenly she felt very weak.

"It's Pap. Open your door, girl."

She hesitated. Her head seemed to go round. Then she obeyed his gentle request.

Pap walked into the room.



CHAPTER VIII

ARTISTS

Pap closed the door carefully behind him before he looked at Sheila. At once his face changed to one of deep concern.

"Why, girl! What's happened to you? You got no call to feel like that!"

He went over to her and took her limp hand. She half turned away. He patted the hand.

"Why, girl! This isn't very pleasant for me. I aimed to make you happy when I brought you out to Millings. I kind of wanted to work myself into your Poppa's place, kind of meant to make it up to you some way. I aimed to give you a home. 'Home, sweet home, there's no place like home'—that was my motto. And here you are, all pale around the gills and tears all over your face—and, say, there's a regular pool there on your pillow. Now, now—" he clicked with his tongue. "You're a bad girl, a regular bad, ungrateful girl, hanged if you aren't! You know what I'd do to you if you were as young as you are little and foolish? Smack you—good and plenty. But I'm not agoin' to do it, no, ma'am. Don't pull your hand away. Smacking's not in my line. I never smacked my own children in their lives, except Dickie. There was no other way with him. He was ornery. You come and set down here in the big chair and I'll pull up the little one and we'll talk things over. Put your trust in me, Miss Sheila. I'm all heart. I wasn't called 'Pap' for nothing. You know what I am? I'm your guardian. Yes'm. And you just got to make up your mind to cast your care upon me, as the hymn says. Nary worry must you keep to yourself. Come on now, kid, out with it. Get it off your chest."

Sheila had let him put her into the big creaking leather chair. She sat with a handkerchief clenched in both her hands, upon which he, drawing up the other chair, now placed one of his. She kept her head down, for she was ashamed of the pale, stained, and distorted little face which she could not yet control.

"Now, then, girl ... Well, if you won't talk to me, I'll just light up and wait. I'm a patient man, I am. Don't hurry yourself any."

He withdrew his hand and took out a cigar. In a moment he was sitting on the middle of his spine, his long legs sprawled half across the room, his hands in his pockets, his head on the chair-back so that his chin pointed up to the ceiling. Smoke rose from him as from a volcano.

Sheila presently laughed uncertainly.

"That's better," he mumbled around his cigar.

"I've had a dreadful day," said Sheila.

"You won't have any more of them, my dear," Sylvester promised quietly.

She looked at him with faint hope.

"Yes'm, dish-washing's dead."

"But what can I do, then?"

Hudson nodded his head slowly, or, rather, he sawed the air up and down with his chin. He was still looking at the ceiling so that Sheila could see only the triangle beneath his jaw and the dark, stringy neck above his collar.

"I've got a job for you, girl—a real one."

He pulled out his cigar and sat up. "You remember what I told you the other night?"

"About my being a—a—beacon?" Sheila's voice was delicately tinged with mockery. So was her doubtful smile.

"Yes'm," he said seriously. "Well, that's it."

"What does a beacon do?" she asked.

"It burns. It shines. It looks bright. It wears the neatest little black dress with a frilly apron and deep frilly cuffs. Say, do you recollect something else I told you?"

"I remember everything you told me."

"Well, ma'am, I remember everything you told me. Somebody said she was grateful. Somebody said she'd do anything for Pap. Somebody said—'Try me.'"

"I meant it, Mr. Hudson. I did mean it."

"Do you mean it now?"

"Yes. I—I owe you so much. You're always so very kind to me. And I behave very badly. I was hateful to you this evening. And, when you came to my door, just now, I was—I was scared."

Pap opened his eyes at her, held his cigar away from him and laughed. The laugh was both bitter and amused.

"Scared of Pap Hudson? You scared? But, look-a-here, girl, what've I done to deserve that?"

He sat forward, rested his chin in his hand, supported by an elbow on his crossed knees and fixed her with gentle and reproachful eyes.

"Honest, you kind of make me feel bad, Miss Sheila."

"I am dreadfully sorry. It was horrid of me. I only told you because I wanted you to know that I'm not worth helping. I don't deserve you to be so kind to me. I—I must be disgustingly suspicious."

"Well!" Sylvester sighed. "Very few folks get me. I'm kind of mis-understood. I'm a real lonesome sort of man. But, honest, Miss Sheila, I thought you were my friend. I don't mind telling you, you've hurt my feelings. That shot kind of got me. It's stuck into me."

"I'm horrid!" Sheila's eyes were wounded with remorse.

"Oh, well, I'm not expecting understanding any more."

"Oh, but I do—I do understand!" she said eagerly and she put her hand shyly on his arm. "I think I do understand you. I'm very grateful. I'm very fond of you."

"Ah!" said Sylvester softly. "That's a good hearing!" He lifted his arm with Sheila's hand on it and touched it with his lips. "You got me plumb stirred up," he said with a certain huskiness. "Well!" She took away her hand and he made a great show of returning to common sense. "I reckon we are a pretty good pair of friends, after all. But you mustn't be scared of me, Miss Sheila. That does hurt. Let's forget you told me that."

"Yes—please!"

"Well, then—to get back to business. Do you recollect a story I told you?"

"A story? Oh, yes—about an Englishman—?"

"Yes, ma'am. That Englishman put his foot on the rail and stuck his glass in his eye and set his tumbler down empty. And he looked round that bar of mine, Miss Sheila. You savvy, he'd been all over the globe, that feller, and I should say his ex-perience of bars was—some—and he said, 'Hudson, it's all but perfect. It only needs one thing.'"

This time Sheila did not ask. She waited.

"'And that's something we have in our country,' said he." Hudson cleared his throat. He also moistened his lips. He was very apparently excited. He leaned even farther forward, tilting on the front legs of his chair and thrusting his face close to Sheila's "'A pretty barmaid!' said he."

There was a profound silence in the small room. The runners of a sleigh scraped the icy street below, its horses' hoofs cracked noisily. The music of a fiddle sounded in the distance. Babe's voice humming a waltz tune rose from the second story.

"A barmaid?" asked Sheila breathlessly. She got up from her chair and walked over to the window. The moon was already high. Over there, beckoning, stood her mountain and her star. It was all so shining and pure and still.

"That's what you want me to be—your barmaid?"

"Yes'm," said Sylvester humbly. "Don't make up your mind in a hurry, Miss Sheila. Wait till I tell you more about it. It's—it's a kind of dream of mine. I think it'd come close to breaking me up if you turned down the proposition. The Aura's not an ordin-ar-y bar and I'm not an ordin-ar-y man, and, say, Miss Sheila, you're not an ordin-ar-y girl."

"Is that why you want me to work in your saloon?" said Sheila, staring at the star.

"Yes'm. That's why. Let me tell you that I've searched this continent for a girl to fit my ideal. That's what it is, girl—my ideal. That bar of mine has got to be perfect. It's near to perfect now. I want when that Englishman comes back to Millings to hear him say, 'It's perfect' ... no 'all but,' you notice. Why, miss, I could 'a' got a hundred ordin-ar-y girls, lookers too. The world's full of lookers."

"Why didn't you offer your—'job' to Babe or Girlie?"

Sylvester laughed. "Well, girl, as a matter of fact, I did."

"You did?" Sheila turned back and faced him. There was plenty of color in her cheeks now. Her narrow eyes were widely opened. Astonishingly large and clear they were, when she so opened them.

"Yes'm." Sylvester glanced aside for an instant.

"And what did they say?"

"They balked," Sylvester admitted calmly. "They're fine girls, Miss Sheila. And they're lookers. But they just aren't quite fine enough. They're not artists, like your Poppa and like you—and like me."

Sheila put a hand up to her cheek. Her eyes came back to their accustomed narrowness and a look of doubt stole into her face.

"Artists?"

"Yes'm." Sylvester had begun to walk about. "Artists. Why, what's an artist but a person with a dream he wants to make real? My dream's—The Aura, girl. For three years now"—he half-shut his eyes and moved his arm in front of him as though he were putting in the broad first lines of a picture—"I've seen that girl there back of my bar—shining and good and fine—not the sort of a girl a man'd be lookin' for, mind you, just not that! A girl that would sort of take your breath. Say, picture it, Sheila!" He stood by her and pointed it out as though he showed her a view. "You're a cowboy. And you come ridin' in, bone-tired, dusty, with a thirst. Well, sir, a thirst in your throat and a thirst in your heart and a thirst in your soul. You're wantin' re-freshment. For your body and your eyes and your mind. Well, ma'am, you tie your pony up there and you push open those doors and you push 'em open and step plumb into Paradise. It's cool in there—I'm picturin' a July evenin', Miss Sheila—and it's quiet and it's shining clean. And there's a big man in white who's servin' drinks—cold drinks with a grand smell. That's my man Carthy. He keeps order. You bet you, he does keep it too. And beside him stands a girl. Well, she's the kind of girl you—the cowboy—would 'a' dreamed about, lyin' out in your blanket under the stars, if you'd 'a' knowed enough to be able to dream about her. After you've set eyes on her, you don't dream about any other kind of girl. And just seein' her there so sweet and bright and dainty-like, makes a different fellow of you. Say, goin' into that bar is like goin' into church and havin' a jim-dandy time when you get there—which is something the churches haven't got round to offerin' yet to my way of thinkin'. Now. I want to ask you, Miss Sheila, if you've got red blood in your veins and a love of adventure and a wish to see that real entertaining show we call 'life'—and mighty few females ever get a glimpse of it—and if you've acquired a feeling of gratitude for Pap and if you've got any real religion, or any ambition to play a part, if you're a real woman that wants to be an in-spire-ation to men, well, ma'am, I ask you, could you turn down a chance like that?"

He stood away a pace and put his question with a lifted forefinger.

Sheila's eyes were caught and held by his. Again her mind seemed to be fastened to his will. And the blood ran quickly in her veins. Her heart beat. She was excited, stirred. He had seen through her shell unerringly as no one else in all her life had seen. He had mysteriously guessed that she had the dangerous gift of adventure, that under the shyness and uncertainty of inexperience there was no fear in her, that she was one of those that would rather play with fire than warm herself before it. Sheila stood there, discovered and betrayed. He had played upon her as upon a flexible young reed: that stop, her ambition, this, her romanticism, that, her vanity, the fourth, her gratitude, the fifth, her idealism, the sixth, her recklessness. And there was this added urge—she must stay here and drudge under the lash of "Momma's" tongue or she must accept this strange, this unimaginable offer. Again she opened her eyes wider and wider. The pupils swallowed up the misty gray. Her lips parted.

"I'll do it," she said, narrowed her eyes and shut her mouth tight. With such a look she might have thrown a fateful toss of dice.

Sylvester caught her hands, pressed them up to his chest.

"It's a promise, girl?"

"Yes."

"God bless you!"

He let her go. He walked on air. He threw open the door.

There on the threshold—stood "Momma."

"I kind of see," she drawled, "why Sheila don't take no interest in dancin'!"

"You're wrong," said Sheila very clearly. "I have been persuaded. I am going to the dance."

Sylvester laughed aloud. "One for you, Momma!" he said. "Come on down, old girl, while Miss Sheila gets into her party dress. Say, Aura, aren't you goin' to give me a dance to-night?"

His wife looked curiously at his red, excited face. She followed him in silence down the stairs.

Sheila stood still listening to their descending steps, then she knelt down beside her little trunk and opened the lid. The sound of the fiddle stole hauntingly, beseechingly, tauntingly into her consciousness. There in the top tray of her trunk wrapped in tissue paper lay the only evening frock she had, a filmy French dress of white tulle, a Christmas present from her father, a breath-taking, intoxicating extravagance. She had worn it only once.

It was with the strangest feeling that she took it out. It seemed to her that the Sheila that had worn that dress was dead.



CHAPTER IX

A SINGEING OF WINGS

All the vitality of Millings—and whatever its deficiencies the town lacked nothing of the splendor and vigor of its youth—throbbed and stamped and shook the walls of the Town Hall that night. To understand that dance, it is necessary to remember that it took place on a February night with the thermometer at zero and with the ground five feet beneath the surface of the snow. There were men and women and children, too, who had come on skis and in toboggans for twenty miles from distant ranches to do honor to the wedding-anniversary of Greely and his wife.

A room near the ballroom was reserved for babies, and here, early in the evening, lay small bundles in helpless, more or less protesting, rows, their needs attended to between waltzes and polkas by father or mother according to the leisure of the parent and the nature of the need. One infant, whose home discipline was not up to the requirements of this event, refused to accommodate himself to loneliness and so spent the evening being dandled, first by father, then by mother, in a chair immediately beside the big drum. Whether the spot was chosen for the purpose of smothering his cries or enlivening his spirits nobody cared to inquire. Infants in the Millings and Hidden Creek communities, where certified milk and scientific feeding were unknown, were treated rather like family parasites to be attended to only when the irritation they caused became acute. They were not taken very seriously. That they grew up at all was largely due to their being turned out as soon as they could walk into an air that buoyed the entire nervous and circulatory systems almost above the need of any other stimulant.

The dance began when the first guests arrived, which on this occasion was at about six o'clock, and went on till the last guest left, at about ten the next morning. In the meantime the Greelys' hospitality provided every variety of refreshment.

When Sheila reached the Town Hall, crowded between Sylvester and joyous Babe in her turquoise blue on the front seat of the Ford, while the back seat was occupied by Girlie in scarlet and "Momma" in purple velveteen, the dance was well under way. The Hudsons came in upon the tumult of a quadrille. The directions, chanted above the din, were not very exactly heeded; there was as much confusion as there was mirth. Sheila, standing near Girlie's elbow, felt the exhilaration which youth does feel at the impact of explosive noise and motion, the stamping of feet, the shouting, the loud laughter, the music, the bounding, prancing bodies: savagery in a good humor, childhood again, but without the painful intensity of childhood. Sheila wondered just as any debutante in a city ballroom wonders, whether she would have partners, whether she would have "a good time." Color came into her face. She forgot everything except the immediate prospect of flattery and rhythmic motion.

Babe pounced upon a young man who was shouldering his way toward Girlie.

"Say, Jim, meet Miss Arundel! Gee! I've been wanting you two to get acquainted."

Sheila held out her hand to Mr. James Greely, who took it with a surprised and dazzled look.

"Pleased to meet you," he murmured, and the dimple deepened in his ruddy right cheek.

He turned his blushing face to Girlie. "Gee! You look great!" he said.

She was, in fact, very beautiful—a long, firm, round body, youthful and strong, sheathed in a skin of cream and roses, lips that looked as though they had been used for nothing but the tranquil eating of ripe fruit, eyes of unfathomable serenity, and hair almost as soft and creamy as her shoulders and her finger-tips. Her beauty was not marred to Jim Greely's eyes by the fact that she was chewing gum. Amongst animals the only social poise, the only true self-possession and absence of shyness is shown by the cud-chewing cow. She is diverted from fear and soothed from self-consciousness by having her nervous attention distracted. The smoking man has this release, the knitting woman has it. Girlie and Babe had it from the continual labor of their jaws. Every hope and longing and ambition in Girlie's heart centered upon this young man now complimenting her, but as he turned to her, she just stood there and looked up at him. Her jaws kept on moving slightly. There was in her eyes the minimum of human intelligence and the maximum of unconscious animal invitation—a blank, defenseless expression of—"Here I am. Take me." As Jim Greely expressed the look: "Girlie makes everything easy. She don't give a fellow any discomfort like some of these skittish girls do. She's kind of home folks at once."

"We can't get into the quadrille now," said Jim, "but you'll give me the next, won't you, Girlie?"

"Sure, Jim," said the unsmiling, rosy mouth.

Jim moved uneasily on his patent-leather feet. He shot a sidelong glance at Sheila.

"Say, Miss Arundel, may I have the next after ... Meet Mr. Gates," he added spasmodically, as the hand of a gigantic friend crushed his elbow.

Sheila looked up a yard or two of youth and accepted Mr. Gates's invitation for "the next."

The head at the top of the tower bent itself down to her with a snakelike motion.

"Us fellows," it said, "have been aiming to give you a good time to-night."

Sheila was relieved to find him within hearing. Her smile dawned enchantingly. It had all the inevitability of some sweet natural event.

"That's very good of—you fellows. I didn't know you knew that there was such a person as—as me in Millings."

"You bet you, we knew. Here goes the waltz. Do you want to Castle it? I worked in a Yellowstone Park Hotel last summer, and I'm wise on dancing."

Sheila found herself stretched ceilingwards. She must hold one arm straight in the air, one elbow as high as she could make it go, and she must dance on her very tip-toes. Like every girl whose life has taken her in and out of Continental hotels, she could dance, and she had the gift of intuitive rhythm and of yielding to her partner's intentions almost before they were muscularly expressed. Mr. Gates felt that he was dancing with moonlight, only the figure of speech is not his own.

Girlie in the arms of Jim spoke to him above her rigid chin. Girlie had the haughty manner of dancing.

"She's not much of a looker, is she, Jim?" But the pain in her heart gave the speech an audible edge.

"She's not much of anything," said Jim, who had not looked like the young man on the magazine cover for several busy years in vain. "She's just a scrap."

But Girlie could not be deceived. Sheila's delicate, crystalline beauty pierced her senses like the frosty beauty of a winter star: her dress of white mist, her slender young arms, her long, slim, romantic throat, the finish and polish of her, every detail done lovingly as if by a master's silver-pointed pencil, her hair so artlessly simple and shining, smooth and rippled under the lights, the strangeness of her face! Girlie told herself again that it was an irregular face, that the chin was not right, that the eyes were not well-opened and lacked color, that the nose was odd, defying classification; she knew, in spite of the rigid ignorance of her ideals, that these things mysteriously spelled enchantment. Sheila was as much more beautiful than anything Millings had ever seen as her white gown was more exquisite than anything Millings had ever worn. It was a work of art, and Sheila was, also, in some strange sense, a work of art, something shaped and fashioned through generations, something tinted and polished and retouched by race, something mellowed and restrained, something bred. Girlie did not know why the white tulle frock, absolutely plain, shamed her elaborate red satin with its exaggerated lines. But she did know. She did not know why Sheila's subtle beauty was greater than her obvious own. But she did know. And so great and bewildering a fear did this knowledge give her that, for an instant, it confused her wits.

"She's going back East soon," she said sharply.

"Is she?" Jim's question was indifferent, but from that instant his attention wandered.

When he took the small, crushable silken partner into his arms for "the next after," a one-step, he was troubled by a sense of hurry, by that desire to make the most of his opportunity that torments the reader of a "best-seller" from the circulating library.

"Say, Miss Arundel," he began, looking down at the smooth, jewel-bright head, "you haven't given Millings a square deal."

Sheila looked at him quizzically.

"You see," went on Jim, "it's winter now."

"Yes, Mr. Greely. It is winter."

"And that's not our best season. When summer comes, it's awfully pretty and it's good fun. We have all sorts of larks—us fellows and the girls. You'd like a motor ride, wouldn't you?"

"Not especially, thank you," said Sheila, who really at times deserved the Western condemnation of "ornery." "I don't like motors. In fact, I hate motors."

Jim swallowed a nervous lump. This girl was not "home folks." She made him feel awkward and uncouth. He tried to remember that he was Mr. James Greely, of the Millings National Bank, and, remembering at the same time something that the girl from Cheyenne had said about his smile, he caught Sheila's eye deliberately and made use of his dimple.

"What do you like?" he asked. "If you tell me what you like, I—I'll see that you get it."

"You're very powerful, aren't you? You sound like a fairy godmother."

"You look like a fairy. That's just what you do look like."

"I like horses much better than motors," said Sheila. "I thought the West would be full of adorable little ponies. I thought you'd ride like wizards, bucking—you know."

"Well, I can ride. But, I guess you've been going to the movies or the Wild West shows. This town must seem kind of dead after Noo York."

"I hate the movies," said Sheila sweetly.

"Say, it would be easy to get a pony for you as soon as the snow goes. I sold my horse when Dad bought me my Ford."

"Sold him? Sold your own special horse!"

"Well, yes, Miss Arundel. Does that make you think awfully bad of me?"

"Yes. It does. It makes me think awfully 'bad' of you. If I had a horse, I'd—I'd tie him to my bedpost at night and feed him on rose-leaves and tie ribbons in his mane."

Jim laughed, delighted at her childishness. It brought back something of his own assurance.

"I don't think Pap Hudson would quite stand for that, would he? Seems to me as if—"

But here his partner stopped short, turned against his arm, and her face shone with a sudden friendly sweetness of surprise. "There's Dickie!"

She left Jim, she slipped across the floor. Dickie limped toward her. His face was white.

"Dickie! I'm so glad you came. Somehow I didn't expect you to be here. But you're lame! Then you can't dance. What a shame. After Mr. Greely and I have finished this, could you sit one out with me?"

"Yes'm," whispered Dickie.

He was not as inexpressive as it might seem however. His face, a rather startling face here in this crowded, boisterous room, a face that seemed to have come in out of the night bringing with it a quality of eternal childhood, of quaint, half-forgotten dreams—his face was very expressive. So much so, that Sheila, embarrassed, went back almost abruptly to Jim. Her smile was left to bewilder Dickie. He began to describe it to himself. And this was the first time a woman had stirred that mysterious trouble in his brain.

"It's not like a smile at all," thought Dickie, the dancing crowd invisible to him; "it's like something—it's—what is it? It's as if the wind blew it into her face and blew it out again. It doesn't come from anywhere, it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, at least not anywhere a fellow knows ..." Here he was rudely joggled by a passing elbow and the pain of his ankle brought a sharp "Damn!" out of him. He found a niche to lean in, and he watched Sheila and Jim. He found himself not quite so overwhelmed as usual by admiration of his friend. His mood was even very faintly critical. But, as the dance came to an end, Dickie fell a prey to base anxiety. How would "Poppa" take it if he, Dickie, should be seen sitting out a dance with Miss Arundel? Dickie was profoundly afraid of his father. It was a fear that he had never been allowed the leisure to outgrow. Sylvester with torture of hand and foot and tongue had fostered it. And Dickie's childhood had lingered painfully upon him. He could not outgrow all sorts of feelings that other fellows seemed to shed with their short trousers. He was afraid of his father, physically and morally; his very nerves quivered under the look of the small brown eyes.

Nevertheless, as Sheila thanked Jim for her waltz, her elbow was touched by a cold finger.

"Here I am," said Dickie. He had a demure and startled look. "Let's sit it out in the room between the babies and the dancin'-room—two kinds of a b-a-w-l, ain't it? But I guess we can hear ourselves speak in there. There's a sort of a bench, kind of a hard one..."

Sheila followed and found herself presently in a half-dark place under a row of dangling coats. An iron stove near by glowed with red sides and a round red mouth. It gave a flush to Dickie's pale face. Sheila thought she had never seen such a wistful and untidy lad.

Yet, poor Dickie at the moment appeared to himself rather a dashing and heroic figure. He had certainly shown courage and had done his deed with jauntiness. Besides, he had on his only good suit of dark-blue serge, very thin serge. It was one that he had bought second-hand from Jim, and he was sure, therefore, of its perfection. He thought, too, that he had mastered, by the stern use of a wet brush, a cowlick which usually disgraced the crown of his head. He hadn't. It had long ago risen to its wispish height.

"Jim dances fine, don't he?" Dickie said. "I kind of wish I liked to dance. Seems like athletic stunts don't appeal to me some way."

"Would you call dancing an athletic stunt?" Sheila leaned back against a coat that smelled strongly of hay and tobacco and caught up her knees in her two hands so that the small white slippers pointed daintily, clear of the floor.

Dickie looked at them. It seemed to him suddenly that a giant's hand had laid itself upon his heart and turned it backwards as a pilot turns his wheel to change the course of a ship. The contrary movement made him catch his breath. He wanted to put the two white silken feet against his breast, to button them inside his coat, to keep them in his care.

"Ain't it, though?" he managed to say. "Ain't it an athletic stunt?"

"I've always heard it called an accomplishment."

"God!" said Dickie gently. "I'd 'a' never thought of that. I do like ski-ing, though. Have you tried it, Miss Arundel?"

"No. If I call you Dickie, you might call me Sheila, I think."

Dickie lifted his eyes from the feet. "Sheila," he said.

He was curiously eloquent. Again Sheila felt the confusion that had sent her abruptly back to Jim. She smoothed out the tulle on her knee.

"I think I'd love to ski. Is it awfully hard to learn?"

"No, ma'am. It's just dandy. Especially on a moonlight night, like night before last. And if you'd 'a' had skis on you wouldn't 'a' broke through. You go along so quiet and easy, pushing yourself a little with your pole. There's a kind of a swing to it—"

He stood up and threw his light, thin body gracefully into the skier's pose. "See? You slide on one foot, then on the other. It's as easy as dreaming, and as still."

"It's like a gondola—" suggested Sheila.

Dickie put his head on one side and Sheila explained. She also sang a snatch of a Gondel-lied to show him the motion.

"Yes'm," said Dickie. "It's like that. It kind of has a—has a—"

"Rhythm?"

"I guess that's the word. So's riding. I like to do the things that have that."

"Well, then, you ought to like dancing."

"Yes'm. Maybe I would if it wasn't for havin' to pull a girl round about with me. It kind of takes my mind off the pleasure."

Sheila laughed. Then, "Did you get my note?" she asked.

"Yes'm." Her laughter had embarrassed him, and he had suddenly a hunted look.

"And are you going to be my friend?"

The sliding of feet on a floor none too smooth, the music, the wailing of a baby accompanied Dickie's silence. He was very silent and sat very still, his hands hanging between his knees, his head bent. He stared at Sheila's feet. His face, what she could see of it, was, even beyond the help of firelight, pale.

"Why, Dickie, I believe you're going to say No!"

"Some fellows would say Yes," Dickie answered. "But I sort of promised not to be your friend. Poppa said I'd kind of disgust you. And I figure that I would—"

Sheila hesitated.

"You mean because you—you—?"

"Yes'm."

"Can't you stop?"

He shook his head and gave her a tormented look.

"Oh, Dickie! Of course you can! At your age!"

"Seems like it means more to me than anything else."

"Dickie! Dickie!"

"Yes'm. It kind of takes the awful edge off things."

"What do you mean? I don't understand."

"Things are so sort of—sharp to me. I mean, I don't know if I can tell you. I feel like I had to put something between me and—and things. Oh, damn! I can't make you see—"

"No," said Sheila, distressed.

"It's always that-a-way," Dickie went on. "I mean, everything's kind of—too much. I used to run miles when I was a kid. And sometimes now when I can get out and walk or ski, the feeling goes. But other times—well, ma'am, whiskey sort of takes the edge off and lets something kind of slack down that gets sort of screwed up. Oh, I don't know ..."

"Did you ever go to a doctor about it?"

Dickie looked up at her and smiled. It was the sweetest smile—so patient of this misunderstanding of hers. "No, ma'am."

"Then you don't care to be my friend enough to—to try—"

"I wouldn't be a good friend to you," said Dickie. And he spoke now almost sullenly. "Because I wouldn't want you to have any other friends. I hate it to see you with any other fellow."

"How absurd!"

"Maybe it is absurd. I guess it seems awful foolish to you." He moved his cracked patent-leather pump in a sort of pattern on the floor. Again he looked up, this time with a freakish, an almost elfin flicker of his extravagant eyelashes. "There's something I could be real well," he said. "Only, I guess Poppa's got there ahead of me. I could be a dandy guardian to you—Sheila."

Again Sheila laughed. But the ringing of her silver coins was not quite true. There was a false note. She shut her eyes involuntarily. She was remembering that instant an hour or two before when Sylvester's look had held hers to his will. The thought of what she had promised crushed down upon her consciousness with the smothering, sudden weight of its reality. She could not tell Dickie. She could not—though this she did not admit—bear that he should know.

"Very well," she said, in a hard and weary voice. "Be my guardian. That ought to sober any one. I think I shall need as many guardians as possible. And—here comes your father. I have this dance with him."

Dickie got hurriedly to his feet. "Oh, gosh!" said he. He was obviously and vividly a victim of panic. Sheila's small and very expressive face showed a little gleam of amused contempt. "My guardian!" she seemed to mock. To shorten the embarrassment of the moment she stepped quickly into the elder Hudson's arm. He took her hand and began to pump it up and down, keeping time to the music and counting audibly. "One, two, three." To Dickie he gave neither a word nor look.

Sheila lifted her chin so that she could smile at Dickie over Pap's shoulder. It was an indulgent and forgiving smile, but, meeting Dickie's look, it went out.

The boy's face was scarlet, his body rigid, his lips tight. The eyes with which he had overcome her smile were the hard eyes of a man. Sheila's contempt had fallen upon him like a flame. In a few dreadful minutes as he stood there it burnt up a part of his childishness.

Sheila went on, dancing like a mist in Hudson's arms. She knew that she had done something to Dickie. But she did not know what it was that she had done....



CHAPTER X

THE BEACON LIGHT

Out of the Wyoming Bad Lands—orange, turquoise-green, and murky blue, of outlandish ridges, of streaked rock, of sudden, twisted canons, a country like a dream of the far side of the moon—rode Cosme Hilliard in a choking cloud of alkali dust. He rode down Crazy Woman's Hill toward the sagebrush flat, where, in a half-circle of cloudless, snow-streaked mountains, lay the town of Millings on its rapid glacier river.

Hilliard's black hair was powdered with dust; his olive face was gray; dust lay thick in the folds of his neck-handkerchief; his pony matched the gray-white road and plodded wearily, coughing and tossing his head in misery from the nose-flies, the horse-flies, the mosquitoes, a swarm of small, tormenting presences. His rider seemed to be charmed into patience, and yet his aquiline face was not the face of a patient man. It was young in a keen, hard fashion; the mouth and eyes were those of a Spanish-American mother, golden eyes and a mouth originally beautiful, soft, and cruel, which had been tightened and straightened by a man's will and experience. It had been used so often for careless, humorous smiling that the cruelty had been almost worked out of it. Almost, not altogether. His mother's blood kept its talons on him. He was Latin and dangerous to look at, for all the big white Anglo-Saxon teeth, the slow, slack, Western American carriage, the guarded and amused expression of the golden eyes. Here was a bundle of racial contradictions, not yet welded, not yet attuned. Perhaps the one consistent, the one solvent, expression was that of alert restlessness. Cosme Hilliard was not happy, was not content, but he was eternally entertained. He was not uplifted by the hopeful illusions proper to his age, but he loved adventure. It was a bitter face, bitter and impatient and unschooled. It seemed to laugh, to expect the worst from life, and not to care greatly if the worst should come. But for such minor matters of dust and thirst and weariness, he had patience. Physically the young man was hard and well-schooled. He rode like a cowboy and carried a cowboy's rope tied to his saddle. And the rope looked as though it had been used.

Millings, that seemed so close below there through the clear, high atmosphere, was far to reach. The sun had slipped down like a thin, bright coin back of an iron rock before the traveler rode into the town. His pony shied wearily at an automobile and tried to make up his mind to buck, but a light pressure of the spur and a smiling word was enough to change his mind.

"Don't be a fool, Dusty! You know it's not worth the trouble. Remember that fifty miles you've come to-day!"

The occupants of the motor snapped a camera and hummed away. They had no prevision of being stuck halfway up Crazy Woman's Hill with no water within fifteen miles, or they wouldn't have exclaimed so gayly at the beauty and picturesqueness of the tired cowboy.

"He looks like a movie hero, doesn't he?" said a girl.

"No, ma'am," protested the Western driver, who had been a chauffeur only for a fortnight and knew considerably less about the insides of his Ford than he did about the insides of Hilliard's cow-pony. "He ain't no show. He's the real thing. Seems like you dudes got things kinder twisted. Things ain't like shows. Shows is sometimes like things."

"The real thing" certainly behaved as the real thing would. He rode straight to the nearest saloon and swung out of his saddle. He licked the dust off his lips, looked wistfully at the swinging door, and turned back to his pony.

"You first, Dusty—damn you!" and led the stumbling beast into the yard of The Aura. In an hour or more he came back. He had dined at the hotel and he had bathed. His naturally vivid coloring glowed under the street-light. He was shaved and brushed and sleek. He pushed quickly through the swinging doors of the bar and stepped into the saloon. It was truly a famous bar—The Aura—and it deserved its fame. It shone bright and cool and polished. There was a cheerful clink of glasses, a subdued, comfortable sound of talk. Men drank at the bar, and drank and played cards at the small tables. A giant in a white apron stood to serve the newcomer.

Hilliard ordered his drink, sipped it leisurely, then wandered off to a near-by table. There he stood, watching the game. Not long after, he accepted an invitation and joined the players. From then till midnight he was oblivious of everything but the magic squares of pasteboard, the shifting pile of dirty silver at his elbow, the faces—vacant, clever, or rascally—of his opponents. But at about midnight, trouble came. For some time Hilliard had been subconsciously irritated by the divided attention of a player opposite to him across the table. This man, with a long, thin face, was constantly squinting past Cosme's shoulder, squinting and leering and stretching his great full-lipped mouth into a queer half-smile. At last, abruptly, the irritation came to consciousness and Cosme threw an angry glance over his own shoulder.

Beside the giant who had served him his drink a girl stood: a thin, straight girl in black and white who held herself so still that she seemed painted there against the mirror on the wall. Her hands rested on her slight hips, the fine, pointed, ringless fingers white against the black stuff of her dress. Her neck, too, was white and her face, the pure unpowdered whiteness of childhood. Her chin was lifted, her lips laid together, her eyes, brilliant and clear, of no definite color, looked through her surroundings. She was very young, not more than seventeen. The mere presence of a girl was startling enough. Barmaids are unknown to the experience of the average cowboy. But this girl was trebly startling. For her face was rare. It was not Western, not even American. It was a fine-drawn, finished, Old-World face, with long, arched eyebrows, large lids, shadowed eyes, nostrils a little pinched, a sad and tender mouth. It was a face whose lines might have followed the pencil of Botticelli—those little hollows in the cheeks, that slight exaggeration of the pointed chin, that silky, rippling brown hair. There was no touch of artifice; it was an unpainted young face; hair brushed and knotted simply; the very carriage of the body was alien; supple, unconscious, restrained.

Cosme Hilliard's look lasted for a minute. Returning to his opponent it met an ugly grimace. He flushed and the game went on.

But the incident had roused Hilliard's antagonism. He disliked that man with the grimacing mouth. He began to watch him. An hour or two later Cosme's thin, dark hand shot across the table and gripped the fellow's wrist.

"Caught you that time, you tin-horn," he said quietly.

Instantly, almost before the speech was out, the giant in the apron had hurled himself across the room and gripped the cheat, who stood, a hand arrested on its way to his pocket, snarling helplessly. But the other players, his fellow sheep-herders, fell away from Hilliard dangerously.

"No shootin'," said the giant harshly. "No shoot-in' in The Aura. It ain't allowed."

"No callin' names either," growled the prisoner. "Me and my friends would like to settle with the youthful stranger."

"Settle with him, then, but somewheres else. No fightin' in The Aura."

There was an acquiescent murmur from the other table and the sheep-herder gave in. He exchanged a look with his friends, and Carthy, seeing them disposed to return quietly to the game, left them and took up his usual position behind the bar. The barmaid moved a little closer to his elbow. Hilliard noticed that her eyes had widened in her pale face. He made a brief, contemptuous excuse to his opponents, settled his account with them, and strolled over to the bar. From Carthy he ordered another drink. He saw the girl's eyes studying the hand he put out for his glass and he smiled a little to himself. When she looked up he was ready with his golden eyes to catch her glance. Both pairs of eyes smiled. She came a step toward him.

"I believe I've heard of you, miss," he said.

A delicate pink stained her face and throat and he wondered if she could possibly be shy.

"Some fellows I met over in the Big Horn country lately told me to look you up if I came to Millings. They said something about Hudson's Queen. It's the Hudson Hotel isn't it?—"

A puzzled, rather worried look crept into her eyes, but she avoided his question. "You were working in the Big Horn country? I hoped you were from Hidden Creek."

"I'm on my way there," he said. "I know that country well. You come from over there?"

"No." She smiled faintly. "But"—and here her breast lifted on a deep, spasmodic sigh—"some day I'm going there."

"It's not like any other country," he said, turning his glass in his supple fingers. "It's wonderful. But wild and lonesome. You wouldn't be caring for it—not for longer than a sunny day or two, I reckon."

He used the native phrases with sure familiarity, and yet in his speaking of them there was something unfamiliar. Evidently she was puzzled by him, and Cosme was not sorry that he had so roused her curiosity. He was very curious himself, so much so that he had forgotten the explosive moment of a few short minutes back.

The occupants of the second table pushed away their chairs and came over to the bar. For a while the barmaid was busy, making their change, answering their jests, bidding them good-night. It was, "Well, good-night, Miss Arundel, and thank you."

"See you next Saturday, Miss Arundel, if I'm alive—"

Hilliard drummed on the counter with his fingertips and frowned. His puzzled eyes wove a pattern of inquiry from the men to the girl and back. One of them, a ruddy-faced, town boy, lingered. He had had a drop too much of The Aura's hospitality. He rested rather top-heavily against the bar and stretched out his hand.

"Aren't you going to say me a real good-night, Miss Sheila," he besought, and a tipsy dimple cut itself into his cheek.

"Do go home, Jim," murmured the barmaid. "You've broken your promise again. It's two o'clock."

He made great ox-eyes at her, his hand still begging, its blunt fingers curled upward like a thirsty cup.

His face was emptied of everything but its desire.

It was perfectly evident that "Miss Sheila" was tormented by the look, by the eyes, by the hand, by the very presence of the boy. She pressed her lips tight, drew her fine arched brows together, and twisted her fingers.

"I'll go home," he asserted obstinately, "when you tell me a proper goo'-night—not before."

Her eyes glittered. "Shall I tell Carthy to turn you out, Jim?"

He smiled triumphantly. "Uh," said he, "your watch-dog went out. Dickie called him to answer the telephone. Now, will you tell me good-night, Sheila?"

Cosme hoped that the girl would glance at him for help, he had his long steel muscles braced; but, after a moment's thought—"And she can think. She's as cool as she's shy," commented the observer—she put her hand on Jim's. He grabbed it, pressed his lips upon it.

"Goo'-night," he said, "Goo'-night. I'll go now." He swaggered out as though she had given him a rose.

The barmaid put her hand beneath her apron and rubbed it. Cosme laughed a little at the quaint action.

"Do they give you lots of trouble, Miss Arundel?" he asked her sympathetically.

She looked at him. But her attitude was not so simple and friendly as it had been. Evidently her little conflict with Jim had jarred her humor. She looked distressed, angry. Cosme felt that, unfairly enough, she lumped him with The Enemy. He wondered pitifully if she had given The Enemy its name, if her experience had given her the knowledge of such names. He had a vision of the pretty, delicate little thing standing there night after night as though divided by the bar from prowling beasts. And yet she was known over the whole wide, wild country as "Hudson's Queen." Her crystal, childlike look must be one of those extraordinary survivals, a piteous sort of accident. Cosme called himself a sentimentalist. Spurred by this reaction against his more romantic tendencies, he leaned forward. He too was going to ask the barmaid for a good-night or a greeting or a good-bye. His hand was out, when he saw her face stiffen, her lips open to an "Oh!" of warning or of fear. He wheeled and flung up his arm against a hurricane of blows.

His late opponents had decided to take advantage of Carthy's absence, and inflict chastisement prompt and merciless upon the "youthful stranger." If it had not been for that small frightened "Oh" Cosme would have been down at once.

With that moment's advantage he fought like a tiger, his golden eyes ablaze. Swift and dangerous anger was one of his gifts. He was against the wall, he was torn from it. One of his opponents staggered across the room and fell, another crumpled up against the bar. Hilliard wheeled and jabbed, plunged, was down, was up, bleeding and laughing. He was whirled this way and that, the men from whom he had struck himself free recovered themselves, closed in upon him. A blow between the eyes half stunned him, another on his mouth silenced his laughter. The room was getting blurred. He was forced back against the bar, fighting, but not effectively. The snarling laughter was not his now, but that of the cheat.

Something gave way behind him; it was as if the bar, against which he was bent backwards, had melted to him and hardened against his foes. For an instant he was free from blows and tearing hands. He saw that a door in the bar had opened and shut. There was a small pressure on his arm, a pressure which he blindly obeyed. In front of him another door opened, and closed. He heard the shooting of a bolt. He was in the dark. The small pressure, cold through the torn silk sleeve of his white shirt, continued to urge him swiftly along a passage. He was allowed to rest an instant against a wall. A light was turned on with a little click above his head. He found himself at the end of the open hallway. Before him lay the brilliant velvet night.

Hilliard pressed his hands upon his eyes trying to clear his vision. He felt sick and giddy. The little barmaid's face, all terrified and urgent eyes, danced up and down.

"Don't waste any time!" she said. "Get out of Millings! Where's your pony?"

At that he looked at her and smiled.

"I'm not leaving Millings till to-morrow," he said uncertainly with wounded lips. "Don't look like that, girl. I'm not much hurt, If I'm not mistaken, your watch-dog is back and very much on his job. I reckon that our friends will leave Millings considerably before I do."

In fact, behind them at the end of the passage there was a sort of roar. Carthy had returned to avenge The Aura.

"You're sure you're not hurt? You're sure they won't try to hurt you again?"

He shook his head. "Not they..." He stood looking at her and the mist slowly cleared, his vision of her steadied. "Shall I see you to-morrow?"

She drew back from him a little. "No," she said. "I sleep all the morning. And, afterwards, I don't see any one except a few old friends. I go riding..."

He puckered his eyelids inquiringly. Then, with a sudden reckless fling of his shoulders, he put out his hand boldly and caught her small pointed chin in his palm. He bent down his head.

She stood there quite still and white, looking straight up into his face. The exquisite smoothness of her little cool chin photographed itself upon his memory. As he bent down closer to the grave and tender lips, he was suddenly, unaccountably frightened and ashamed. His hand dropped, sought for her small limp hand. His lips shifted from their course and went lower, just brushing her fingers.

"I beg your pardon," he said confusedly. He was painfully embarrassed, stammered, "I—I wanted to thank you. Good-bye..."

She said good-bye in the smallest sweet voice he had ever heard. It followed his memory like some weary, pitiful little ghost.



CHAPTER XI

IN THE PUBLIC EYE

No sight more familiar to the corner of Main and Resident Streets than that of Sylvester Hudson's Ford car sliding up to the curb in front of his hotel at two o'clock in a summer afternoon. He would slip out from under his steering-wheel, his linen duster flapping about his long legs, and he would stalk through the rocking, meditative observers on the piazza and through the lobby past Dickie's frozen stare, upstairs to the door of Miss Arundel's "suite." There he was bidden to come in. A few minutes later they would come down together, Sheila, too, passing Dickie wordlessly, and they would hum away from Millings leaving a veil of golden dust to smother the comments in their wake. There were days when Sheila's pony, a gift from Jim Greely, was led up earlier than the hour of Hudson's arrival, on which days Sheila, in a short skirt and a boy's shirt and a small felt Stetson, would ride away alone toward the mountain of her dreams. Sometimes Jim rode with her. It was not always possible to forbid him.

The day after Cosme Hilliard's spectacular passage was one of Hudson's days. The pony did not appear, but Sylvester did and came down with his prize. The lobby was crowded. Sheila threaded her way amongst the medley of tourists, paused and deliberately drew near to the desk. At sight of her Dickie's whiteness dyed itself scarlet. He rose and with an apparent effort lifted his eyes to her look.

They did not smile at each other. Sheila spoke sharply, each word a little soft lash.

"I want to speak to you. Will you come to my sitting-room when I get back?"

"Yes'm," said Dickie. It was the tone of an unwincing pride. Under the desk, hidden from sight, his hand was a white-knuckled fist.

Sheila passed on, trailed by Hudson, who was smiling not agreeably to himself. Over the smile he gave his son a cruel look. It was as though an enemy had said, "Hurts you, doesn't it?" Dickie returned the look with level eyes.

The rockers on the piazza stopped rocking, stopped talking, stopped breathing, it would seem, to watch Sylvester help Sheila into his car; not that he helped her greatly—she had an appearance of melting through his hands and getting into her place beside his by a sort of sleight of body. He made a series of angular movements, smiled at her, and started the car.

"Well, little girl," said he, "where to this afternoon?"

When Sheila rode her pony she always rode toward The Hill. But in that direction she had never allowed Sylvester to take her. She looked vaguely through the wind-shield now and said, "Anywhere—that canon, the one we came home by last week. It was so queer."

"It'll be dern dusty, I'm afraid."

"I don't care." Sheila wrapped her gray veil over her small hat which fitted close about her face. "I'm getting used to the dust. Does it ever rain around Millings? And does it ever stop blowing?"

"We don't like Millings to-day, do we?"

Sylvester was bending his head to peer through the gray mist of her veil. She held herself stiffly beside him, showing the profile of a small Sphinx. Suddenly it turned slightly, seemed to wince back. Girlie, at the gate of Number 18 Cottonwood Avenue, had stopped to watch them pass. Girlie did not speak. Her face looked smitten, the ripe fruit had turned bitter upon her ruddy lips. The tranquil emptiness of her beauty had filled itself stormily.

Sheila did not answer Hudson's reproachful question. She leaned back, dropped back, rather, into a tired little heap and let the country slide by—the strange, wide, broken country with its circling mesas, its somber grays and browns and dusty greens, its bare purple hills, rocks and sand and golden dirt, and now and then, in the sudden valley bottoms, swaying groves of vivid green and ribbons of emerald meadows. The mountains shifted and opened their canons, gave a glimpse of their beckoning and forbidding fastnesses and closed them again as though by a whispered Sesame.

"What was the row last night?" asked Sylvester in his voice of cracked tenderness. "Carthy says there was a bunch of toughs. Were you scared good and plenty? I'm sorry. It don't happen often, believe me.

"I wish you could 'a' heard Carthy talkin' about you, Sheila," went on Sylvester, his eyes, filled with uneasiness, studying her silence and her huddled smallness, hands in the pockets of her light coat, veiled face turned a little away, "Say, that would 'a' set you up all right! Talk about beacons!"

Here she flashed round on him, as though her whole body had been electrified. "Tell me all that again," she begged in a voice that he could not interpret except that there was in it a sound of tears. "Tell me again about a beacon ..."

He stammered. He was confused. But stumblingly he tried to fulfill her demand. Here was a thirst for something, and he wanted above everything in the world to satisfy it. Sheila listened to him with unsteady, parted lips. He could see them through the veil.

"You still think I am that?" she asked.

He was eager to prove it to her. "Still think? Still think? Why, girl, I don't hev to think. Don't the tillbox speak for itself? Don't Carthy handle a crowd that's growing under his eyes? Don't we sell more booze in a week now than we used to in a—" Suddenly he realized that he was on the wrong tack. It was his first break. He drew in a sharp breath and stopped, his face flushing deeply.

"Yes?" questioned Sheila, melting her syllables like slivers of ice on her tongue. "Go on."

"Er—er, don't we draw a finer lot of fellows than we ever did before? Don't they behave more decent and orderly? Don't they get civilization just for looking at you, Miss Sheila?"

"And—and booze? Jim Greely, for instance, Mr. James Greely, of the Millings National Bank—he never used to patronize The Aura. And now he's there every night till twelve and often later, for he won't obey me any more. I wonder whether Mr. and Mrs. Greely are glad that you are getting a better type of customer! Mrs. Greely almost stopped me on the street the other day—that is, she almost got up courage to speak to me. Before now she's cut me, just as Girlie does, just as your wife does, just as Dickie does—"

"Dickie cut you?" Sylvester threw back his head and laughed uneasily, and with a strained note of alarm. "That's a good one, Miss Sheila. I kinder fancied you did the cuttin' there."

"Dickie hasn't spoken to me since he came to me that day when he heard what I was going to do and tried to talk me out of doing it."

"Yes'm. He came to me first," drawled Sylvester.

They were both silent, busy with the amazing memory of Dickie, of his disheveled fury, of his lashing eloquence. He had burst in upon his family at breakfast that April morning when Millings was humming with the news, had advanced upon his father, stood above him.

"Is it true that you are going to make a barmaid of Sheila?"

Sylvester, in an effort to get to his feet, had been held back by Dickie's thin hand that shot out at him like a sword.

"Sure it's true," Sylvester had said coolly. But he had not felt cool. He had felt shaken and confused. The boy's entire self-forgetfulness, his entire absence of fear, had made Hudson feel that he was talking to a stranger, a not inconsiderable one.

"It's true, then." Dickie had drawn a big breath. "You—you"—he seemed to swallow an epithet—"you'll let that girl go into your filthy saloon and make money for you by her—by her prettiness and her—her ignorance—"

"Say, Dickie," his father had drawled, "you goin' to run for the legislature? Such a lot of classy words!" But anger and alarm were rising in him.

"You've fetched her away out here," went on Dickie, "and kinder got her cornered and you've talked a lot of slush to her and you've—"

Here Girlie came to the rescue.

"Well, anyway, she's a willing victim, Dickie," Girlie had said.

Dickie had flashed her one look. "Is she? I'll see about that. Where's Sheila?"

And then, there was Sheila's memory. Dickie had come upon her in a confusion of boxes, her little trunk half-unpacked, its treasures scattered over the chairs and floor. Sheila had lifted to him from where she knelt a glowing and excited face. "Oh, Dickie," she had said, her relief at the escape from Mrs. Hudson pouring music into her voice, "have you heard?"

He had sat down on one of the plush chairs of "the suite" as though he felt weak. Then he had got up and had walked to and fro while she described her dream, the beauty of her chosen mission, the glory of the saloon whose high priestess she had become. And Dickie had listened with the bitter and disillusioned and tender face of a father hearing the prattle of a beloved child.

"You honest think all that, Sheila?" he had asked her patiently.

She had started again, standing now to face him and beginning to be angry at his look. This boy whom she had lifted up to be her friend!

"Say," Dickie had drawled, "Poppa's some guardian!" He had advanced upon her as though he wanted to shake her. "You gotta give it right up, Sheila," he had said sternly. "Sooner than immediately. It's not to go through. Say, girl, you don't know much about bars." He had drawn a picture for her, drawing partly upon experience, partly upon his imagination, the gift of vivid metaphor descending upon him. He used words that bit into her memory. Sheila had listened and then she had put her hands over her ears. He pulled them down. He went on. Sheila's Irish blood had boiled up into her brain. She stormed back at him.

"It's you, it's your use of The Aura that has been its only shame, Dickie," was the last of all the things she had said.

At which, Dickie standing very still, had answered, "If you go there and stand behind the bar all night with Carthy to keep hands off, I—I swear I'll never set foot inside the place again. You ain't agoin' to be my beacon light—"

"Well, then," said Sheila, "I shall have done one good thing at least by being there."

Dickie, going out, had passed a breathless Sylvester on his way in. The two had looked at each other with a look that cut in two the tie between them, and Sheila, running to Sylvester, had burst into tears.

* * * * *

The motor hummed evenly on its way. It began, with a change of tune, to climb the graded side of one of the enormous mesas. Sheila, having lived through again that scene with Dickie, took out a small handkerchief and busied herself with it under her veil. She laughed shakily.

"Perhaps a beacon does more good by warning people away than by attracting them," she said. "Dickie has certainly kept his word. I don't believe he's touched a drop since I've been barmaid, Mr. Hudson. I should think you'd be proud of him."

Sylvester was silent while they climbed the hill. He changed gears and sounded his horn. They passed another motor on a dangerous curve. They began to drop down again.

"Some day," said Sylvester in a quiet voice, "I'll break every bone in Dickie's body." He murmured something more under his breath in too low a tone, fortunately, for Sheila's ear. From her position behind the bar, she had become used to swearing. She had heard a strange variety of language. But when Sylvester drew upon his experience and his fancy, the artist in him was at work.

"Do you suppose," asked his companion in an impersonal tone, "that it was really a hard thing for Dickie to do—to give it up, I mean?"

"By the look of him the last few months," snarled Sylvester, "I should say it had taken out of him what little real feller there ever was in."

Sheila considered this. She remembered Dickie, as he had risen behind the desk half an hour before. She did not contradict Sylvester. She had learned not to contradict him. But Dickie's face with its tight-knit look of battle stood out very clear to refute the accusation of any loss of manliness. He was still a quaint and ruffled Dickie. But he was vastly aged. From twenty to twenty-seven, he seemed to have jumped in a few weeks. A key had turned in the formerly open door of his spirit. The indeterminate lips had shut hard, the long-lashed eyes had definitely put a guard upon their dreams. He was shockingly thin and colorless, however. Sheila dwelt painfully upon the sort of devastation she had wrought. Girlie's face, and Dickie's, and Jim's. A grieving pressure squeezed her heart; she lifted her chest with an effort on a stifled breath.

"God! Sheila," said Sylvester harshly. The car wobbled a little. "Ain't you happy, girl?"

Sheila looked up at him. Her veil was wet against her cheeks.

"Last night," she said unevenly, "a man was going to kiss me on my mouth and—and he changed his mind and kissed my hand instead. He left a smear of blood on my fingers from where those—those other men had struck his lips. I don't know why it f-frightens me so to think about that. But it does."

She seemed to collapse before him into a little sobbing child.

"And every day when I wake up," she wailed, "I t-taste whiskey on my tongue and I—I smell cigarette smoke in my hair. And I d-dream about men looking at me—the way Jim looks. And I can't let myself think of Father any more. He used to hold his chin up and walk along as if he looked above every one and everything. I don't believe he'd ever seen a barmaid or a drunken man—not really seen them, Mr. Hudson."

"Then he wasn't a real artist after all," Sylvester spoke slowly and carefully. He was pale.

"He l-loved the stars," sobbed Sheila, her broken reserve had let out a flood; "he told me to keep looking at the stars."

"Well, ma'am," Sylvester spoke again, "I never knowed the stars to turn their backs on anything. Barmaids or drunks or kings—they all look about alike to the stars, I reckon. Say, Sheila, maybe you haven't got the pluck for real living. Maybe you're the kind of doll-baby girl that craves sheltering. I reckon I made a big mistake."

Sheila moved slightly as though his speech had pricked her.

"It kind of didn't occur to me," went on Sylvester, "that you'd care a whole lot about being ig-nored by Momma and Mr. and Mrs. Greely and Girlie. Say, Girlie's got to take her chance same's anybody else. Why don't you give Jim a jolt?"

Sheila at this began to laugh. She caught her breath. She laughed and cried together.

Sylvester patted her shoulder. "Poor kid! You're all in. Late hours too much for you, I reckon. Come on now—tell Pap everything. Ease off your heart. It's wonderful what crying does for the nervous system. I laid out on a prairie one night when I was about your age and just naturally bawled. You'd 'a' thought I was a baby steer, hanged if you wouldn't 'a' thought so. It's the fight scared you plumb to pieces. Carthy told me about it and how you let the good-looking kid out by the back. I seen him ride off toward Hidden Creek this morning. He was a real pretty boy too. Say, Sheila, wasn't you ever kissed?"

"No," said Sheila. "And I don't want to be." Sylvester laughed with a little low cackle of intense pleasure and amusement. "Well, you shan't be. No, you shan't. Nobody shall kiss Sheila!"

His method seemed to him successful. Sheila stopped crying and stopped laughing, dried her eyes, murmured, "I'm all right now, thank you, Mr. Hudson," and fell into an abysmal silence.

He talked smoothly, soothingly, skillfully, confident of his power to manage "gels." Once in a while he saw her teeth gleam as though she smiled. As they came back to Millings in the afterglow of a brief Western twilight, she unfastened her veil and showed a quiet, thoughtful face.

She thanked him, gave him her hand. "Don't come up, please, Mr. Hudson," she said with that cool composure of which at times she was surprisingly capable. "I shall have my dinner sent up and take a little rest before I go to work."

"You feel O.K.?" he asked her doubtfully. His brown eyes had an almost doglike wistfulness.

"Quite, thank you." Her easy, effortless smile passed across her face and in and out of her eyes.

Hudson stood beside his wheel tapping his teeth and staring after her. The rockers on the veranda stopped their rocking, stopped their talking, stopped their breathing to see Sheila pass. When she had gone, they fastened their attention upon Sylvester. He was not aware of them. He stood there a full three minutes under the glare of publicity. Then he sighed and climbed into his car.



CHAPTER XII

HUDSON'S QUEEN

The lobby, empty of its crowd when Sheila passed through it on her way up to her rooms, was filled by a wheezy, bullying voice. In front of the desk a little barrel of a man with piggish eyes was disputing his bill with Dickie. At the sound of Sheila's entrance he turned, stopped his complaint, watched her pass, and spat into a near-by receptacle. Sheila remembered that he had visited the bar early in the evening before, and had guzzled his whiskey and made some wheezy attempts at gallantry. Dickie, flushed, his hair at wild odds with composure, was going over the bill. In the midst of his calculations the man would interrupt him with a plump dirty forefinger pounced upon the paper. "Wassa meanin' of this item, f'rinstance? Highway robbery, thassa meanin' of it. My wife take breakfast in her room? I'd like to see her try it!"

Sheila went upstairs. She took off her things, washed off the dust, and changed into the black-and-white barmaid's costume, fastening the frilly apron, the cuffs, the delicate fichu with mechanical care. She put on the silk stockings and the buckled shoes and the tiny cap. Then she went into her sitting-room, chose the most dignified chair, folded her hands in her lap, and waited for Dickie. Waiting, she looked out through the window and saw the glow fade from the snowy crest of The Hill. The evening star let itself delicately down through the sweeping shadows of the earth from some mysterious fastness of invisibility. The room was dim when Dickie's knock made her turn her head.

"Come in."

He appeared, shut the door without looking at her, then came unwillingly across the carpet and stopped at about three steps from her chair, standing with one hand in his pocket. He had slicked down his hair with a wet brush and changed his suit. It was the dark-blue serge he had worn at the dance five months before. What those five months had been to Dickie, through what abasements and exaltations, furies and despairs he had traveled since he had looked up from Sheila's slippered feet with his heart turned backward like a pilot's wheel, was only faintly indicated in his face. And yet the face gave Sheila a pang. And, unsupported by anger, he was far from formidable, a mere youth. Sheila wondered at her long and sustained persecution of him. She smiled, her lips, her eyes, and her heart.

"Aren't you going to sit down, Dickie? This isn't a school examination."

"If it was," said Dickie, with an uncertain attempt at ease, "I wouldn't pass." He felt for a chair and got into it. He caught a knee in his hand and looked about him. "You've made the room awful pretty, Sheila."

She had spent some of the rather large pay she drew upon coverings of French blue for the plush furniture, upon a dainty yellow porcelain tea-set, upon little oddments of decoration. The wall-paper and carpet were inoffensive, the quietest probably in Millings, so that her efforts had met with some success. There was a lounge with cushions, there were some little volumes, a picture of her father, a bowl of pink wild roses, a vase of vivid cactus flowers. Some sketches in water-color—Marcus's most happy medium—had been tacked up. A piece of tapestry decorated the back of the chair Sheila had chosen. In the dim light it all had an air of quiet richness. It seemed a room transplanted to Millings from some finer soil.

Dickie looked at the tapestry because it was the nearest he dared come to looking at Sheila. His hands and knees shook with the terrible beating of his heart. It was not right, thought Dickie resentfully, that any feeling should take hold of a fellow and shake and terrify him so. He threw himself back suddenly and folded his arms tight across his chest.

"You wanted to see me about something?" he asked.

"Yes. I'll give you some tea first."

Dickie's lips fell apart. He said neither yea nor nay, but watched dazedly her preparations, her concoctions, her advance upon him with a yellow teacup and a wafer. He did not stand up to take it and he knew too late that this was a blunder. He tingled with shame.

Sheila went back to her chair and sipped from her own cup.

"I've been angry with you for three months now, Dickie."

"Yes'm," he said meekly.

"That's the longest I've ever been angry with any one in my life. Once I hated a teacher for two weeks, and it almost killed me. But what I felt about her was—was weakness to the way I've felt about you."

"Yes'm," again said Dickie. His tea was terribly hot and burnt his tongue, so that tears stood in his eyes.

"And I suppose you've been angry with me."

"No, ma'am."

Sheila was not particularly pleased with this gentle reply. "Why, Dickie, you know you have!"

"No, ma'am."

"Then why haven't you spoken to me? Why have you looked that way at me?"

"I don't speak to folks that don't speak to me," said Dickie, lifting the wafer as though its extreme lightness was faintly repulsive to him.

"Well," said Sheila bitterly, "you haven't been alone in your attitude. Very few people have been speaking to me. My only loyal friends are Mr. Hudson and Amelia Plecks and Carthy and Jim. Jim made no promises about being my guardian, but—"

"But he is your guardian?" Dickie drawled the question slightly. His gift of faint irony and impersonal detachment flicked Sheila's temper as it had always flicked his father's.

"Jim is my friend," Sheila maintained in defiance of a still, small voice. "He has given me a pony and has taken me riding—"

"Yes'm, I've saw you—" Dickie's English was peculiarly fallible in moments of emotion. Now he seemed determined to cut Sheila's description short. "Say, Sheila, did you send for me to tell me about this lovely friendship of yours with Jim?"

Sheila set her cup down on the window-sill. She did not want to lose her temper with Dickie. She brushed a wafer crumb from her knee.

"No, Dickie, I didn't. I sent for you because, after all, though I've been so angry with you, I've known in my heart that—that—you are a loyal friend and that you tell the truth."

This admission was an effort. Sheila's pride suffered to the point of bringing a dim sound of tears into her voice....

Dickie did not speak. He too put down his tea-cup and his wafer side by side on the floor near his chair. He put his elbows on his knees and bent his head down as though he were examining his thin, locked hands.

Sheila waited for a long minute; then she said angrily, "Aren't you glad I think that of you?"

"Yes'm." Dickie's voice was indistinct.

"You don't seem glad."

Dickie made some sort of struggle. Sheila could not quite make out its nature. "I'm glad. I'm so glad that it kind of—hurts," he said.

"Oh!" That at least was pleasant intelligence to a wounded pride.

Fortified, Sheila began the real business of the interview. "You are not an artist, Dickie," she said, "and you don't understand why your father asked me to work at The Aura nor why I wanted to work there. It was your entire inability to understand—"

"Entire inability—" whispered Dickie as though he were taking down the phrase with an intention of looking it up later.

This confused Sheila. "Your—your entire inability," she repeated rapidly, "your—your entire inability—"

"Yes'm. I've got that."

"—To understand that made me so angry that day." Sheila was glad to be rid of that obstruction. She had planned this speech rather carefully in the watches of the wakeful, feverish morning which had been her night. "You seemed to be trying to pull your father and me down to some lower spiritual level of your own."

"Lower spiritual level," repeated Dickie.

"Dickie, stop that, please!"

He looked up, startled by her sharpness. "Stop what, ma'am?"

"Saying things after me. It's insufferable."

"Insufferable—oh, I suppose it is. You're usin' so many words, Sheila. I kind of forgot there was so many words as you're makin' use of this afternoon."

"Oh, Dickie, Dickie! Can't you see how miserable I am! I am so unhappy and—and scared, and you—you are making fun of me."

At that, spoken in a changed and quavering key of helplessness, Dickie hurried to her, knelt down beside her chair, and took her hands.

"Sheila! I'll do anything!"

His presence, his boyish, quivering touch, so withheld from anything but boyishness, even the impulsive humility of his thin, kneeling body, were inexpressibly soothing, inexpressibly comforting. She did not draw away her hands. She let them cling to his.

"Dickie, will you answer me, quite truthfully and simply, without any explaining or softening, please, if I ask you a—a dreadful question?"

"Yes, dear."

"I'm not sure if it is a dreadful question, but—but I'm afraid it is."

"Don't worry. Ask me. Surely, I'll answer you the truth without any fixin's."

Her hands clung a little closer. She was silent, gathering courage. He felt her slim knees quiver.

"What do they mean, Dickie," she whispered with a wan look, "when they call me—'Hudson's Queen'?"

Dickie bent from her look as though he felt a pain. He took her hands up close to his breast. "Who told you that they called you that?" he asked breathlessly.

"That's what every one calls me—the men over in the Big Horn country—they tell men that are coming to Millings to be sure to look up 'Hudson's Queen.' Do they mean the Hotel, Dickie? They do mean the Hotel, don't they, Dickie?—that I am The Hudson's Queen?"

The truth sometimes presents itself like a withering flame. Dickie got up, put away her hands, walked up and down, then came back to her. He had heard the epithet and he knew its meaning. He wrestled now with his longing to keep her from such understanding, or, at least, to soften it. She had asked for the clear truth and he had promised it to her. He stood away because he could not trust himself to endure the wincing of her hands and body when she heard the truth. He hoped dimly that she might not understand it.

"They don't mean the Hotel, Sheila," he said harshly. "They mean—Father. You know now what they mean—?" In her stricken and bewildered eyes he saw that she did know. "I would like to kill them," sobbed Dickie suddenly. "I would like to kill—him. No, no, Sheila, don't you cry. Don't you. It's not worth cryin' for. It's jest ignorant folks's ignorant and stupid talk. It's not worth cryin' for." He sat down on the arm of her chair and fairly gathered her into his arms. He rocked and patted her shoulder and kissed her gently on her hair—all with that boyishness, that brotherliness, that vast restraint so that she could not even guess the strange and unimaginable pangs he suffered from his self-control.

Before Dickie's resolution was burnt away by the young inner fire, Sheila withdrew herself gently from his arms and got up from the chair. She walked over to one of the two large windows—the sunset windows she called them, in contradistinction to the one sunrise window—and stood composing herself, her hands twisted together and lifted to the top of the lower sash, her forehead rested on them.

A rattle of china, a creaking step outside the door, interrupted their tremulous silence in which who knows what mysterious currents were passing between their young minds.

"It's my dinner," said Sheila, and Dickie walked over mechanically and opened the door.

Amelia Plecks came panting into the room, set the tray down on a small table, and looked contempt at Dickie.

"There now, Miss Arundel," she said with breathless tenderness, "I've pro-cured a dandy chop for you. You said you was kind of famished for a lamb chop, and, of course, in a sheep country good mutton's real hard to come by, and this ain't properly speaking—lamb, but—! Well, say, it's just dandy meat."

She ignored Dickie as one might ignore the presence of some obnoxious insect in the reception-room of a queen. Her eyes were disgustedly fascinated by his presence, but in her conversation she would not admit this preoccupation of disgust.

"I'll be going," said Dickie.

Amelia nodded as one who applauds the becoming move of an inferior.

"Here's a note for you, Miss Arundel," she said, coming over to Sheila's post at the window, where she was trying to hide the traces of her tears. "Well, say, who's been botherin' you?" Amelia's voice went down a long, threatening octave to a sinister bass note, at the voicing of which she turned to look at Dickie.

"Good-night, Sheila," he said diffidently; and Sheila coming quickly toward him, put out her hand. The note Amelia had handed her fell. Dickie and Amelia both bent to pick it up.

"No, you don't," said Amelia, snatching it and accusing him, by her tone, of inexpressibly base intentions. "Say, Miss Arundel," in a whisper of thrilled confidence, "Mister Jim! Uh?"

"Thank you, Dickie," murmured Sheila, half-embarrassed, half-amused by her adoring follower's innuendoes. "Thank you for everything. I shall have to think what I can do ... Good-night."

Dickie, his eyes forcibly held away from Jim's note, murmured, "Good-night, ma'am," and went out, closing the door with exaggerated gentleness. The quietness of his departure seemed to spare Sheila's sensitiveness.

"Ain't he a worm, though!" exclaimed Amelia, sparing nobody's sensitiveness.

"He's nothing of the sort," Sheila protested indignantly. "He is a dear!"

Amelia opened her prominent eyes and pursed her lips. A reassuring light dawned on her bewilderment. "Oh, say, dearie, I wasn't speakin' of your Mister Jim. I was makin' reference to Dickie."

Sheila thrust the note into her pocket and went over to the table to light her lamp. "I know quite well that you meant Dickie," she said. "Nobody in Millings would ever dream of comparing Mr. James Greely to a worm, even if he came out from the ground just in time for the early bird to peck him. I know that."

"You're ornery to-night, dearie," announced Amelia, and with exemplary tact she creaked and breathed herself to the door. There she had a relapse from tactfulness, however, and planted herself to stare. "Ain't you goin' to read your note?"

Sheila, to be rid of her, unfolded the paper and read. It was quite beautifully penned in green ink on violet paper. Jim had written both wisely and too well.

"My darling—Why not permit me to call you that when it is the simple and sincere truth?" An astonished little voice in Sheila's brain here seemed to counter-question mechanically "Why not, indeed?"—"I cannot think of anything but you and how I love you. These little notes I am going to keep a-sending you are messengers of love. You will never meet with a more tremendous lover than me.... Be my Queen," Jim had written with a great climatic splash of ink, and he had signed himself, "Your James."

Sheila's face was crimson when she put down the note. She stared straight in front of her for an instant with very large eyes in this scarlet rose of countenance and then she crumpled into mirth. She put her face into her hands and rocked. It seemed as though a giant of laughter had caught her about the ribs.

Amelia stared and felt a wound. She swallowed a lump of balked sentiment as she went out. Her idol was faintly tarnished, her heroine's stature preceptibly diminished. The sort of Madame du Barry atmosphere with which Sheila's image was surrounded in Amelia's fancy lost a little of its rosy glow. The favorite of Kings, the amorita of Dukes, does not rock with laughter over scented notes from a High Desirable.

"She ain't just quite up to it," was Amelia's comment, which she probably could not have explained even to herself.

Sheila presently was done with laughter. She ate a nibble of dinner as soberly as Amelia could have wished, then sat back, her eyes closed with a resolve to think clearly, closely, to some determination of her life. But Jim's note, which had so roused her amusement, began to force itself in another fashion upon her. She discovered that it was an insufferable note. It insinuated everything, it suggested—everything. It was a boastful messenger. It swaggered male-ishly. It threw out its chest and smacked its lips. "See what a sad dog my master is," it said; "a regular devil of a fellow." Sheila found her thoughts confused by anger. She found that she was too disturbed for any clear decision. She was terribly weary and full of dread for the long night before her. And a startled look at her clock told her it was time now to go over to the saloon.

She got up, went to her mirror, smoothed her rippled hair with two strokes of a brush, readjusted her cap, and decided that, for once, a little powder on the nose was a necessity. Carthy must not see that she had been crying. As it was, her brilliant color was suspicious, and her eyes, with their deep distended look of tears. She shut them, drew a breath, put out her light, and went down the back stairs to a narrow alley. It led from the hotel to the street that ran back of The Aura ... the street to which she had taken young Hilliard the night before.

The alley seemed to Sheila, as she stepped into it from the glare of the electric-lighted hotel, a stream of cool and silvery light. Above lay a strip of tender sky in which already the stars shook. In this high atmosphere they were always tremulous, dancing, beating, almost leaping, with a fullness of quick light. They seemed very near to the edges of the alley walls, to be especially visiting it with their detached regard, peering down for some small divine occasion for influence. Sheila prayed to them a desperate prayer of human helplessness.



CHAPTER XIII

SYLVESTER CELEBRATES

"Hey, you girl there! Hi! Hey!"

These exclamations called in a resonant, deep-chested voice succeeded at last in attracting Sheila's attention. She had lingered at the alley's mouth, shirking her entrance into the saloon, and now she saw, halfway down the short, wide street, a gesticulating figure.

At first, as she obeyed the summons, she thought the summoner a man, but on near view it proved itself a woman, of broad, massive hips and shoulders, dressed in a man's flannel shirt and a pair of large corduroy trousers, their legs tucked into high cowboy boots. She wore no hat, and her hair was cut square across her neck and forehead; hair of a dark rusty red, it was, and matched eyes like dark panes of glass before a fire, red-brown and very bright, ruddy eyes in a square, ruddy face, which, with its short, straight, wide-bridged nose, well-shaped lips, square chin, and brilliant teeth, made up a striking and not unattractive countenance.

"I've got a horse here; won't stand," said the woman. "Will you hold his head? Can leaking back here in my wagon, leaking all over my other stuff."

The horse came round the corner. He moved resolutely to meet them. He was the boniest, small horse Sheila had ever seen—a shadow of a horse, one-eyed, morose, embittered. The harness hung loose upon his meagerness; the shafts stuck up like the points of a large collar on a small old man.

"He's not running away," explained the owner superfluously. "It's just that he can't stop. You'd think, to look at him, that stopping would be his favorite sport. But you'd be mistaken. Go he must. He's kind of always crazy to get there—Lord knows where—probably to the end of his life."

Sheila held the horse, and rubbed his nose with her small and gentle hand. The creature drooped under the caress and let its lower lip, with a few stiff white hairs, hang and quiver bitterly. It half-closed its one useful eye, a pale eye of intense, colorless disillusionment.

When the wagon stopped, a dog who was trotting under it stopped too and lay down in the dust, panting. Sheila bent her head a little to see the dog. She had a child's intense interest in animals. Through the dimness she made out a big, wolfish creature with a splendid, clean, gray coat, his pointed nose, short, pointed ears, deep, wild eyes, and scarlet tongue, set in a circular ruff of black. His bushy tail curled up over his back.

"What kind of dog is that?" asked Sheila, thinking the great animal under the wagon better fitted to pull the load than the shadowy little horse in front of it.

"Quarter wolf," answered the woman in her casual manner of speech, her resonant voice falling pleasantly on the light coolness of the evening air; "Malamute. This fellow was littered on the body of a dead man."

Sheila had also the child's interest in tales. "Tell me about it," she begged fervently.

The woman stopped in her business of tying down a canvas cover over her load and gave Sheila an amused and searching look. She held an iron spike between her teeth, but spoke around it skillfully.

"Arctic exploration it was. My brother was one of the party. 'T was he brought me home Berg. Berg's mother was one of the sledge dogs. Party was shipwrecked, starved, most of the dogs eaten, one man dead. Berg's mother littered on the body one night. Next morning they were rescued and the new family was saved. Otherwise I guess they'd have had a puppy stew and Berg and his wife and family wouldn't be earning their living with me."

"How do they earn their living?" asked Sheila, still peering at the hero of the tale.

"They pull my sled about winters, Hidden Creek."

"Oh, you live in the Hidden Creek country?"

"Yes. Got a ranch up not far from the source. Ever been over The Hill?"

She came toward Sheila, gathered the reins into her strong, broad hands, held them in her teeth, and began to pull on her canvas gloves. She talked with the reins between her teeth as she had with the spike, her enunciation triumphantly forceful and distinct.

"Some day, I'm coming over The Hill," said Sheila, less successful with a contraction in her throat.