"Here's a new settler!" Jack called. "I am going to stay in Little Rivers and win all the prizes."

"You are joking!" gasped the Doge.

"Not joking," said Jack. "I want to close the bargain to-night."

"You bring color and adventure—yes! I did not expect the honor—the town will be delighted! I am overwhelmed! Will you plow with Pete Leddy's gun drawn by Wrath of God, sir, and harrow with your spurs drawn by Jag Ear? Shall you make a specialty of olives? Do you dare to aspire as high as dates?"

The Doge's speech had begun incoherently, but steadied into rallying humor at the close.

"I haven't seen the date-tree yet," said Jack. "Not until I have can I judge whether or not I shall dare to rival the lord of the manor in his own specialty. And there are business details which I must settle with you, O Doge of this city of slender canals!"

"O youth, will you tarry with peace between wars?" answered the Doge, in quick response to the spirit of nonsense as a basis for their new relations. "Come, and I will show you our noblest product of peace, the Date-Tree Wonderful!" he said, leading the way to the garden, while Mary hurried rather precipitately into the house.

Jasper Ewold was at his best, a glowing husbandman, when he pointed aloft to the clusters of fruit pendent from the crotches of the stiff branches, enclosed in cloth bags to keep them free of insects.

"Do you see strange lettering on the cloth?" he asked.

"Yes, it looks like Arabic."

"So it is! Among other futile diversions in a past incarnation I studied Arabic a little, and I still have my lexicon. Perhaps my construction might not please the grammarians of classic Bagdad, but the sentiment is there safe enough in the language of the mother romance world of the date: 'All hail, first-born of our Western desert fecundity!' It is calling out to the pass and the range from the wastes where the sagebrush has had its own way since the great stir that there was in the world at genesis."

"With the unlimited authority I have in bestowing titles," said Jack, "I have a mind to make you an Emir. But it's a pity that you haven't a camel squatting under your date-tree and placidly chewing his cud."

"A tempting thought!" declared the Doge unctuously.

"Bob Worther could ride him on the tours of inspection. I think the jounce would be almost as good a flesh-reducer as pedestrianism."

"There you go! You would have the camel wearing bells, with reins of red leather and a purple saddle-cloth hung with spangles, and Bob—our excellent Bob—in a turban! Persiflage, sir! A very demoralization of the faculties with cataracts of verbiage, sir!" declared the Doge as he started back to the house. "Little Rivers is a practical town," he proceeded seriously. "We indulge in nonsense only after sunset and when a stranger appears riding a horse with a profane name. Yes, a practical town; and I am surprised at your disloyalty to your own burro by mentioning camels."

"It rests with you, I believe, to let me have the land and also the water," said Jack.

"We grow businesslike!" returned the Doge with a change of manner.

"Very!" declared Jack.

"The requirement is that you become a member of the water users' association and pay your quota of taxes per acre foot; and the price you pay for your land also goes to the association. But I decide on the eligibility of the applicant."

They were in front of the house by this time, and again the Doge gave Jack that sharp, quick, knowing glance of scrutiny through his heavy, tufted eyebrows, before he proceeded:

"The concession for the use of the river for irrigation is mine, administered by the water users' association as if it were theirs, under the condition that no one who has not my approval can have membership. That is, it is practically mine, owing to my arrangement with old Mr. Lefferts, who lives upstream. He is an eccentric, a hermit. He came here many years ago to get as far away from civilization as he could, I judge. That gives him an underlying right. Originally he had two partners, squaw men. Both are dead. He had made no improvements beyond drawing enough water for a garden and for his horse and cow. When I came to make a bargain with him he named an annual sum which should keep him for the rest of his life; and thus he waived his rights. First, Jim Galway, then other settlers drifted in. I formed the water users' association. All taxes and sums for the sale of land go into keeping the dam and ditches in condition."

"You take nothing for yourself!"

"A great deal. The working out of an idea—an idea in moulding a little community in my old age in a fashion that pleases me; while my own property, of course, increases in value. At my death the rights go to the community. But no Utopia; Sir Chaps! Just hard-working, cheerful men and women in a safe refuge!"

"And I am young!" exclaimed Jack, with a hopeful smile. "I have good health. I mean to work. I try to be cheerful. Am I eligible?"

"Sir Chaps, you—you have done us a great favor. Everybody likes you. Sir Chaps"—the Doge hesitated for an instant, with a baffling, unspoken inquiry in his eyes—"Sir Chaps, I like your companionship and your mastery of persiflage. Jim Galway, who is secretary of the association, will look after details of the permit and Bob Worther will turn the water on your land, and the whole town will assist you with advice! Luck, Sir Chaps, in your new vocation!"

That evening, while the Doge took down the David and set a fragment from the frieze of the Parthenon in its place, Little Rivers talked of the delightful news that it was not to lose its strange story-teller and duelist. Little Rivers was puzzled. Not once had Jack intimated a thought of staying. By his own account, so far as he had given any, his wound had merely delayed his departure to New York, where he had pressing business. He had his reservation on the Pullman made for the morning express; he had paid a farewell call at the Ewolds, and apparently then had changed his mind and his career. These were the only clues to work on, except the one suggested by Mrs. Galway, who was the wise woman of the community, while Mrs. Smith was the propagandist.

"I guess he likes the way Mary Ewold snubs him!" said Mrs. Galway.

But there was one person in town who was not surprised at Jack's decision. When Jack sang out as he entered the Galway yard on returning from the Doge's, "We stay, Firio, we stay!" Firio said: "Si, Senor Jack!" with no change of expression except a brighter gleam than usual in his velvety eyes.



XV

WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS

Perhaps we may best describe this as a chapter of Incidents; or, to use a simile, a broad, eddying bend in a river on a plateau, with cataracts and canyons awaiting it on its route to the sea. Or, discarding the simile and speaking in literal terms, in a search for a theme on which to hang the incidents, we revert to Mary's raillery at the announcement of an easy traveller that he was going to turn sober rancher.

"You plowing! You blistering your hands! You earning your bread by the sweat of your brow!"

But there he was in blue overalls, sinking his spade deep for settings, digging ditches and driving furrows through the virgin soil, while the masons and carpenters built his ranch house.

"They are straight furrows, too!" Jack declared.

"Passably so!" answered Mary.

"And look at the blisters!" he continued, exhibiting his puffy palms.

"You seem to think blisters a remarkable human phenomenon, a sensational novelty to a laboring population!"

"Now, would you advise pricking?" he asked, with deference to her judgment.

"It is so critical in your case that you ought to consult a doctor rather than take lay advice."

"Jim Galway says that the thorough way, I mulched my soil before putting in my first crop of alfalfa is a model for all future settlers," he ventured.

She remarked that Jim was always encouraging to new-comers, and remarked this in a way that implied that some new-comers possibly needed hazing.

"And I am up at dawn and hard at it for six hours before midday."

"Yes, it is wonderful!" she admitted, with a mock show of being overwhelmingly impressed. "Nobody in the world ever worked ten hours a day before!"

"I'm doing more than any man that I pay two-fifty. I do perspire, and if you don't call that earning your bread with the sweat of your brow, why this is an astoundingly illogical world!"

"There is a great difference between sporadic display and that continuity which is the final proof of efficiency," she corrected him.

"Long, involved sentences often indicate the loss of an argument!" declared Jack.

"There isn't any argument!" said Mary with superior disinterestedness.

By common inspiration they had established a truce of nonsense. She still called him Jack; he still called her Mary. It was the only point of tacit admission that they had ever met before he asked her to show a prospective settler a parcel of land.

Their new relations were as the house of cards of fellowship: cards of glass, iridescent and brittle, mocking the idea that there could be oblivion of the scene in Lang's store, the crack of Leddy's pistol in the arroyo, or the pulse of Jack's artery under her thumb! She was sure that he could forget these experiences, even if she could not. That was his character, as she saw it, free of clinging roots of yesterday's events, living some new part every day.

In the house of cards she set up a barrier, which he saw as a veil over her eyes. Not once had he a glimpse of their depths. There was only the surface gleam of sunbeams and sometimes of rapier-points, merry but significant. She frequently rode out to the pass and occasionally, when his day's work was done, he would ride to the foot of the range to meet her, and as they came back he often sang, but never whistled. Indeed, he had ceased to whistle altogether. Perhaps he regarded the omission as an insurance against duels.

Aside from nonsense they had common interests in cultural and daily life, from the Eternal Painter's brushwork to how to dress a salad. She did extend her approval for the generous space which he was allowing for flower-beds, and advised him in the practical construction of his kitchen; while the Doge decorated the living-room with Delia Robbias, which, however, never arrived at the express office. He was a neighbor always at home in the Ewold house. The Doge revelled in their disputations, yet never was really intimate or affectionate as he was with Jim Galway, who knew not the Pitti, the Prado, nor the Louvre, and could not understand the intoning of Dante in the original as Jack could, thanks to his having been brought up in libraries and galleries.

The town, which was not supposed to ask about pasts, could not help puzzling about his. What was the story of this teller of stories? The secluded little community was in a poor way to find out, even if the conscientious feeling about a custom had not been a restraint that kept wonder free from inquiring hints. They took him for what he was in all their personal relations; that was the delightful way of Little Rivers, which inner curiosity might not alloy. His broader experience of that world over the pass which stretched around the globe and back to the other range-wall of the valley, seemed only to make him fall more easily into the simple ways of the fellow-ranchers of the Doge's selection, who were genuine, hall-marked people, whatever the origin from which the individual sprang. He knew the fatigue of productive labor as something far sweeter than the fatigue that comes from mere exercise, and the neophyte's enthusiasm was his.

"I'm sitting at the outer edge of the circle," he told Jim Galway. "But when my first crop is harvested I shall be on the inside—a real rancher!"

"You've already got one foot over the circle," said Jim.

"And with my first crop of dates I'll be in the holy of holies of pastoral bliss!"

"Yes, I should say so!" Jim responded, but in a way that indicated surprise at the thought of Jack's remaining in Little Rivers long enough for such a consummation.

When his alfalfa covered the earth with a green carpet Jack was under a spell of something more than the never-ending marvel of dry seeds springing into succulent abundance without the waving of any magic wand.

"I made it out of the desert!" he cried. "It laughs in triumph at the bare stretches around it, waiting on water!"

"That is it," said Jim; "waiting on water!"

"The promise of what might come!"

"It will come! Some day, Jack, you and I will ride up into the river canyon and I will show you a place where you can see the blue sky between precipitous walls two hundred feet high. The abyss is so narrow you can throw a stone across it."

"What lies beyond?" asked Jack, his eyes lighting vividly.

"A great basin which was the bed of an ancient lake before the water wore its way through."

"A dam between those walls—and you have another lake!"

"Yes, and the spring freshets from the northern water-shed all held in a reservoir—none going to waste! And, Jack, as population spreads the dam must come."

"Why, the Doge has a kingdom!"

"Yes, that's the best of it, the rights being in his hands. He shares up with everybody and we get it when he dies. That's why we are ready to accept the Doge's sentiments as kind of gospel. If ornamental hedges waste water and bring bugs and are contrary to practical ranching ideas, why—well, why not? It's our Little Rivers to enjoy as we please. We aren't growing so fast, but we're growing in a clean, beautiful way, as Jasper Ewold says. What if that river was owned by one man! What if we had to pay the price he set for what takes the place of rain, as they do in some places in California? We're going to say who shall build that dam!"

"Think of it! Think of it!" Jack half whispered, his imagination in play. "Plot after plot being added to this little oasis until it extends from range to range, one sea of green! Many little towns, with Little Rivers the mother town, spreading its ideas! Yes, think of being in at the making of a new world, seeing visions develop into reality as, stone by stone, an edifice rises! I—I—" Jack paused, a cloud sweeping over his features, his eyes seeming to stare at a wall. His body alone seemed in Little Rivers, his mind on the other side of the pass. He was in one of those moods of abstraction that ever made his fellow-ranchers feel that he would not be with them permanently.

Indeed, he had whole days when his smile had a sad turn; when, though he spoke pleasantly, the inspiration of talk was not in him and when Belvy Smith could not rouse any action in the cat with two black stripes down its back. But many Little Riversites, including the Doge, had their sad days, when they looked away at the pass oftener than usual, as if seeing a life-story framed in the V. His came usually, as Mrs. Smith observed, when he had a letter from the East. And it was then that he would pretend to cough to Firio. These mock coughing spells were one of the few manifestations that made the impassive Firio laugh.

"Now you know I am not well, don't you, Firio?" he would ask, waggishly, the very thought seeming to take him out of the doldrums. "I could never live out of this climate. Why, even now I have a cough, kuh-er!"

Firio had turned a stove cook. He accepted the humiliation in a spirit of loyalty. But often he would go out among the sagebrush and return with a feathery tribute, which he would broil on a spit in a fire made in the yard. Always when Jack rode out to meet Mary at the foot of the range, Firio would follow; and always he had his rifle. For it was part of Jack's seeming inconsistency, emphasizing his inscrutability, that he would never wear his revolver. It hung beside Pete's on the wall of the living-room as a second relic. Far from being a quarrel-maker, he was peaceful to the point of Quakerish predilection.

"Nobody ever hears anything of Leddy," said Jim; "but he will never forget or forgive, and one day he will show up unexpectedly."

"Not armed!" said Jack.

"Do you think he will keep his word?"

"I know he will. I asked him and he said he would."

"You're very simple, Jack. But mind, he can keep his word and still use a gun outside the town!"

"So he might!" admitted Jack, laughing in a way that indicated that the subject was distasteful to him; for he would never talk of the duel.

Now we come to that little affair of Pedro Nogales. Pedro was a half-breed, whose God among men was Pete Leddy no less than Jack was Firio's and the Doge was Ignacio's. In his shanty back of Bill Lang's the Mexicans and Indians lost their remaining wages in gambling after he had filled them with mescal. It happened that Gonzalez, head man of the laborers under Bob Worther, who had saved quite a sum, came away penniless after taking but one drink. Every ounce of Bob's avoirdupois was in a rage.

"It's time we cleaned out Pedro's place, seh!" he told Jack; "and you and Jim Galway have got to help me do it!"

"I don't like to get into a row," said Jack very soberly.

"Then I'll undertake the job alone," Bob retorted. "That will be a good deal worse, for when I get going I lose my temper and I tell you, seh, I've got a lot to lose! And, Jack, are you going to stand by and see robbery done by the meanest, most worthless greaser in the valley—and a good Indian the victim?"

"Yes, Jack," said Jim, "you've got such a formidable reputation since your set-to with Leddy that the Indians think you are a regular master of magic. You're just the one to make Pedro come to terms."

"A formidable reputation without firing a shot!" admitted Jack quizzically, and consented.

"You'll surely want your gun this time!" Bob warned him.

"No," said Jack.

"But—"

"I have hung up my gun!" Jack said decisively. "We'll try to handle this peacefully. Come on!"

"Well, we've got our guns, anyway!" Jim put in.

It was mid-afternoon, a slack hour for Pedro's kind of trade, and the shanty was empty of customers when the impromptu vigilance committee entered. Pedro himself was half dozing in the faro dealer's chair. His small, ferret eyes flashed a spark at the visitors as he rose, but he was politeness itself.

"Senores! It is great honor! Be seated, senores!" he said with eloquent deference.

The very sight of him set all the ounces in Bob quivering in an outburst:

"No chairs for us! You fork over Gonzalez's money that you tricked out of him!"

"I take Gonzalez's money! I? Senores?"

"It's a hundred and twenty dollars that he earned honestly, and the quicker you lay your hands on it the better for you!" Bob roared back.

Pedro was quite impassive.

"Senores, if Gonzalez need money—senores, I honest man! Senores, sit down! We talk!" Pedro dropped back into his chair and his hand, with cat-like quickness, shot under the faro table.

Jack had come through the door after Jim and Bob. He was standing a little behind them, and while they had been watching Pedro's face he had watched Pedro's movements.

"Pedro, take your hand out from under the table and without your gun!" said Jack; and Jim Galway caught a thrill in Jack's voice that he had heard in the arroyo.

Pedro looked into Senor Don't Care's eyes and saw a bead, though they were not looking along the glint of a revolver barrel.

"Si, senor!" said Pedro, settling back in the chair with palms out in intimation of his pacific intentions.

"Now, Pedro, you have Gonzalez's money, haven't you?" Jack went on, in the reasoning fashion that he had adopted to Leddy in the store. "And you aren't going to make yourself or Bob trouble. You are going to give it back!"

"Si, senor!" said Pedro wincing.

While he was producing the money and counting it, his furtive glance kept watch of Jack. Then, as the committee turned to go, he suddenly exclaimed with angry surprise and disillusion:

"You got no gun!"

While Jim and Bob waited for Jack to precede them out of the door Jim had time to note Pedro's baleful, piercing look at Jack's back.

"Just as I told you, Jack—and I reckon you saved a big row. You just put a scare into that hellion with a word, like you had a thousand devils in you!" said Jim.

"It's all over!" Jack answered, looking more hurt than pleased over the congratulations. "Very fortunately over."

"But," Jim observed, tensely, "Pedro is not only Leddy's bitter partisan and ready to do his bidding, Pedro's a bit loco, besides—the kind that hesitates at nothing when he gets a grudge. You've got to look out for him."

"Oh, no!" said Jack, in the full swing of a Senor Don't Care mood.

Jim and Bob began to entertain the feelings of Mary on the pass, when she thought of Jack as walking over precipices regardless of danger signs. After all, did he really know how to shoot? If he would not look after himself, it was their duty to look after him. Jim suggested that the rule which Jack had made for Leddy should have universal application. No one whosoever should wear arms in Little Rivers without a permit. The new ordinance had the Doge's approval; and Jim and Bob, both of whom had permits, kept watch that it was enforced, particularly in the case of Pedro Nogales.

Meanwhile, Jack kept the ten-hour-a-day law. His alfalfa was growing with prolific rapidity, but Firio had the air of one who waits between journeys.

"Never the trail again?" he asked temptingly, one day.

"Never the trail again!" Jack declared firmly.

"Si, si, si—the trail again!"

"You think so? Then why do you ask?"

"To make a question," answered Firio. "The big sadness will be too strong. It will make you move—si!"

"The big sadness!" Jack exclaimed. He seized Firio by the shoulders and looked narrowly at him, and Firio met the gaze with soft, puzzling lights in his eyes. "Ho! ho! A big sadness! How do you know?" he laughed.

"I learn on the trail when I watch you look at the stars. And Senorita Ewold, she know; but she think the big sadness a devil. She—" and he paused.

"She—yes?" Jack asked.

"She—" Firio started again.

Jack suddenly raised his hands from Firio's shoulders in a gesture of interruption. It was not exactly Firio's place to hazard opinions about Mary Ewold.

"Never mind!" he said, rather sharply.

But Firio proceeded fixedly to finish what he had to say.

"She has a big sadness, which makes her ride to the pass. She rides out so she can ride back smiling."

"Firio, don't mistake your imagination for divination!" Jack warned him.

As Firio did not understand the meaning of this he said nothing. Probably he would have said nothing even if he had understood.

"I'll show you the nature of the big sadness and that the devil is a joy devil when we harvest our first crop of alfalfa," Jack concluded. "Then I shall make a holiday! Then I shall be a real rancher and something is going to happen!"

"The trail!" exclaimed Firio, and the soft light in his eyes flashed. "Si! The trail and the big spurs and the revolver in the holster!"

"No!"

But Firio said "Si"! with the supreme confidence of one who holds that belief in fulfilment will make any wish come true.



XVI

A CHANGE OF MIND

It was Sunday afternoon; or, to date it by an epochal event, the day after Jack's alfalfa crop had fallen before the mower. Mary was seated on the bench under the avenue of umbrella-trees reading a thin edition of Marcus Aurelius bound in flexible leather. Of late she had developed a fondness for the more austere philosophers. Jack, whose mood was entirely to the sonneteers, came softly singing down the avenue of palms and presented himself before her in a romping spirit of interruption.

"O expert in floriculture!" he said, "the humble pupil acting as a Committee of One has failed utterly to agree with himself as to the form of his new flowerbed. There must be a Committee of Two. Will you come?"

"Good! I am weary of Marcus. I can't help thinking that he too far antedates the Bordeaux mixture!" she answered, springing to her feet with positive enthusiasm.

He rarely met positive enthusiasm in her and everything in him called for it at the moment. He found it so inspiring that the problem of the bed was settled easily by his consent to all her suggestions—a too-ready consent, she told herself.

"After all, it is your flower garden," she reminded him.

"No, every flower garden in Little Rivers is yours!" he declared.

The way he said this made her frown. She saw him taking a step on the other side of that barrier over which she mounted guard.

"Never make your hyperboles felonious!" she warned him. "Besides, if you are going to be a real Little Riversite you should have opinions of your own."

"I haven't any to-day—none except victory!" and he held out his palms, exhibiting their yellowish plates. "Look! Even corns on the joints!"

"Yes, they look quite real," she admitted, censoriously.

"Haven't I made good? Do you remember how you stood here on the very site of my house and lectured me? I would not work! I would not—"

"You have worked a little—a little!" she said grudgingly, and showed him as much of the wondrous sparkle in her eyes as he could see out of the corners between the lashes. She never allowed him to look into her eyes if she apprehended any attempt to cross the barrier. But she could see well enough out of the corners to know that his glances had a kind of hungry joy and a promise of some new demonstration in his attitude toward her. She must watch that barrier very shrewdly.

"Look at my hedge!" he went on. "It is knee-high already, and my umbrella-trees cast enough shade for anybody, if he will wrap himself around the trunk. But such things are ornamental. I have a more practical appeal. Come on!"

His elation was insistent, superior to any prickling gibes of banter, as they walked on the mealy earth between rows of young orange settings, and the sweet odor of drying alfalfa came to their nostrils, borne by a vagrant breeze. He swept his hand toward the field in a gesture of pride, his shoulders thrown back in a deep breath of exultation.

"The callouses win!" And he exhibited them again.

But she refused even to glance at them this time.

"You seem to think callouses phenomenal. Most people in Little Rivers accept them as they do the noses on their faces."

"They certainly are phenomenal on me. So is my first crop! My first crop! I'll be up at dawn to stack it—and then I'm no longer a neophyte. I am an initiate! I'm a real rancher! A holiday is due! I celebrate!"

He was rhapsodic and he was serious, too. She was provokingly flippant as an antidote for Marcus Aurelius, whom she was still carrying in the little flexible leather volume.

"How celebrate?" she inquired. "By walking through the town with a wisp of alfalfa in one hand and exhibiting the callouses on the other? or will you be drawn on a float by Jag Ear—a float labeled, 'The Idler Enjoying His Own Reform?' We'll all turn out and cheer."

"Amusing, but not dignified and not to my taste. No! I shall celebrate by a terrific spree—a ride to the pass!"

He turned his face toward the range, earnest in its transfixion and suffused with the spirit of restlessness and the call of the mighty rock masses, gray in their great ribs and purple in their abysses. She felt that same call as something fluid and electric running through the air from sky to earth, and set her lips in readiness for whatever folly he was about to suggest.

"A ride to the pass and a view of the sunset from the very top!" he cried. He looked down at her quickly, and all the force of the call he had transformed into a sunny, personal appeal, which made her avert her glance. "My day in the country—my holiday, if you will go with me! Will you, and gaze out over that spot of green in the glare of the desert, knowing that a little of it is mine?"

"Your orange-trees are too young. It's so far away they will hardly show," she ventured, surveying the distance to the pass judicially.

"Will you?"

"Why, to me a ride to the pass is not a thing to be planned a day beforehand," she said deliberately, still studiously observing Galeria. "It is a matter of momentary inspiration. Make it a set engagement and it is but a plodding journey. I can best tell in the morning," she concluded. "And, by the way, I see you haven't yet tried grafting plums on the alfalfa stalks."

"No. I have learned better. It is not consistent. You see, you mow alfalfa and you pick plums."

This return to drollery, in keeping with the prescribed order of their relations, made her look up in candid amusement over the barrier which for a moment he had been endangering.

"Honestly, Jack, you do improve," she said, with mock encouragement. "You seem to have mastered a number of the simple truths of age-old agricultural experience."

"But will you? Will you ride to the pass?"

He had the question launched fairly into her eyes. She could not escape it. He saw one bright flash, whether of real anger or simply vexation at his reversion to the theme he could not tell, and her lashes dropped; she ran the leaf edges of the austere Marcus back and forth in her fingers, thip-thip-thip. That was the only sound for some seconds, very long seconds.

"As I've already tried to make clear to you, it's such a businesslike thing to ride to the pass unless you have the inspiration," she remarked thoughtfully to Marcus. "Perhaps I shall get the inspiration on the way back to the house;" which was a signal that she was going. "And, by the way, Jack, to return to the object of my coming, if you have ideas of your own about flowers incorporate them; that is the way to develop your floricultural talent."

She turned away, but he followed. He was at her side and proceeding with her, his head bent toward her, boyishly, eagerly.

"You see, I have never been out to the pass," he remarked urgently.

"What! You—" she started in surprise and checked herself.

"Didn't I come by train?" he asked reprovingly.

"No!" she answered. Her eyes were level with the road, her voice was a little unnatural. "No! You came over the pass, Jack."

It was the first time in the months of his citizenship of Little Rivers that she had ever hinted anything but belief in the fiction that they had first met when he asked her to show him a parcel of land. She seemed to be calling a truth out of the past and grappling with it, while her lips tightened and she drew in her chin.

"Then I did come over the pass," he agreed; and after a pause added: "But there was no Pete Leddy."

"Yes, oh, yes—there was a Pete Leddy!"

"But he will not be there this time!"

And now his voice, in a transport that seemed to touch the cloud heights, was neither like the voice of the easy traveller on the pass, nor the voice of his sharp call to Leddy to disarm, nor the voice of the storyteller. It had a new note, a note startling to her.

"We shall be on the pass without Leddy and smiling over Leddy and thanking him for his unwitting service in making me stop in Little Rivers," he concluded.

"Yes, he did that," she admitted stoically, as if it were some oppressive fact for which she could offer no thanks.

"I want to see our ponies with their bridles hanging loose! I want the great silence! I want company, with imagination speaking from the sky and reality speaking from the patch of green out on the sea of gray! Will you?"

Their steps ran rhythmically together. His look was eager in anticipation, while she kept on running the leaves of the austere Marcus through her fingers. Her lips were half open, as if about to speak, but were without words; the thin, delicate nostrils trembled.

"Will you? Will you, because I kept the faith of callouses? Will you go forth and dream for a day? We'll tell fairy stories! We'll get a pole and prod the dinosaur through the narrow part of the pass and hear him roar his awfullest. Will you?"

Her fingers paused in the pages as if they had found a helpful passage. The chin tilted upward resolutely and he had a full view of her eyes, dancing with challenging lights. She was augustly, gloriously mischievous.

"Will you go in costume? Will you wear your spurs and the chaps and the silk shirt?"

The question said that it was not a time to be serious. It sprinkled the crest of the barrier with gleaming slivers of glass, which might give zest to words spoken across it, but would be most sharp to the touch.

"I will wear my spurs around my wrists, if you say, tie roses in the fringe of my chaps, bind my hat with a big red silk bandanna, and put streamers on P.D.'s bits!"

"That is too enticing for refusal," she answered, playfully. "I particularly want to hear the dinosaur roar."

They had come to the opening of the Ewold hedge, and they paused to consider arrangements. There was no one in sight on the street except Jim Galway, who was approaching at some distance.

"Shall we start in the morning and have luncheon at the foot of the range?" suggested Jack.

She favored an early afternoon start; he argued for his point of view, and in their preoccupation with the passage of arms they did not notice Pedro Nogales slipping along beside the hedge with soft steps, his hand under his jacket. A gleam out of the bosom of Pedro's jacket, a cry from Mary, and a knife flashed upward and drove toward Jack's neck.

Jack had seemed oblivious of his surroundings, his gaze centered on Mary. Yet he was able to duck backward so that the blade only slit open his shirt as Pedro, with the misdirected force of his blow, lunged past its object. Mary saw that face which had been laughing into hers, which had been so close to hers in its persistent smile of persuasion, struck white and rigid and a glint like that of the blade itself in the eyes. In a breath Jack had become another being of incarnate, unthinking physical power and swiftness. One hand seized Pedro's wrist, the other his upper arm, and Mary heard the metallic click of the knife as it struck the earth and the sickening sound of the bone of Pedro's forearm cracking. She saw Pedro's eyes bursting from their sockets in pain and fear; she saw Jack's still profile of unyielding will and the set muscles of his neck and the knitting muscles of his forearm driving Pedro over against the hedge, as if bent on breaking the Mexican's back in two, and she waited in frozen apprehension to hear another bone crack, even expecting Pedro's death cry.

"The devil is out of Senor Don't Care!" It was the voice of Ignacio, who had come around the house in time to witness the scene.

"What fearful strength! You will kill him!" It was the voice of the Doge, from the porch.

"Yes, please stop!" Mary pleaded.

Suddenly, at the sound of her cry, Jack released his hold. The strong column of his neck became apparently too weak to hold the weight of his head. Inert, he fell against the hedge for support, his hands hanging limp at his side, while he stared dazedly into space. It seemed then that Pedro might have picked up the knife and carried out his plan of murder without defence by the victim.

"Yes, yes, yes!" Jack repeated.

Pedro had not moved from the hollow in the hedge which the impress of his body had made. He was trembling, his lips had fallen away from his teeth, and he watched Jack in stricken horror, a beaten creature waiting on some judgment from which there was no appeal.

"We'll tell fairy stories"—Jack's soft tones of persuasion repeated themselves in Mary's ears in contrast to the effect of what she had just witnessed. Her hand slipped along the crest of the hedge, as if to steady herself.

"I'll change my mind about going to the pass, Jack," she said.

"Yes, Mary," he answered in a faint tone.

He looked around to see her back as she turned away from him; then, with an effort, he stepped free of the hedge.

"Come, we will go to the doctor!" he said to the Mexican.

He touched Pedro's shoulder softly and softly ran his hand down the sleeve in which the arm hung limp. Pedro had not moved; he still leaned against the hedge inanimate as a mannikin.

"Come! Your legs are not broken! You can walk!" said Jim Galway, who had come up in a hurry when he saw what was happening.

"Pedro, you will learn not to play with the devil in Senor Don't Care!" whispered Ignacio, while Mary had disappeared in the house and the Doge stood watching.

Jack had stroked Pedro's head while the bone was being set. He had arranged for Pedro's care. And now he was in his own yard with Jag Ear and the ponies, rubbing their muzzles alternately in silent impartiality, his head bowed reflectively as Firio came around the corner of the house. At first he half stared at Firio, then he surveyed the steeds of his long journeyings in questioning uncertainty, and then looked back at Firio, smiling wanly.

"Firio," he said, "I feel that I am a pretty big coward. Firio, I am full up—full to overflowing. My mind is stuffed with cobwebs. I—I must think things out. I must have the solitudes."

"The trail!" prescribed Doctor Firio.

After Jack had given his ranch in charge to Galway, he rode away in the dusk, not by the main street, but straight across the levels toward the pass.



XVII

THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND

Jasper Ewold was a disciple of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one's own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer express them with the simple directness of our ancestors. He kept a diary with what he called a perfect regularity of intermittency. A week might pass without his writing a single word, and again he might indulge freely for a dozen nights running. He wrote as much or as little as he pleased. He wrote when he had something to tell and when he was in the mood to tell it.

"It is facing yourself in your own ink," he said. "It is confessing that you are an egoist and providing an antidote for your egoism. Firstly, you will never be bored by your own past if you can appreciate your errors and inconsistencies. Secondly, you will never be tempted to bore others with your past as long as you wish to pose as a wise man."

He must have found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to form a powerful current.

On the evening that Jack took to the trail again, Jasper Ewold had a number of thick notebooks out of the box in the library which he always kept locked, and placed them on the living-room table beside his easy chair, in which he settled himself. Mary was sewing while he pored over his life in review as written by his own hand. Her knowledge of the secrets of that chronicle from wandering student days to desert exile was limited to glimpses of the close lines of fine-written pages across the breadth of the circle of the lamp's reflection. He surrounded his diary with a line of mystery which she never attempted to cross. On occasions he would read to her certain portions which struck his recollection happily; but these were invariably limited to his impressions of some city or some work of art that he was seeing for the first time in the geniality of the unadulterated joy of living in what she guessed was the period of youth before she was born; and never did they throw any light on his story except that of his views as a traveller and a personality. But he did not break out into a single quotation to-night. It seemed as if he were following the thread of some reference from year to year; for he ran his fingers through the leaves of certain parts hastily and became studiously intense at other parts as he gloomily pondered over them.

Neither she nor her father had mentioned Jack since the scene by the hedge. This was entirely in keeping with custom. It seemed a matter of instinct with both that they never talked to each other of him. Yet she was conscious that he had been in her father's mind all through the evening meal, and she was equally certain that her father realized that he was in her mind.

It was late when the Doge finished his reading, and he finished it with the page of the last book, where the fine handwriting stopped at the edge of the blank white space of the future. An old desire, ever strong with Mary, which she had never quite had the temerity to express, had become impelling under the influence of her father's unusually long and silent preoccupation.

"Am I never to have a glimpse of that treasure? Am I never, never to read your diary?" she asked.

The Doge drew his tufted eyebrows together in utter astonishment.

"What! What, Mary! Why, Mary, I might preach a lesson on the folly of feminine curiosity. Do you think I would ask to see your diary?"

"But I don't keep one."

"Hoo-hoo-hoo!" The Doge was blowing out his lips in an ado of deprecatory nonsense. "Don't keep one? Have you lost your memory?"

"I had it a minute ago—yes," after an instant's playful consideration, "I am sure that I have it now."

"Then, everybody with a memory certainly keeps a diary. Would you want me to read all the foolish things you had ever thought? Do you think I would want to?"

"No," she answered.

"There you are, then!" declared the Doge victoriously, as he rose, slipping a rubber band with a forbidding snap over the last book. "And this is all stupid personal stuff—but mine own!"

There was an unconscious sigh of weariness as he took up the thumbed leather volumes. He was haggard. "Mine own" had given him no pleasure that evening. All the years of his life seemed to rest heavily upon him for a silent moment. Mary feared that she had hurt him by her request.

"You have read so much you will scarcely do any writing to-night," she ventured.

"Yes, I will add a few more lines—the spirit is in me—a few more days to the long record," he said, absently, then, after a pause, suddenly, with a kind of suppressed force vibrating in his voice: "Well, our Sir Chaps has gone."

"As unceremoniously as he came," she answered.

"It was terrible the way he broke Nogales's wrist!" remarked the Doge narrowly.

"Terrible!" she assented as she folded her work, her head bent.

"Gone, and doubtless for good!" he continued, still watching her sharply.

"Very likely!" she answered carelessly without looking up. "His vagarious playtime for this section is over."

"Just it! Just it!" the Doge exclaimed happily.

"And if Leddy overtakes him now, it's his own affair!"

"Yes, yes! He and his Wrath of God and Jag Ear are away to other worlds!"

"And other Leddys!"

"No doubt! No doubt!" concluded the Doge, in high good humor, all the vexation of his diary seemingly forgotten as he left the room.

But, as the Doge and Mary were to find, they were alone among Little Riversites in thinking that the breaking of Pedro Nogales's wrist was horrible. Jim Galway, who had witnessed the affair, took a radically contrary view, which everyone else not of the Leddy partisanship readily accepted. Despite the frequency of Jack's visits to the Ewold garden and all the happy exchange of pleasantries with his hosts, the community could not escape the thought of a certain latent hostility toward Jack on the part of the Doge, the more noticeable because it was so out of keeping with his nature.

"Doge, sometimes I think you are almost prejudiced against Jack Wingfield because he didn't let Leddy have his way," said Jim, with an outright frankness that was unprecedented in speaking to Jasper Ewold. "You're such a regular old Quaker!"

"But that little Mexican panting in abject fear against the hedge!" persisted the Doge.

"A nice, peaceful little Mexican with a knife, sneaking up to plant it in Jack's neck!"

"But Jack is so powerful! And his look! I was so near I could see it well as he towered over Nogales!"

"Yes, no mistaking the look. I saw it in the arroyo. It made me think of what the look of one of those old sea-fighters might have been like when they lashed alongside and boarded the enemy."

"And the crack of the bone!" continued the Doge.

"Would you have a man turn cherub when he has escaped having his jugular slashed by a margin of two or three inches? Would you have him say, 'Please, naughty boy, give me your knife? You mustn't play with such things!'"

"No! That's hyperbole!" the Doge returned with a lame attempt at a laugh.

"Mebbe it is, whatever hyperbole is," said Jim; "but if so, hyperbole is a darned poor means of self-defence. Yes, the trouble is you are against Jack Wingfield!"

"Yes, I am!" said the Doge suddenly, as if inward anger had got the better of him.

"And the rest of us are for him!" Jim declared sturdily.

"Naturally! naturally!" said the Doge, passing his hand over his brow. "Yes, youth and color and bravery!" He shook his head moodily, as if Jim's statement brought up some vital, unpleasant, but inevitable fact to his mind.

"It's beyond me how anybody can help liking him!" concluded Galway stubbornly.

"I like him—yes, I do like him! I cannot help it!" the Doge admitted rather grudgingly as he turned away.

"So we weren't so far apart, after all!" Galway hastened to call after the Doge in apology for his testiness. "We like him for what he has been to us and will always be to us. That's the only criterion of character in Little Rivers according to your own code, isn't it, Jasper Ewold?"

"Exactly!" answered the Doge over his shoulder.

The community entered into a committee of the whole on Jack Wingfield. With every citizen contributing a quota of personal experience, his story was rehearsed from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure. Argument fluctuated on the question of whether or not he would ever return, with now the noes and now the ayes having it. On this point Jim had the only first-hand evidence.

"He said to let things grow until he showed up or I heard from him," said Jim.

"Not what I would call enlightening," said Bob Worther.

"That was his way of expressing it; but to do him justice, he showed what a good rancher he was by his attention to the details that had to be cared for," Jim added.

"He's like the spirit of the winds, I guess," put in Mrs. Galway. "Something comes a-calling him or a-driving him, I don't know which. Indeed, I'm not altogether certain that it isn't a case of Mary Ewold this time!"

"Yes," agreed Jim. "The fighting look went out of his face when she spoke, and when he saw how horrified she was, why, I never saw such a change come over a man! It was just like a piece of steel wilting."

However, the children, who had no part in the august discussions of the committee of the whole, were certain that their story-teller would come back. Their ideas about Jack were based on a simple, self-convincing faith of the same order as Firio's. Lonely as they were, they were hardly more lonely than their elders, who were supposed to have the philosophy of adults.

No Jack singing out "Hello!" on the main street! No Jack looking up from work to ask boyishly: "Am I learning? Oh, I'll be the boss rancher yet!" No Jack springing all sorts of conceits, not of broad humor, but the kind that sort of set a "twinkling in your insides," as Bob Worther expressed it! No Jack inspiring a feeling deeper than twinkles on his sad days! He had been an improvement in town life that became indispensable once it was absent. Little Rivers was fairly homesick for him.

"How did we ever get along without him before he came, anyway?" Bob Worther demanded.

Then another new-comer, as distinctive from the average settler as Jack was, diverted talk into another channel, without, however, reconciling the people to their loss.



XVIII

ANOTHER STRANGER ARRIVES

If the history of Little Rivers were to be written in chapter headings the first would be, "Jasper Ewold Founded the Town"; the second, "Jack Wingfield Arrived"; and the third, "John Prather Arrived."

While Jack came in chaps and spurs, bearing an argosy of fancy, Prather came by rail, carrying a suitcase in a conventional and businesslike fashion. Bill Deering, as the representative of a spring wagon that did the local omnibus and express business, was on the platform of the station when the 11:15 rolled in, and sang out, in a burst of joy, as the stranger, a man in the early twenties, stepped off the Pullman:

"What's this, Jack? Back by train—and in store clothes? Well, of all—" and saw his mistake when the stranger's full face was turned toward him.

"Yes, I am sometimes called Jack," said the stranger pleasantly. "Now, where have we met before? Perhaps in Goldfield? No matter. It is time we got acquainted. My name is Prather, and yours?"

As he surveyed the man before him, Bill was as fussed as the giant of the fairy story had been by a display of yellow. He was uncertain whether he was giving his own baptismal name or somebody's else.

"By Jing! No, I don't know you, but you sure are the dead spit of a fellow I do know!" said Bill.

"Well, he has done me the favor of introducing me to you, anyway," said Prather, who had a remarkably ingratiating smile. "I would like a place to stop while I take a look around. Is there a hotel?"

"Rooms over the store and grub at Mrs. Smith's—none better!"

"That will do."

As they rode into town more than one passer-by called out a ringing "Hello, Jack!" or, "Back, eh, Jack? Hurrah for you!" and then uttered an exclamation of disillusion when Prather turned his head.

"The others see it, too," said Bill.

"They seem to. Who is this double of mine?"

"Jack Wingfield."

"Jack Wingfield? It seems that our first names are the same, too. He lives here, I take it."

"Yes. But he's away now."

"Well, when he comes back"—with a pause of slight irritation—"there will be no difficulty in telling us apart."

He put his finger to a triangular patch of mole on his cheek. His irritation passed and a sense of appreciative amusement at the distinction took its place.

"Now, where shall I find Jasper Ewold?" he asked, as Bill drew up before the Smiths.

A few minutes later the Doge, busy among his orange-trees, hearing a step, looked up with a signal of recognition which changed to blank inquiry when the cheek with the mole was turned toward him.

"Upon my word, sir, I—I thought that you were—" he began.

"Mr. Wingfield! Yes, everybody in town seems to think so at first glance, so I am quite used to the comparison by this time," Prather put in, easily. "It is very interesting to meet the founder of a town, and I have come to you to find out about conditions here."

Prather did not appear as if he had ever done manual labor. He was too young to have turned from ill health or failure in the city to the refuge of the land. Indeed, his quiet gray suit of good material indicated unostentatious prosperity. Evidently he was well-bred and evidently he was not an agent for a new style of seeding harrow or weed killer.

"You think of settling?" asked the Doge.

"Yes. From all I have heard of Little Rivers, it's a community where I should feel at home."

"Then, sir, we will talk of it at luncheon; it is knocking-off time for the morning. Yes, I'll talk as much as you please. Come on, Mr. Prather!" They started along the avenue of palms, the Doge still studying the face at his side. "Pardon me for staring at you, but the resemblance to Jack Wingfield at first sight is most striking," he added.

"Has he travelled much in the West?" asked Prather.

"Yes, much—leading an aimless life."

"Then he must be the one that I was taken for in Salt Lake City one day. The man who called out to me saw his mistake, just as you did, when he saw my full face;" and again Prather made a gesture of understanding amusement to the mole.

"When you consider what confusion there must be in the workrooms, with the storks flapping and screeching like newsboys outside the delivery room," mused the Doge, "and when you consider the multitudinous population of the earth, it's surprising that the good Lord is able to furnish such a variety of faces as he does. But they do say that every one of us has a few doubles. In the case of famous public men they get their pictures in the papers."

"Yes, very few of us but have been mistaken for a friend by a stranger passing in the street!" Prather suggested.

"Only to have the stranger see his mistake at a second glance; and on second glance you do not look very much like Jack Wingfield," the Doge concluded. "Just a coincidence in physiognomy!"

And Prather was very frank about his past.

"I have led rather a hard life," he said. "Though I was well brought up my father left mother and me quite penniless. I had to fend for myself at the age of sixteen. A friend gave me an opportunity to go to Goldfield at the outbreak of the excitement there. The rough experience of a mining-camp was not exactly to my taste, but it meant a livelihood. My real interest has always been in irrigation farming. I would rather grow a good crop than mine for gold. Well, I saved a little money at Goldfield—saved it to buy land. But land is not the only consideration. The surroundings, the people with whom you have to live count for a great deal when you mean to settle permanently."

"Excellent!" declared the Doge. "A good citizen in full fellowship with your neighbors! Exactly what we want in Little Rivers."

Prather had a complexion of that velvety whiteness that never tans. His eyes were calm, yet attractive, with a peculiar insinuating charm when he talked that made it seem easy and natural to respond to his wishes. In listening he had an ingratiating manner that was flattering to the speaker.

"A practical man!" the Doge said to Mary that evening. "The kind we need here. He and I had a grand afternoon of it together. Every one of his questions about soils and cultivation was to the point."

"Not one argument?" she asked.

"No, Mary; no time for argument."

"You do like people to agree with you, after all!" she hazarded. For she did not like Prather.

"Pooh! Not a matter of agreement! No persiflage! No altitudinous conversation of the kind that grows no crops. Prather wants to learn, and he's got good, clean ideas, with a trained and accurate mind—the best possible combination. I hope he will stay for the very reason that he is not the kind that takes up a plot of land for life on an impulse, which usually results in turning on the water and getting discouraged because nature will not do the rest. But he is very favorably impressed. He said that after Goldfield Little Rivers was like Paradise—practical Paradise. Good phrase, practical Paradise!"

In two or three days the new-comer knew everyone in town; but though he addressed the men by their first names they always addressed him as "Mr. Prather." In another respect besides his features he was like Jack: he was much given to smiling.

"The difference between his smile and Jack's," said Mrs. Galway, who was at one with Mary in not liking him, "is that his is sort of a drawing-in kind of smile and Jack's sort of radiates."

The children developed no interest in him. It was evident that he could not tell stories, except with an effort. In his goings and comings, ever asking pleasant questions and passing compliments, he was usually accompanied by the Doge, and his attitude toward the old man was the admiring deference of disciple for master.

"I am sorry I don't understand that," he would say when the Doge fell into a scholastic allusion to explain a point. "I was hard at work when lots of my friends were in college."

"Learning may be ruination," responded the Doge, "though it wouldn't have been in your case. It's the man that counts. See what you have made of yourself!"

"Ah, yes, but I feel that I have missed something. When I am settled here I shall be able to make up for lost time, with your help, sir."

"Every pigeonhole in my mind will be open at your call!" said the Doge, glowing at the prospect.

The favor that Prather found in the eyes of Jasper Ewold partly accounted for what favor he found in Little Rivers' eyes.

"Prather has certainly made a hit with the Doge!" quoth Bob Worther. "As the Doge gets older I reckon he will like compliments better than persiflage. But Jack could pay a compliment, too—only he never used the ladle."

It was Bob, as inspector of ditches and dams, who provided a horse for Prather to inspect the source of the water supply. In keeping with a characteristic thoroughness, Prather wanted to go up the river into the canyon. He made himself a very enjoyable companion on the way, drawing out all of Bob's best stories. When they stopped in sight of the streak of blue sky through the breach in the mighty wall that had once imprisoned the ancient lake, he was silent for some time, while he surveyed this grandeur of the heights with smiling contemplation, at intervals rubbing the palms of his hands together in a manner habitual with him when he was particularly pleased.

"I guess the same idea has struck you that strikes everybody at sight of that, seh!" said Bob.

"Yes, a dam might be practical," Prather answered. "But it would take a lot of capital—a lot of capital!"

On the way back they stopped before a dilapidated shanty near the foothills. In the midst of a littered yard old man Lefferts, half dozing, occupied a broken chair.

"Since the Doge came old man Lefferts has had to do no work at all. A Mexican looks after him. But it hasn't made him any happier," Bob explained as they approached.

"Howdy yourself?" growled Lefferts in answer to Bob's greeting.

"He seems to be a character!" whispered Prather to Bob, as he smiled at the prospect. "To confess the truth, I am a little saddle sore and tired. I didn't get much riding in Goldfield. I think I'll stop and rest and get acquainted."

"You won't get much satisfaction but growls."

"That will be all the more fun for me," rejoined Prather. "But don't let me keep you."

"No. I must be going on. I've got some things to look after before nightfall," said Bob, while Prather, in a humor proof against any hermit cantankerousness, rode into the yard.

When he returned after dark he said, laughingly, that he had enjoyed himself, though the conversation was all on one side. The next morning he decided to take up the plot of land adjoining Jack's.

"But I shall not be able to begin work for a few weeks," he said. "I must go to Goldfield to settle up my affairs before I begin my new career."

"If Jack ever comes back I wonder what he will say to his new neighbor!" Little Rivers wondered.



XIX

LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES

To Mary Ewold the pass was a dividing line between two appeals. The Little Rivers side, with the green patch of oasis in the distance, had a message of peaceful enjoyment of what fortune had provided for her. Under its spell she saw herself content to live within garden walls forever in the land that had given her life, grateful for the trickles of intelligence that came by mail from the outside world.

The other side aroused a mighty restlessness. Therefore, she rarely made that short journey which spread another panorama of space before her. But this was one of the afternoons when she welcomed a tumult of any kind as a relief from her depression; and she went on through the V as soon as she reached the summit.

Seated on a flat-topped rock, oblivious of the passage of time, of the dream cities of the Eternal Painter, she was staring far away where the narrowing gray line between the mountain rims met the sky. She was seeing beyond the horizon. She was seeing cities of memory and reality. A great yearning was in her heart. All the monotonous level lap of the heights which seemed without end was a symbol that separated her from her desire.

She imagined herself in a Pullman, flashing by farms and villages; in a shop selecting gowns; viewing from a high window the human stream of Fifth Avenue; taking passage on a steamer; hearing again foreign tongues long ago familiar to her ears; sensing the rustle of great audiences before a curtain rose; glimpsing the Mediterranean from a car window; feeling herself a unit in the throbbing promenade of the life of many streets while her hunger took its fill of a busy world.

"It is hard to do it all in imagination!" she said to herself. "Even imagination needs an occasional nest-egg of reality by way of encouragement."

An hour on the far side of the pass played the emotional part for her of a storm of tears for many another woman. She rejoiced in being utterly alone; rejoiced in the grandeur of the very wastes around her as mounting guard over the freedom of her thoughts. There was no living speck on the trail, which she knew lay across the expanse of parched earth to the edge of the blue dome; there was not even a bird in the air. Undisturbed, she might think anything, pray for anything; she might feed the flame of revolt till the fuel of many weeks' accumulation had burned itself out and left her calm in the wisdom and understanding that reconciled her to her portion and freshened to return through Galeria to the quiet routine of her daily existence.

Her mind paused in its travels from capital to capital and she was conscious solely of the stark majesty of her surroundings. She listened. There was no sound. The spacious stillness was soothing to her nerves; a specific when all the Eternal Painter's art failed. She closed her eyes, trying to realize that great silence as one would try to realize the Infinite. Then faintly she heard a man's voice singing. It seemed at first a trick of the imagination. But nearer and nearer it came, in the fellowship of life joyfully invading the solitude; and with a readjustment of her faculties to the expected event, she watched the point where the trail dipped on a sharp turn of grade.

Above it rose a cowpuncher hat, then a silk shirt with a string tie, and after that a sage baggage burro with clipped ears, a solemn-faced pony, and an Indian. Jack was watching his steps in the uneven path, and not until the full length of him had appeared and he was flush on the level with her did he look up.

She was leaning back, her weight partly poised on the flat of her hand on the rock, revealing the full curve of throat and the soft sweep of the lines of her slim figure, erect, her head thrown back, her face in shadow with the sun behind playing in her hair, in half-defiant readiness. She saw him as the spirit of travel—its ease, mystery, unattachedness—which had spanned the distances between her and the horizon, in the freedom of his wandering choice. His low-pitched exclamation of surprise was vibrant with appreciation of the picture she made, and he stood quite still in a second's wistful silence, waiting on her first word after the lapse of the many days since he had brought a look of horror into her eyes.

"Hello, Jack!" she said in the old tone of comradeship. It struck a spark electrifying him with all his old, happy manner.

He swept off his hat with a grand bow, blinking in the blaze of the sun which turned his tan to a bronze and touched the smile, which was born as an inspiration from her greeting, with radiance.

"Hello to you, Mary, guarding the pass to Little Rivers!" he said exultantly. "You are just the person I wanted to see. I have been in a hurry to tell you about a certain thing ever since it came to me this morning."

She guessed that he was about to make up a new story. He must have had time for many inventions in the ten days of his absence. But she welcomed any tangent of nonsense that set the right key for the coincidence of their meeting. She had refused to ride to the pass with him and here they were alone together on the pass. Three or four steps, so light that they seemed to be irresistibly winning permission from her, and he had sat down on another flat-topped rock close by. Firio and the baggage train moved on up the trail methodically and stopped well in the background.

"You know how when you meet a person you are sometimes haunted by a conviction that you have met him before!" he began. "How exasperated you are not to be able to recall the time and place!"

"Had you forgotten where you met the dinosaur?" she asked. "He must have thought you very impolite after all the trouble he had taken to make you remember him the last time you went through the pass."

"Oh, the dinosaur and I have patched up a truce, because it seems, after all, that I had mistaken his identity and he was a pleosaur. But"—he did not take the pains to parry her interruption with more foolery, and proceeded as if she had not spoken—"it has never been out of my mind that your father gave me a glance at our first meeting which asked the question that has kept recurring to me: Where had he and I seen each other before?"

"Well?" she said curiously, recalling her father's repeated allusions to "this Wingfield," his strange depression after Jack had left the night before the duel, his reticence and animadversions.

"I said nothing about it, nor did he. I wonder if it has not been a kind of contest between us as to which should be the first to say 'Tag!'"

She smiled at this and leaned farther back, but with the curtain of her eyelashes widening in tremulous intensity.

"I knew it would come!" he went on, with dramatic fervor. "Such things do come unexpectedly in a flash when there is a sudden electric connection with some dusty pigeonhole in the mind. It was in Florence that he and I met! In Florence, on the road to Fiesole!"

"Florence! The road to Fiesole!" Mary repeated; and the names seemed to rouse in her a rapturous recollection. She leaned forward now, her lips apart, her eyes glowing. In place of wastes she was seeing brown roofs and the sweep of the Tuscan Valley.

"And we met—you and I!"

"We?" Her glance came sharply back from the distances in the astonishment of dilating pupils that drew together in inquiry as she saw that he was in earnest.

"Yes. I was at the extremely mature age of six and you must have been about a year younger. Do you remember it at all?"

"No!" She was silent, concentrated, groping. "No, no!" she repeated. "Five is very immature compared to six!"

"Your father had a beard then, a great blond beard that excited my emulation. When I grew up I was going to have one like it and just such bushy eyebrows. You came up the Fiesole road at his side, holding fast to his thumb. I was playing at our villa gate. You went up the path with him to see my mother—I can see just how you looked holding so fast to that thumb! After a while you came straying out alone. Now don't you remember? Don't you? Something quite sensational happened."

"No!"

"Well, I showed off what a great boy I was. I walked on the parapet of the villa wall. I bowed to my audience aged five with the grandeur of a tight-rope performer who has just done his best thriller as a climax to his turn."

"Yes—yes!" she breathed, with quick-running emphasis. Out of the mists of fifteen years had come a signal. She bent nearer to him in the wonder of a thing found in the darkness of memory, which always has the fascination of a communication from another world. "You wanted me to come up on the wall," she said, taking up the thread of the story. "You said it was so easy, and you helped me up, and when I looked down at the road I was overcome and fell down all in a heap on the parapet."

"And heavens!" he gasped, living the scene over again, "wasn't I frightened for fear you would tumble off!"

"But I remember that you helped me down very nicely—and—and that is all I do remember. What then?"

She had come to a blind alley and perplexity was in her face, though she tried to put the question nonchalantly. What then? How deep ran the current of this past association?

"Why, there wasn't much else. Your father came down the path and his big thumb took you in tow. I did not see you again. A week later mother and I had gone to Switzerland—we were always on the move."

The candor of his glance told her that this was all. As boy and girl they had met under an Italian sky. As man and woman they had met under an Arizona sky.

Now the charm of the Florence of their affections held them with a magic touch. They were not in a savage setting, looking out over savage distances, but on the Piazzale Michelangelo, looking out over the city of Renaissance genius which slumbers on the refulgent bosom of its past; they were oblivious of the Eternal Painter's canvasses and enjoying Raphael's, Botticelli's, and Andrea del Sarto's. Possibly the Eternal Painter, in the leniency of philosophic appreciation of their oblivion to his art, hazarded a guess about the destiny of this pair. He could not really have known their destiny. No, it is impossible to grant him the power of divination; for if he had it he might not be so young of heart.

Their talk flitted here and there in exclamations, each bringing an entail of recollection of some familiar, enjoyed thing; and when at last it returned to their immediate surroundings the shadow of the range was creeping out onto the plain, cut by the brilliance of the sun through the V. Mary rose with a quick, self-accusing cry about the lateness of the hour. To him it was a call on his resources to delay their departure.

"Do you see where that shelf breaks abruptly?" he asked. "It must be the side of a canyon. Have you ever looked down?"

"I started to once."

"I should not like to go over the pass again without seeing if this is really a canyon of any account. I feel myself quite an authority on canyons."

"It will be dark before we reach Little Rivers!" she protested.

"Ten minutes—only a step!" and he was appealing in his boyish fashion to have his way.

"Nonsense! Besides, I do not care for canyons."

"You still fear, then, to look down from walls? You—"

And this decided her. On another occasion she had gone to the precipice edge and faltered. She would master her dizziness for once and all; he should not know from her any confession of a weakness which was purely of the imagination.

The point to which he had alluded was an immense overhanging slab of granite stratum deep set in the mountain side. As they approached, a thrill of lightness and uncertainty was setting her limbs a-quiver. Her elbow was touching his, her will driving her feet forward desperately. Suddenly she was gazing down, down, down, into black depths which seemed calling irresistibly and melting her power of muscular volition, while he with another step was on the very edge, leaning over and smiling. She dropped back convulsively. He was all happy absorption in the face of that abyss. How easy for him to topple over and go hurtling into the chasm!

"Don't!" she gasped, and blindly tugged at his arm to draw him back.

As he looked around in surprise and inquiry, she withdrew her hand in a reaction against her familiarity, yet did not lower it, holding it out with fingers spread in expression of her horror. Serenely he regarded her for a moment in her confusion and distress, and then, smiling, while the still light of confidence was in his eyes, he locked his arm in hers. Before she could protest or resist he had drawn her to his side.

"It is just as safe as looking off the roof of a porch on to a flower garden," he said.

And why she knew not, but the fact had come as something definite and settled: she was no longer dizzy or uncertain. Calmly, in the triumph of mind over fear, in the glory of a new sensation of power, she looked down into that gulf of shadows—looked down for a thousand feet, where the narrowing, sheer walls merged into darkness.

From this pit to the blue above there was only infinite silence, with no movement but his pulse-beat which she could feel in his wrist distinctly. He had her fast, a pawn of one of his impulses. A shiver of revolt ran through her. He had taken this liberty because she had shown weakness. And she was not weak. She had come to the precipice to prove that she was not.

"Thank you. My little tremor of horror has passed," she told him. "I can stand without help, now."

He released his hold and she stood quite free of him, a glance flashing her independence. Smilingly she looked down and smilingly and triumphantly back at him.

"You need not keep your arm up in that fashion ready to assist me. It is tiring," she said, with a touch of her old fire of banter over the barrier. "I am all right, now. I don't know what gave me that giddy turn—probably sitting still so long and looking out at the blaze of the desert."

He swept her with a look of admiration; and their eyes meeting, she looked back into the abyss.

"I wish I had such courage," he said with sudden, tense earnestness; "courage to master my revulsion against shadows."

"Perhaps it will come like an inspiration," she answered uncomprehendingly.

Then both were silent until she spoke of a stunted little pine three or four hundred feet down, in the crotch of an outcropping. Its sinking roots had split a rock, over which the other roots sprawled in gnarly persistence. Some passing bird had dropped the seed which had found a bed in a pocket of dust from the erosions of time. So it had grown and set up housekeeping in its isolation, even as the community of Little Rivers had in a desert basin beside a water-course.

"The little pine has courage—the courage of the dwarf," she said. "It is worth more than a whole forest of its majestic cousins in Maine. How green it is—greener than they!"

"But they rise straight to heaven in their majesty!" he returned, to make controversy.

"Yes, out of the ease of their rich beds!"

"In a crowd and waiting for the axe!"

"And this one, in its isolation, creating something where there was nothing! Every one of its needles is counted in its cost of birth out of the stubborn soil! And waiting all its life down there for the reward of a look and a word of praise!"

"But," he went on, in the delight of hearing her voice in rebuttal, "the big pines give us the masts of ships and they build houses and furnish the kindling for the hardwood logs of the hearth!"

"The little pine makes no pretensions. It has done more. It has given us something without which houses are empty: It has given us a thought!"

"True!" he exclaimed soberly, yielding. And now all the lively signals of the impulse of action played on his face. "For your glance and your word of praise it shall pay you tribute!" he cried. "I am going down to bring you one of its clusters of spines."

"But, Jack, it is a dangerous climb—it is late! No! no!"

"No climb at all. It is easy if I work my way around by that ledge yonder. I see stepping-places all the way."

How like him! While she thought only of the pine, he had been thinking how to make a descent; how to conquer some physical difficulty. Already he had started despite her protest.

"I don't want to rob the little pine!" she called, testily.

"I'll bring a needle, then!"

"Even every needle is precious!"

"I'll bring a dead one, then!"

There was no combatting him, she knew, when he was headstrong; and when he was particularly headstrong he would laugh in his soft way. He was laughing now as he took off his spurs and tossed them aside.

"No climbing in these cart-wheels, and I shall have to roll up my chaps!"

She went back to the precipice edge to prove to him, to prove to herself, that she could stand there alone, without the moral support of anyone at her side, and found that she could. She had mastered her weakness. It was as if a new force had been born in her. She felt its stiffening in every fibre as she saw him pass around the ledge and start down toward the little pine; felt it as something which could build barriers and mount them with an invulnerable guard.

How would he get past that steep shoulder? The worst obstacle confronted him at the very beginning of the descent. He was hugging a rock face, feeling his way, with nothing but a few inches of a projecting seam between him and the darkness far below. His foot slipped, his body turned half around, and she had a second of the horror that she had felt when waiting for the sound of Leddy's shot in Bill Lang's store. She saw his outspread hands clutching the seam above; watched for them to let go. But they held; the foot groped and got its footing again, and he worked his way out on a shelf.

He was safe and she dropped on her knees weakly, still looking down at him. It was the old story of their relations. Was this man ever to be subjecting her to spasms of fear on his account? And there he was beaming up at her reassuringly, while she felt the blood which had gone from her face return in a hot flood. It brought with it anger in place of fear.

"I don't want it! I don't want it!" she cried down.

"And I want to get it for you! I want to get it for you—for you!" His voice was a tumult of emotion in the abandon of passionate declaration. So long had she held him back that now when the flood came it had the power of conserved strength bursting a dam in wild havoc. "There is nothing I would not like to do for you, Mary!" he cried. "I'd like to pull that pine up for you, even if it bled and suffered! I'd like to go on doing things for you forever!"

There was not even a movement of her lips in answer. It seemed to her now that there on the precipice edge, while he held her arm in his, the iridescent house of glass had fallen about them in a confused, dazzling shower of wreckage. He had found an opening. He had broken through the barrier.

Half unconscious of his progress, of the chasm itself, she waited in a daze and came out of it to see him sweeping his hat upward from beside the pine before he reached as far as he could among the branches and, with what seemed to her the refinement of effrontery and disregard of her wishes, broke off a tawny young branch. He waved it to her—this garland of conquest won out of the jaws of danger, which he was ready to throw at her feet from the lists.

"No, no, no!" she said, half aloud.

She saw him start back with his sure steps, his shoulders swinging with the lithe, adaptable movement of his body; and every step was drawing him nearer to a meeting which would be like no other between them. Soon he would be crunching the glass of the house under that confident tread; in the ecstasy of a new part he would be before the opening he had broken in the barrier with the jauntiness of one who expected admission. His pulse-beat under the touch of her fingers at the precipice edge, his artery-beat in the arroyo, was hammering in her temples, hammering out a decision which, when it came, brought her to her feet.

Now the shadows were deep; all the glory of the sunset in the Eternal Painter's chaotic last moments of his day's work overspread the western sky, and from the furnace in which he dipped his brush came a blade of rich, blazing gold through the pass and lay across the trail. It enveloped her as, half running, mindless of her footing, slipping as she went, she hurried toward the other side of Galeria.

When Jack Wingfield came up over the ledge, a pine tassel in his hand, his languor of other days transformed into high-strung, triumphant intensity, the sparkle of a splendid hope in his eyes, only Firio was there to welcome him.

"Senorita Ewold said she no could wait," Firio explained. "It was very late, she said."

Jack stopped as if struck and his features became a lifeless mask, as lifeless as the walls of the canyon. He looked down at the trophy of his climb and ran his fingers over the needles slowly, again and again, in abstraction.

"I understand!" he said, half to himself; and then aloud: "Firio, we will not go into town to-night. We will camp on the other side by the river."

"Si! I shot enough quail this afternoon for dinner."

But Jack did not have much appetite, and after dinner he did not amuse Firio with inventions of his fancy. He lay long awake, his head on his clasped hands, looking at the stars.



XX

A PUZZLED AMBASSADOR

A faint aureole of light crept up back of the pass.

"Dawn at last!" Jack breathed, in relief. "Firio! Firio! Up with you!"

"Oh-yuh!" yawned Firio. "Si, si!" he said, rising numbly to his feet and rubbing his eyes with his fists, while he tried to comprehend an astonishing reversal of custom. Usually he awakened his camp-mate; but this morning his camp-mate had awakened him. A half shadow in the semi-darkness, Jack was already throwing the saddle over P.D.'s back.

"We will get away at once," he said.

Firio knew that something strange had come over Senor Jack after he had met Senorita Ewold on the pass, and now he was convinced that this thing had been working in Senor Jack's mind all night.

"Coffee before we start?" he inquired ingratiatingly.

"Coffee at the ranch," Jack answered.

In their expeditious preparations for departure he hummed no snatches of song as a paean of stretching muscles and the expansion of his being with the full tide of the conscious life of day; and this, too, was contrary to custom.

Before it was fairly light they were on the road, with Jack urging P.D. forward at a trot. The silence was soft with the shimmer of dawn; all glistening and still the roofs and trees of Little Rivers took form. The moist sweetness of its gardens perfumed the fresh morning air in greeting to the easy traveller, while the makers of gardens were yet asleep.

It was the same hour that Mary had hurried forth after her wakeful night to stop the duel in the arroyo. As Jack approached the Ewold home he had a glimpse of something white, a woman's gown he thought, that disappeared behind the vines. He concluded that Mary must have risen early to watch the sunrise, and drew rein opposite the porch; but through the lace-work of the vines he saw that it was empty. Yet he was positive that he had seen her and that she must have seen him coming. She was missing the very glorious moment which she had risen to see. A rim of molten gold was showing in the defile and all the summits of the range were topped with flowing fire.

"Mary!" he called.

There was no answer. Had he been mistaken? Had mental suggestion played him a trick? Had his eyes personified a wish when they saw a figure on the steps?

"Mary!" he called again, and his voice was loud enough for her to have heard if she were awake and near. Still there was no answer.

The pass had now become a flaming vortex which bathed him in its far-spreading radiance. But he had lost interest in sunrises. A last backward, hungry glance over his shoulder as he started gave him a glimpse through the open door of the living-room, and he saw Mary leaning against the table looking down at her hands, which were half clasped in her lap, as if she were waiting for him to get out of the way.

Thus he understood that he had ended their comradeship when he had broken through the barrier on the previous afternoon, and the only thing that could bring it back was the birth of a feeling in her greater than comradeship. His shoulders fell together, the reins loosened, while P.D., masterless if not riderless, proceeded homeward.

"Hello, Jack!"

It was the greeting of Bob Worther, the inspector of ditches, who was the only man abroad at that hour. Jack looked up with an effort to be genial and found Bob closely studying his features in a stare.

"What's the matter, Bob?" he asked. "Has my complexion turned green over night or my nose slipped around to my ear?"

"I was trying to make out if you do look like him!" Bob declared.

"Like whom? What the deuce is the mystery?"

"What—why, of course you're the most interested party and the only Little Riversite that don't know about it, seh!"

After all, there was some compensation for early rising. Bob expanded with the privilege of being the first to break the news.

"If you'd come yesterday you'd have seen him. He went by the noon train," he said, and proceeded with the story of Prather.