They passed dead pools that day, places where Desert travellers had stuck up posts to mark a spring; but where the Service axe failed to find water below the saline crust. Then, Wayland knew why the sulphur dust drift moved so slowly against the horizon. The outlaws had not found water. Horses and men were fagging. A velveteen coat had been thrown aside to lighten weight; from the dust markings one horse seemed to have fallen; and the load had been lightened still more by casting off half sacks of flour and some canvas tenting; but the tracks of the lame horse picking the soft places along the trail showed drops of blood. Had it cut itself on the glassy lava rocks; or was it the hoof? A little farther ahead, the same horse had fallen again to its knees, rolling over headlong; and the other tracks doubled back confusedly where the riders had come to help.

The Ranger smiled, though the yellow heat danced in blood clots before his blistered vision. He had had to put the old frontiersman back on his horse three times. The stirrup was wrong; or the saddle was slipping; or . . . what alarmed Wayland was each time he had stopped, the old man was stooping as if to follow the wavering outline of invisible water. Then, when the Ranger tried to count how many days they had been out, he found he couldn't. He had lost track: the days had slipped into nights and the nights into days; and he suddenly realized that his head pounded like a steel derrick; that the crackling of the dry sage brush leaves snapped something strung and irritable in his own nerves. There was no longer a drowsy hum in his ears. It was a wild rushing.

Once, the horses shuffled to a dead stop. Wayland looked up from the dancing sand at his feet. He rubbed his eyes and looked again.

"I keep thinking I see a white horse lagging behind that dust drift. What puzzles me is whether they are trying to get out of the Desert or lose us in it. While we are seeing them, you can bet they are seeing us! There hasn't been a yard for a mile back, where the hoof tracks weren't bloody. They'll lose a horse if they keep on to-day: then, they'll be without a packer; but if they are plumb up against it, why don't they face round and fight? They are three to our two? They could hide behind any of these sand rolls and pot us crossing the sinks; but if they are not at the end of their tether, why don't they hustle and get out of sight? If they aren't played out, they could outride us in half a day."

The old man was shading his eyes and gazing across the sun glare. Wayland noticed that he was steadying himself in the saddle by the pummel.

"Is my eye playing me tricks, Wayland; or do A see something stuck on yon bush along the way? First glance, it looks like the leaf of a note book. Keep looking, it might be a tent a couple of miles away. That used to happen when we were buildin' bridges in the Rockies. Surveyors crossing upper snows would stick up a message in neck of a ginger ale bottle: then, when we'd come along with the line men after trampin' the snow for hours, we'd mistake the thing for a man with a white hat till we almost tumbled over the bottle. Is it the Desert playin' me tricks, Wayland; or do A see something? Look, . . . where that bit of brush grows against the lava rock there."

Wayland's glance ran along the trail; and for an instant, the writhing sun glare played the same trick with his own vision. Something a dirty white quivered above the black lava table like the loose canvas top of a tented wagon. The Ranger side-stepped the trail for a different angle of refraction. The object blurred, then reappeared, a leaf from a note book not thirty yards away. Wayland went quickly forward. He was aware as he walked that the shrivelled earth heaved and sank so that he had the sensation of staggering. It was a dirty leaf from a note book fouled by the Desert winds and lodged in the sage brush. Then, he looked twice. It was not lodged. It was stuck down in the branches secure against the wind. The ranger pulled the thing off. The under side showed tobacco stains. On the upper were scrawled in heavy pencil; By. 20 ml du est if yu don't cath upp hit itt est flagg midnite frate carrie yu mine sitty.

"Railway twenty miles due East," translated Wayland. "That is probably true. I think there is a branch line runs a hundred miles in to Mine City. If you don't catch up, hit it East, flag the midnight freight, she'll carry you to Mine City. Well? What do you make of it? Did they leave it; or did some body else? If it had been there long, the wind would have torn it to tatters."

"Let me see it." The old man turned it over in his hand. "Evidently left to direct the man back in the Pass; they don't believe he's dead."

The Ranger took it back and read it over. "If they're lagging back for the missing man, why didn't they leave a message sooner? Trail doesn't fork here. Why did they leave word here?"

"There really is a railway somewhere here, Wayland?"

"There must be if one knew where to find it."

Matthews smiled. "Then, A take it this is a gentle hint to go off and lose ourselves trying to find it."

Wayland's eyes rested on the slow-moving dust cloud against the horizon.

"Then it is a case of who lasts out!" He looked at his white haired companion. "But there's no call for you to risk your life on the last lap of the race. It's not your job. It means another day; perhaps, two. If you'd take my horse, it's fresher, and the water bag, you could ride out to the railroad to-night. Those fellows are not good for many miles more unless they hit a spring. Let me go on alone, sir."

"Alone?" The old man's face flushed furious, livid. . . . "Git epp!"

Up a sand bluff, heaving to the heat waves; down a slither of ash dust; then, across the petrified black lava roll; down to a saline sink, white and blistering to the sight; over a silt bank crumbly as flour; and on and yet on; across the dusty sage-smelling parched plain . . . they moved; always following the tracks; tracks confused and doubling back as if the hind horse lagged; with blood drip and shuffling dragging hoofs; always keeping the dust whirl of the fore horizon in view; on and on, but speaking scarcely at all!

The Ranger again had that curious sensation of the earth slipping away from his foot steps. He had thrown away his leather coat early in the morning. Now be found himself tearing off the loose red tie round the flannel collar of the Service suit; and he pulled himself sharply together recognizing the fevered instinct to strip off all hampering clothing. It was as much a heat-death symptom as sleep forbodes frost death. He did not walk in a daze as the old man rode, half numbness, half drowse. He walked with a throb—throb—throb in his temples like the fall of water. He wanted to run; to strip himself as an athlete for a race; and all the time, he kept walking as if the heaving earth went writhing away from each step.

"Don't y' think ye better open that pack, an' get a drink for y'rself, my boy?"

Wayland was pausing in the shadow of a sand butte, and the old man had ridden up.

"Want it for yourself?"

"Not a drop."

"Better keep it for the horses, then; if we can keep them going to the next spring, they'll carry us out. Anything the matter with me that you ask that?"

"Oh no; A thought A saw you wave y'r arms."

The Ranger looked at the elder man. He was riding leaning forward heavily; and the dust had trenched deep fatigue lines in the hollow beneath his eyes and from the nostrils to the mouth. Wayland didn't retort that the frontiersman's speech had sounded guttural and muffled. He was not sure it was not the fault of his own ears.

They worked slowly to the crest of the sand roll, zig-zagging to break the steepness. An ash-colored shadow skulked along the tracks of the outlaw trail. The little mule gave a squealing hind kick. The shadow looked back: it was a coyote, scenting the tracks of the drovers' lame horse. It went loping over the sand a blurr of gray.

"Curious thing that, Wayland! Notice the antics of the mule? Always see that in a range bred beast, centuries of ham stringing."

The Ranger did not answer. The sand was no longer heaving in waves. It was running, sliding like the glossy surface of the sea. The throb of his temples, the slide of the sand, the lakes of light, light and crystal pools, that ran away as you came up, all brought visions of water. The dust cloud on the sky line dipped and disappeared behind a ridge of rolling sand.

There was the drowsy swash of saddle leather and the padded chug of dragging feet and the hum, the hypnotic hum, of the heat that drowsed from delirium to sleep.

"I think," said Wayland, "this seems a pretty good jumping-off place for a rest."

The afternoon was waning. They were under shelter of a sand bank from the wind and sun.

"A think, Wayland, this is nearly my jumping off place altogether."

Matthews spoke feebly. On pretense of steadying the fagged broncho, the Ranger helped him to dismount. Then, Wayland unsaddled and drew the water bag from the pack trees. He handed it over to the old man. Matthews pushed it aside: "Keep it for yourself to-morrow. If y' find no spring, y'll need the water to-morrow; but A'll take y'r flask of brandy if y' don't mind?"

"That's a fool thing to take in the heat, sir."

"'Tis if y' intend to live, Wayland; but A'm at the end of this Trail. A'd like a bit strength t' tell y' a thing or two before . . . as we rest! Don't waste any water on flap jacks."

The mule lay rolling in the sage brush. The two horses stood with lowered heads chacking on the bit and pawing. Wayland saw the brandy flush mount to the purplish pallor of the old man's face.

"Wayland, this is my jumping off place! A'm at the end of the Track. The Trail where the tracks all point one way. 'Tis na' sensible y'r hangin' back for me! If y'll take the fresh horse an' go on alone, y'll get out! If the railroad is only thirty miles due East, y' can make that. We'll rest a bit here, then after sundown we'll ride on; an' in the dark A'll drop back. If it hurts y' t' think of it, A'll head my horse due East for the railroad! Y'll go on, Wayland! Y'll not turn back for me!"

It took the Ranger a moment to realize what the old frontiersman was trying to say. "I think you'd better take another drink of that brandy," he said. "It seems to me a fool thing to let a good man die for the sake of catching three outlaw blackguards."

"'Tis not for the sake o' three blackguards!" The words came out with a rap. "'Tis to vindicate justice, 'tis to uphold law, an' till every good citizen is willin' to lay down his life hounding outrage to th' very covert o' Hell, t' die protectin' law an' justice an' innocence an' right, y'r Nation wull be ruled by paltroons an' cowards an' white-vested blackguards! Go; go on; go on to the end till ye fall and rot! If th' Devil takes to the open an' the saints take to cover, whose goin' t' fight the battle for right? The Armageddon o' y'r Nation? 'Tis easy t' be a good citizen when the bands are playin' an' the cannon roarin'. 'Tis harder in times o' peace to fight the battle o' the lone man! These outlaws, these blackguards, these cut throats, they're only the tools of the Man Higher Up! Get them, then go on for the Man Higher Up! Leave me, when A drop back in the dark to-night; if A'm in my senses, A'll shout a bravo and give y' a wave! Y'r the Man on the Job, the Nation's job! 'Tis not by bludgeons and bayonets, 'tis by ballots and brains y'll fight this battle out; and fight y' must or y'r freedom will go the way o' the old world despotisms down in a welter. A wish y'd go to the top o' the bank and have a look ahead."

An absurd sense of power, of resolution from despair, of will to do—suddenly swept over the Ranger. He forgot his fatigue. Months afterwards, a fellow student who had become a professor in psychology explained to him that it was a case of consciousness dipping suddenly down to the sublimal reservoirs of unconscious strength that lie in humanity; but then, Wayland had left two factors of explanation untold: first, that the dying trumpet call of the old warrior missionary had opened the doors of consciousness to that night on the Ridge of the Holy Cross; second, that the setting sun tinging all the buttes and hummocks and plains with rose flame somehow tinctured his being with consciousness of her, consciousness of the life drafts he had taken from her lips that night of the Death Watch.

He went across to the pack trees. Picking up the cross trees and blankets, he laid them on the ground as a pillow.

"If you will rest here, sir, I'll go above and have a look."

From the top of the sand bank, the Ranger looked down to see the old man lying with his face to the sky, his head pillowed on the saddle blankets, sound asleep. He looked across the Desert. The sun had sunk behind the azure strip of the mountain sky line. The billows of lava, black and glazed, the ashy silt pink-tinged to the sun-glow, the heaving orange sands . . . lay palpitating infinite almost with a oneness that was of God. Wayland was not given to prayers. Perhaps, like all men of action, he tried to make his life a prayer. Somehow, something within him prayed wordlessly now . . . not for exceptional advantage in the game of life, not for remission of the laws of Nature, not for miracle, but for aptitude to play the game according to rules. His wordless prayer did not end in an "amen." It ended in a little hard laugh. As though Right were such a simple business as just personally being good! or an insurance policy against damnation and guarantee for salvation! What was it the old man had said? Your right must be made into might . . . that was the game of life: the saving of the Nation: the good old-fashioned square deal no matter which party cut the cards. Right made Might, Might made Right; that was what the Nation wanted!

Then, it came again, the touch, the consciousness, the will to power, to do, to fight and overcome. He rose and looked across the Desert. A puff of dust, a swirl and eddy of riders, resolved itself through the terra cotta mist to the forms of three men going over the crest of the sand roll against the red sun-wrack of the sky line; three figures far apart, riding slowly, crawling against the face of the distant sky; one man in advance bent over his pummel; a second rider with a pack horse in tow pulling and dragging on the halter rope, the pack horse white and lame, stopping at every step, the man crunched, huddling fore done, down in his saddle; then dragging far to the rear, just cresting the sky line as the other two disappeared, swaying from side to side, a ragged wreck lying almost forward on his horse's neck; was he being deserted?

Wayland uttered a jubilant low whistle and tumbled down the sand bank to his camp kit.

The wind was at lull and the velvet air palpitating as a human pulse. The after-glow lay on the orange sands cresting all the ridges with cressets of flame. Wayland was riding bare backed.

"When we sight them, I want you to drop back, sir! The Desert's got them. They haven't the resistance of dead fish left. If we cut across this sink, as I make it, we'll save a couple of miles and almost meet them on the other side of the next ridge."

When Wayland had wakened the old frontiersman, he had babbled inconsequently about the sea. Mixing brandy with the last of the sediment water, Wayland got him into the saddle. There were queer splotches of blood under the skin on the backs of his hands; but when the brandy relieved his fatigue, he stopped babbling of the sea and spoke coherently.

"Y' mind the man, whose wife died in the Desert, Wayland?"

His horse stumbled. The Ranger snatched at the bridle and jerked it up.

"Yes," said Wayland.

"Vera noble of the woman; 'tis all right on her record, Wayland; but what do y' think o' th' man?"

"But in this case, the man took her in to save her life."

"A wasn't thinking of his case," answered the other bluntly. "A was thinking of yours."

The horse stumbled again. This time, the Ranger kept hold of the bridle rein.

"A didna' just mean t' tell y', Wayland; but A want y' t' know before A drop back. A saw it in her eyes, Wayland, yon night she went up the Ridge trail, and oh, man, A was loth to speak: she would cheer y' on in y'r work, A thought, perhaps—perhaps, the Lord might be playin' an ace card an' A'd no be trumpin' my partner's tricks; but 'tisn't so; Wayland, 'tisn't so! This Desert hell proves me wrong. She isna for y', man; no man can ask a woman to come into a fight that may mean this! It's a man's job, Wayland; an' the man who would drag a woman into the sufferin' of it isn't worthy of her . . . isn't the man to do the job. Oh yes, A know, a woman's love is ready to jump in the fire an' all that. Hoh! The man's love that'll let her is poor stuff, Wayland, base metal, kind o' love to burn all away to dross an' ashes when the fires come! Her's will come out pure gold thro' it all, but man alive, Wayland, think o' her when she finds his as dross; an' if he lets her sacrifice hers for his, 'tis dross!"

Wayland grew suddenly hot all over. He could not bring himself to name her, much less indulge in the cheap confessional of tawdry loose held affection. He had heard men discuss their love affairs: men who could discuss them hadn't any; theirs was the sense reflex of the frog that kicks when you tickle its nerve-end. He rode on unspeaking.

"Y'll be tellin' y'rself 'tis too sacred to mouthe—with an old fellow like me. All right! We'll say it is too sacred; but that minds me of a Cree rascal on my Reserve, an old medicine man, always talkin' of his sacred medicine bag; well, one day when he was good an' far away, good an' plenty drunk, A took a peep into his medicine bag; there was nothin' inside but a little snake that hissed; an' him beatin' the big drum! Hoh! sacred?

"Y'll be tellin' me y'r passion vows are stronger than life or death? Hoh! Y'd be a poor man if love wasn't stronger than death without any vows and big drum! Y'll be tellin' me y've warned her not t' link her life up wi' y'rs, to help y' resist an' all that; well, while y'r playin' y'r high and mighty self-sacrifice, did y'r manhood melt in the love light o' her eyes?"

Wayland jerked his horse roughly to a dead stop. "Mr. Matthews, for what reason are you saying all this?"

"A'll tell y' that too! A've come for her, Wayland. A've come to take her back to her people. Y' don't understand, her father is a MacDonald of the Lovatt clan—came out with Wolfe's regiment in 1759."

"In 1759?" repeated Wayland. "I heard her father say that very year."

"Yes, and a dark doursome race they are. Lovatt: Fraser MacDonald was his name; fought under Wolfe and joined the up country furhunters. When he came back from his hunting one year, he found his wife had eloped with an officer of the regiment; so he took to the north woods an' married an Indian girl and his son was the man o' the iron arm, the piper for little Sir George in the thirties, who blew the bag pipes up Saskatchewan and over the mountains and down the Columbia and all round them lakes where y'r Holy Cross Forest is. They were a' dark fearsome men in their loves and hates. This man married late in life, he had two sons, Angus of Prince Albert an' your Donald here. He never saw his father alive. The Lovatt estates have been restored by law; but the line is bred out, down to a little old lady whose waitin' me up at my Mission on Saskatchewan. She came huntin' heirs. Angus had married an Indian woman; he'll never go back, nor his sons. They're livin' under a tent to-day. What would they do wi' a castle and liveried servants and tenants an' things? Donald, y'r sheep king man, married a white girl. Some time after '85 she left him for the part he took in the Rebellion. She died after the child's birth; and the father claimed the daughter. He's known they'd have to come for his daughter some day, spite of his part in the Rebellion; and that was no such shameful thing as y' might think, if y've lived long enough in the West, t' understand! He has educated the daughter for the place. As A guess, she knows nothing of it, doesn't know who her mother was, or why her father had to leave Canada. A guessed that much when y'r Indian woman sent me the wrong road from the Ridge trail, that night! She doesn't even know who that Indian woman is."

"You came—for her?" repeated Wayland slowly. The night on the Ridge came back to him! Calamity's fear when the old frontiersman arrived; Bat's threat to expose something; Eleanor's perturbed letter; the father's half furtive defiant existence. He was too proud to ask more than the other cared to tell, too loyal to pry into any part of her life that she could not willingly share with him. He sat gazing into the mystic afterglow of the Desert, a flame of fire over a lake of light. It was as the old man had said, he had asked her to strengthen his resolution; and he drank in the love light of her eyes as he asked. He had vowed himself to a life apart and then his humanity, his weakness, his need had sealed the vow of renunciation in the fires that forged eternally their beings into one. But this, this was the Hand from Outside on which we never reckon and which always comes; the Destiny Thing which Man's Will denies, wrenching the forging asunder. Was it right for him to risk their lives farther in the Desert now; it affected her life now; and that was exactly what his common sense had foreseen: the fighter must fight alone. Love might send forth; but love must not be suffered to draw back.

"Why do you tell me all this?"

The old man moistened his lips before speaking. "If A don't go out, Wayland, A want y' t' see that her father's told, that she's taken back. When A saw the love light in her face come out like stars and her breath break when A spoke of you as a Ranger fellow, when A saw that, A thought, no matter what A thought. If y' married her, d' y' think y' could go off on the firing line; d' y' think y' would if y' knew y'd left her in danger? They'd strike at you through her, Wayland . . . it would be the end of free fightin'. A ask no promise. 'Tis enough A've told y'. Drive on!"

They moved slowly up the sand ridge, the Ranger a little ahead, oblivious of the livid blue of the old man's lips and the drag on the bridle rope till a quick jerk ripped the line from his loose hold; and he glanced back to see the other's horse stagger, flounder up again, waver and sink with a sucking groan. Wayland sprang just in time to catch the old frontiersman. He tore the saddle from the fallen broncho and cinched it on his own horse. Then he lifted Matthews, protesting, to the fresh mount, "till we reach the next rest place," he said, tying the halter rope of the pack mule to the saddle pommel. "Go on, I'll come."

Wayland waited till the horse and mule passed over the crest of the sand bank; then, he took out his revolver. A shudder ran through the fallen horse. The Ranger's hand trembled. He stroked its neck. "Poor devil; it's none of your affair either. I wonder how the God of the game will square it with the dumb brutes?"

He ran his left hand down the white face of the broncho. It hobbled as if to stagger up, and sank back dumb, faithful, trying to the end, one fore knee bent to rise, the neck outstretched. Wayland's right hand went swiftly close between eye and ear. He shot, in quick succession, three times, his hand fumbling, his sight turned aside.

Neither spoke as they advanced down the other side of the sand ridge, the Ranger steadying himself with a hand to the mule's neck. The bank dipped to a white alkali pit where the light lay in dead pools, gray in the twilight, quivering with heat, layers of blue air above ashes of death. For the second time that day, the sand colored thing skulked across the trail. Wayland took hold of both bridles and led down, the old man wakening as from a stupor. The alkali pit lay perhaps a mile distant, gray and fading in the red light.

"Wayland, is that water?"

"Where? I can't see it."

"There, at the foot of the hill."

"With trees up side down? No, sir! It may be mirage of water miles away, carried by the rays of this twilight; but if you can see it and the horses can't smell it, you can bet on a false pool!"

But the little mule had jerked free with a low squeal.

"A tell you, Wayland, there is water;" and he began babbling again inconsequently of the sea, running his words together incoherent, half delirious.

"Go on and see, then! I'll follow! If there's water, look out for the drovers."

Wayland let go his hold of the bridle. Horse and mule shot down the sand bank. He saw them shoulder neck and neck along the white alkali bottom, then break to a gallop, the old man hanging to the pommel; then all disappeared round the end of the bank. Wayland slithered down the sand slope and dashed to the top of the next hill breathless. Below lay the glister of water, real water and no mirage, glassy, gray and sinister. The Ranger uttered a yell; then paused in his head-long descent.

The pony had plunged in belly deep; the mule had lowered its head; the old man was kneeling at the brink. Wayland saw him lave the water up with his hand: then throw it violently back. All at once, the grip of life snapped. Matthews was lying motionless on the sand. The horse was chocking its head up and down; the mule was stamping angrily with fore feet roiling the pool bottom. It had been one of the salt sinks that lie in the depressions of the Desert.



CHAPTER XVII

WHERE THE TRACKS ALL POINT ONE WAY

Wayland poured the last very driblets of water sediments from the skin bag. This, he forced past the old man's lips. Then he drew the unconscious form back on the saddle blankets, loosened the neck of the shirt, laved the temples and wrists with the salt water, tore strips of canvas from the tent square, wet that and laid it on the old man's forehead. He ran his hand inside the shirt and felt the heart. It was still beating, beating furiously, with faint flutterings, then accessions of fresh fury. The lips were black and swollen. The eyes were sunken; and the veins stood out in deadly clear purplish reticulation with splotches of transfused blood under the shrivelled skin of the hands. Then, he raised the old white head from the pack trees,—brave old warrior for right going down the Trail where the Tracks All Point One Way—, and somehow got a mouthful of brandy past the clinched teeth. The breath came fast and faint like the heart beats. Once, the eyes opened; but they were glazed and unseeing. Wayland laid the old head on the pillowed pack trees, fitting rest for frontiersman of the wilderness; then he stood up to think! A terrible passion of tenderness, of question, of defiance to God, rushed through his thoughts. The animals take their tragedies dumb and uncomplaining. Man alone has not learned the futility of shouting impotent reproaches at a brazen sky.

The Ranger unsaddled the pony. Then he tethered the mule and broncho by separate ropes to the boulders. He placed the brandy flask by the old man's right hand. He thought a moment. Then he laid the loaded rifle close to the same hand.

The eyes were still staring wide open unseeing. The purple lips began babbling wordless words, words of the sea, words that ran into one another inarticulate. Wayland stooped and took the left hand in his own palm. It was cold and heavy, a thing detached from life; and the purple swollen lips were still babbling in inarticulate whispers. Should he leave him to die there alone; or go forth to seek; seek what?

The Ranger stooped and pressed his lips to the blood-blotched back of the faithful shrivelled old hand. He did not shed a tear. We weep only when we are half hurt.

Wayland seized the Service axe and uncased his own rifle. Then in words that were not worshipful, not bending his knees, but standing with his hat off, he uttered what may have been a prayer, or may have been blasphemy. I leave you to judge: "By God, if there is a God, why doesn't He waken up? If there is a God, does He stand for right? Is there such a thing as Right; or is Right the dream of fools? I want to know! If there is a God, I want God to speak out clear and plain, right now, in plain facts, so I can understand, and not so blamed long ago that a plain fellow can't make out what's the right thing to do."

It was one thing to pray under the rose-colored windows of a college chapel, and another thing to pray under the yellow, brazen Desert sky. There was only the dreadful Desert silence, with the rattle from the laboured breathing of the unconscious man. If there was no God, then the fight for Right was the futility of fools: Right was only the Right of the strong to prey upon the weak, till the weak became in turn strong enough to prey; and that meant anarchy. If Right was right as two and two make four in Heaven or Hell, then where was the God from whom Right, laws of Right emanated, guiding the unwise as laws of gravity guide the stars?

He didn't know that he had been staggering from physical weakness as he climbed the ridge of sand. There was the fresh horse. One of them might escape in a night by riding it to death. Then, there was the possibility of the railroad being within reach. One of them might go out to the railroad, but not both. The old frontiersman had passed the point of being able to ride; and a very few hours would probably witness the end of his life. He could tie the old man to the fresh horse, but the slow pace that would be necessary would sacrifice both their lives. There was another possibility: the fresh man on the fresh horse. That way out did not enter Wayland's mind; but he did ask himself why the outlaws had not come down to the false pool. Why had they gone on? They were as near the end of their tether as he was of his.

Then he became suddenly conscious that he had eaten almost nothing for twenty-four hours and that the quivering air darkening to night rolled above the yellow sands in a way not caused by heat. Was it saddle wear or exhaustion that he stumbled as he walked? He looked at the silver strip of mountains above the westering sky. A fore-shortening haze swam into his sight. There was the mountain flecked with silver. Then it had gone into a milky black and pools, pools of water, fringed by the pines of the North, hung in the blue haze of mid-air, fore-shortening, shifting like a blurred sieve into the silver strip of mountain and milky blot, then back again, pools of crystal water, cool mountain lakes, this time with the trees up side down and figures among the trees. He knew by the trees being up side down, though he was dreaming of laughing as he drank and drank, that it must be a mirage! Then he came to himself wondering how in the world he was sitting on the sand bank. And why hadn't he kept the tea leaves to put on his eyes in case of heat inflammation? Then, it tripped almost under his feet, you understand he did not trip, he had struck at it with his Service axe—the wolf thing tracking the red stain of the outlaws' trail along the base of the sand bank out across the ash colored silt sands. He watched it pausing, where the wind had eddied the dust in serpentine lines over the tracks, sniffing the air, loping across the break, and on out again at a run, nose down to earth: a blot against the sky; the burned out sulphur sky above an earth of embers and ashes. Was it a mirage; or was he going delirious; or had he fallen asleep to dream her face framed in the blur of the purpling haze, receding from him, drawing him with the shine of the stars in her eyes, drawing him with the warmth of their first passion kiss on her lips? He would rise from his grave, and follow her from death, if she wove such spells, whether of dreams or delirium or mirage! The Ranger found himself stumbling across the baked silt and lava rocks, stripped of his hat and his boots, stripped like a marathon runner, vaguely conscious that he ought to have kept those tea leaves for that burn in his eyes, that the silver strip of the mountain was there just ahead; now a crystal pool of the cool mountain lake in mid air; now her face had vanished into the blue haze. Suddenly, winged things flappered up with raucous protest. The coyote had skulked over the edge of the lava dip; not the burnt-oil earth-scorched Desert smell, but the shrivelled putridity of flesh smote and nauseated his senses. The white pack horse of the outlaw drovers lay dead across the trail at his feet, a pool of clotted blood darkening the ashy sand. Its throat had been cut. . . .

The Ranger drew off, rubbed his eyes and looked again. The crumbly silt had been trampled all round the dead horse. So they, too, were dying of thirst on the Desert. Which way to follow now? There were the hoof prints across the open level; but forking from the main trail was another track: that of a man dragged or dragging or crawling forward on his hands and knees. Had they deserted the third man; or had the third man dropped back from them to cut his horse's throat? The Ranger laughed aloud, a harsh cracked laugh; he knew he was delirious. The Lord had played an ace and he wouldn't trump His trick by going after the trail of the man who had crawled away to die. There was a Deity of retribution at least, whether God or demon: he had vowed he would make those blackguards drink horse blood!

If he hounded along the trail, perhaps he might overhaul the other two. Then, then if he did perish in the Desert, he would not have perished for naught! It was then, the earth performed the acrobatic feat of heaving up, and he fell! This time, he knew he had fallen. It was no trip. He was down and out and done for; and he knew it. He rose to his knees steadying himself on his Service axe. Then, it came again, the silver strip of mountain on the sky line with the cool lakes and the blue haze, and her face, the face in the Watts' picture of "the Happy Warrior," weaving the spell, receding from him, drawing him with the love light in her eyes and the passion kiss on her lips, beckoning, beckoning; he would rise and follow her from the dead if she beckoned with that light in her eyes. She was receding not along the trail of the fleeing Desert runners, but down the dragged track of the body that had crawled to the foot of a sand bank. Wayland never knew whether he staggered or crept down the trail of the dragged body away from the hoof prints of the drovers' horses across the alkali sink; but between him and the silver strip of mountain on the far skyline, above the yellow sand so hot to his palms, beckoned her face, the love light in her eyes, weaving the spell. Then the coyote had bounded into the air, and the red-combed Desert condors, the scavengers of an outcast world, rose from their quarry; and Wayland, fevered, delirious, laughing, crying, kneeled over the body of a man lying on his face with his bloody hand clutched in death grip round an upright post driven into the alkali bottoms, a post with a drinking cup hung on the notched crotch, the Desert sign of a water spring beneath the drifted sands.

Wayland pushed the body aside. The man's face was red-smeared. He was dead. Wayland had to unlock the clutched fingers from the post. Somewhere, from the submerged consciousness of forgotten college lore came memory that the water table lay ten feet deep beneath the Desert silt. The Ranger slid down the sand drift and was chopping, hacking, digging, into the side of the bank, thanking God; God was on the job after all; scooping the sand drift out with his naked hand, burrowing at the earth as the animals of the wilderness-struggle tear in maddened thirst for the hidden life beneath the sand death. He heard the suck and gurgle of the water, not the joyous silver laugh of Northern springs, but the sullen coming of water compelled; and his lips were at the sand; drinking, drinking, drinking. Then, he suddenly remembered her face. He looked up. Gone the silver strip of shining mountain; gone the mirage of the crystal pool; darkness, velvet pansy darkness of the Desert night; and an earth bat winged past his face. Even as he drank he felt the puff and whirl of the wind rising; he laughed. He felt the cool water trickle and settle and pool in the sand hole. Then he laved his temples and wrists, and laughed softly, and called a low long tremulous call; that foolish Saxon word he had told her to look up in the dictionary.

The wind might blow great guns, and wipe out the fugitive trail. He would go no farther. The wind would attend to the other two men. He had found water: he had found life. God had played the trick; and he had not trumped the ace; four of the six outlaws dead, and the last two hastening to the alkali death across the Desert sands. He drank again, this time from the cup, sip by sip, slowly, then in deep draughts of God-given waters.

He didn't thank God in so many words, or in testimony to pass muster at a prayer meeting; but he paused twice on his way back to the saline sink to say: "He's on the job. You bet He's on the job!" He spent the rest of the week nursing the old frontiersman back to life.



PART II

THE MAN HIGHER UP



CHAPTER XVIII

WITHOUT MALICE

The Senator sat in his office with his hat on the back of his head and a U. S. Geological Survey map spread out on the desk in front of him. Bat stood sleepily at attention on the other side of the desk with his hat in his hand. It was a sweltering July afternoon in Smelter City, the air athrob with the derricks and the trucks and the cranes and the pulleys and the steam hoists and the cable car tramway run up and down the face of Coal Hill by natural gravitation. The light was dusky yellow from the smelter smoke; and loafers round the transcontinental railroad station across the street chose the shady side of the building, where they sat swinging their legs from the platform and aiming tobacco juice with regularity and precision in the exact centre of the gray dusty road.

The Senator wore a pair of pince nez glasses. He looked up over the top of them through the yellow sun-light of the open street door.

"Declare, Brydges, the damned rascals are too lazy to brush the flies off," he observed of the brigade of loafers across the street.

Bat threw a glance over his shoulder at the coterie of loafers, and brought his drowsy tortoise-shell glance back to the map lying before the Senator.

"I guess the flies won't bother 'em long as they vote right, Mr. Senator."

Moyese was slowly turning and turning the thick stub of a crayon pencil between his thumb and fore finger. Bat knew that trick of absent-minded motion always presaged senatorial sermonizing, just as the soft laugh down in the crinkles of the white vest forewarned danger. ("When I see the tummy wrinkles coming, I always feel like telling the other fellow to get the button off his fencing sword—You bet that means business," Bat often confided to the newseditor.)

"Brydges, this country is rapidly lining up two opposing sides: fighting lines, too, by George! Mobocracy versus Plutocracy! I'm only a cog in the wheel, myself, a mere marker for the big counters, my boy; but if I have to put up with the tyranny of one or t'other, I'm damned if I don't prefer the tyranny of the rich to the tyranny of the poor, any day! Why, is any man poor in this country, Brydges? Because he's a damned incompetent unfit swinish hog, too lazy to plant and hoe his own row; so he gets the husks of the corn while the competent man gets the cob—the cob with the corn on, you bet, number one, Silver King, Hard, seventy cents a bushel! If I have to put up with one or t'other, I'm damned if I don't prefer the tyranny of knowledge to the tyranny of ignorance! One butters your bread, anyway, and sometimes puts some jam on with the butter. The other snivels and whines and begs a crust from the other fellow's table, and snaps at the hand that gives him the crust, and spends the time in self-pity that he should spend in work! Look at that row of free-born American citizens, kings in disguise, Brydges! Not a damned man of them ever did a stroke of honest work in his life except on election day, when we line 'em up; and damn it, aren't we right, to line 'em up? What kind of rule are you going to get from that kind of rulership if some one doesn't jump in and group it and direct it; yes, by George, and compel it to keep in line and vote right, just as a general licks his recruits in shape on pain of court martial? Think any battle would ever be won, Brydges, if the commanding officer hadn't the power of a despot? He makes mistakes. Of course, he makes mistakes! So do we! But we're keeping those damned rascals in line for the good of the country; and so, I say, the plutocrats who are being cursed from one end of the country to the other to-day, are playing the same part in modern life as the big war chiefs of the Middle Ages. They are marshalling the forces; leading the advance; conquering the countries with commerce that the old war chiefs used to conquer with arms; building up, constructing, amassing, concentrating in trust and combine all the scattered abilities of men, who would be powerless individually; and we use our tools, that parcel of beauties out there, same as the old war chiefs used their blackguard mercenaries! It's cheaper for us to buy 'em than be bossed by 'em, a darn sight cheaper, Brydges; for us to swing 'em into a bunch and control 'em than be blackmailed by 'em, Brydges! If every penny grafter didn't hold up the corporation, every damned little squirt of a county supervisor and road contractor and town councilman, if they didn't hold the corporation up for blackmail way the highwaymen of old used to hold up the lone traveller, if they didn't hold us up for blackmail, Brydges, it wouldn't be necessary for us to man that gang across the way on voting day!

"Freedom, pah!" The Senator had stopped swirling the stub pencil. He reached forward to a jar of roses on his desk. "Equality? Pah! Dream of fools, Brydges! Doesn't exist! Never did exist! Never can exist! Know how we develop Silver King Corn that gives ninety bushels to the acre instead of old thirty bushel yield?"

Bat had sat down, still sleepily watchful through the tortoise-shell eyes, but a bit wilted in the heat. Some of the men swinging corduroy and blue jean legs from the station platform evidently perpetrated a pleasantry; for there was a loud guffaw, and a shower of tobacco wads into the middle of the road.

"Know how we get high grade corn, high grade rose like this American Beauty: in fact, high grade anything? Well, I'll tell you. It's the same process that brings out high grade men. You go into a field of corn. You pick out best specimens. You keep that for seed, special care, special fine ground, special careful cultivation. You let the others go, feed 'em to the hogs, understand, Bat? It's the same with the roses, and the same with men; and now where's your fine theory of all men equal?"

As Bat did not care to remind the Senator that his own career from the ghetto up contradicted all this fine philosophy, he left the question unanswered.

Moyese pushed the glasses up on his nose and returned to the map.

"How many homesteaders did you succeed in nabbing out of that last train-load?"

"About a hundred, Senator! I've got the list of 'em here . . . haven't counted, but think it will tally up about a hundred."

"What are they, Germans?"

"No, Swedes."

Moyese laughed. "Thrifty beggars will job round and earn double while they're operating for us! Got good big families, Bat?"

It was the turn of the handy man to laugh. "I filed one fellow and eight kids for one hundred and sixty acres each."

"You didn't contract to pay each of the little olive branches three-hundred?"

"Lord, no! If the dad sits tight till we prove up entry, he's to get three-hundred! No fear of his blabbing. He can't speak a word of English; and when I told the woman, through the interpreter that we pay their fare out and each of the kids would get a five, why, she kissed my hand and slobbered gratitude all over me."

"Wayland won't be quite so grateful for that bunch."

"Oh, I didn't file that batch in the N. F. You bet, that's a little too obvious! I put 'em in the Pass, lower end of the Pass, not by a damn sight, I didn't put 'em in the N. F.! I thought Smelter people wanted us to secure that Pass for a dam; and I bunched 'em all in just above the Sheriff's place!"

"That's good! The Sheriff proves up this year; and if you get this bunch in behind, that corks the Pass up pretty effectually! Where are the bounds of the Forest there?"

Bat drew his fore-finger along the map. "Along the red line, here: just to the trail through the canyon."

"Good: now what about the timber claim along the Gully? That's in the Forests, Brydges. I want to force a contest on that; the Swede fellow has cut the logs under his permit; but I'd like to make that doubly sure before we go to trial. If we can get a double cinch on that, we'll knock the claim of the Forestry Department to keep homesteaders out into a cocked hat."

Bat's sleepy eyes emitted sparks and his good natured smile widened to an open grin.

"The Swede happened to use a U. S. Forest hatchet when he cut those logs," he said. "I told him to be sure and stamp the butt end of each log U. S., duly inspected," he said.

Moyese dropped the map and the pencil and his heavy hand with a thud on the desk and laughed noiselessly down into the creases of his fat double chin and into the wrinkling rotundity of his white vest.

"And to cinch it," continued Brydges, "as the fellow's permit didn't cover the Gully, I got some blanket railway scrip for an Irishman, O'Finnigan, Shanty Town, and planked it on the Gully. You see, Senator, by law the settlers can go in on the National Forests wherever it has been surveyed and declared agricultural land; but they can't go in and get title till it is surveyed and passed. But you can plaster the railway scrip where it is unsurveyed. That's the little joker somebody tucked in when the scrip railway act was passed. I guess by the time they have red-taped and trapesed round and wrangled those two tangles of title out, the logs will be safe down the River; and I guess that will about see the finish of Wayland before the coal cases come up—"

"That's it, Brydges." Moyese had lowered his voice. "What about Wayland? Have you found out anything? Where the devil is he? He isn't on his patrol! He hasn't been at the Ridge for three weeks. He hasn't been at the Ridge since I left for Washington. If we could prove how he's been using Government time," he paused to reflect. "That might be shortest way out! Did you find out anything at the MacDonald Ranch?"

Bat threw a precautionary glance over his shoulder towards the door opening on the street. Then he rose, walked across the office, shut the door, came back and drawing his chair close to the desk opposite the Senator, sat down astride with his feet tucked back one round each hind leg.

"Yes, I did; and no again, I didn't! It's just as it may strike you! As a news man, I know how this kind of yarn would be taken by the public."

"Oh, come on with it, Brydges!" Moyese had pushed back and was holding the edge of the desk with his hands. Mr. Bat Brydges recognized that while the creases of good-nature crinkled at the chin, the jaws and the hands had locked.

"Your newsman got this despatch from Mine City: you see it's pretty vague: 'bodies of two men found forty miles from branch of P. & O. Line, thought to be drovers overcome by heat and thirst.' I wired for more particulars; but the railway hands had shovelled the bodies under."

"Brydges," interrupted Moyese sharply, "I'm going to tell you something; and you put it in your pipe and smoke it; and don't waste time running off on false clues. You leave that to women and sissies—to the she-male man! Now listen, a man can't lose himself in the Desert: He can't lose himself in the Wilderness. If he's a damphool, he can get lost, but he can't lose himself, he can't hide in the wilderness, not ever! He can lose himself in a city in one week. He could drop out of sight right here in Smelter City; but he can't go into the wilds and not come out again and people not know it. Somebody sees him go in, and somebody doesn't see him come out; and there you are! It's the same in the wilds as at the North Pole: you can't cook up a fake. Man who goes into the wilds is a marked man till he comes out. Every man, who meets him, takes a turn round to look at him; and he's going to keep looking till the fellow comes out. Now, you take this case. Wayland had on his Service Badge. If he had been one of those two, the fact would have been flashed right down to Washington. Now tell me facts, not rumors; exactly what did you find out?"

When his chief began in that dictatorial fashion, Bat let his facts go in a running fire:

"Well, Flood saw him with his own eyes going up the Pass with that old Canadian duffer the morning, the morning," Bat paused, manifestly unable to specify which morning.

"Yes, the morning after," added the soft, even voice of Moyese. "And the snow slide filled the Pass up to the neck, forty-eight hours later. Yes, I know; but Wayland was too good a mountain man to be caught by a slide."

"I told Flood to get out and examine that slide, anyway! He said 'twasn't any use, this hot weather would clean it up in a couple of weeks. He was going up the Pass when I left for the Valley yesterday."

"What did you find out at the Ridge?"

"That's where the milk is in this cocoanut," answered Bat. "He hasn't passed one night at the Ridge since the night we were all up! You remember who was at the Cabin, night we went up? Well, keep that in mind; when I went across to MacDonald's Ranch to express your regret over this accident, found old man wasn't home. He's expected back from the Upper Pass by train this week: seems he has been arranging new grazing ground for another herd up there. You know how MacDonald house is laid out? Big room as you enter; then a sort of back sitting room for," Bat smiled queerly, a smile that said nothing, yet subterraneously conveyed out to daylight one of those under currents of thought that flows only in the dark, "for the lady. Well, sir, chill blasts of North Pole were tropical zephyrs compared to what I got from that MacDonald gurl."

"I thought her name was Miss MacDonald," suggested the Senator, softly. He had lowered his chin and was looking over his eye glasses at Brydges.

"Hold on, Mr. Senator! I am coming to that! Her father has been away a month. I found out from Calamity and the road gang that Wayland hasn't been at the Cabin since that night I was there; and Gee Whittiker," Brydges laughed sleepily, the same smile that said nothing but came up from the subterranean under current, "he was a bear with a sore head that night; spent most of the night prancing the Ridge. Well, a fellow can't exactly stand on one leg and then on t'other all through a call. She didn't ask me to sit down. Said her father was coming home by Smelter City and you could have the pleasure of conveying your sympathy personally: kept standing herself all the time; kept looking from me to the door. Well, sir, while she was looking through the door behind me, I was looking through the door behind her." And as Bat said it, he looked away. "Wayland's Range coat was hanging in that inner room."

Bat smiled slowly and sleepily; then openly grinned as who should say "now the cat is out"; but when he turned to Moyese, his chief had whirled in the swing chair and was sitting with hands clasped under his hat, and the back of his head towards Brydges.

A glossy smile had come over Bat's face that is not good to see on man, woman, child or beast; and it is the same kind of smile on all four, not laughter, nor light, not definite enough to be malicious, nor pointed enough to be self accusatory, nor direct enough to be challenged and repudiated; a smile untellably familiar—a Satyr-faced thought looking through a veil, somehow sinuously suggestive, saying nothing at all, yet conveying the physical sensation of pus from an ulcerous thing; and strangely enough, there are blow-fly natures that prefer pus to nectar.

If Brydges had not been so absorbed in the jocularity of his own sensations, he would have observed that his chief remained singularly silent.

"Oh, I don't suppose he's there all this time." Bat rushed to the defence of the absent, (Heaven bless such defenders). "That old Canadian duffer, who seems to have hitched up with him on the Rim Rocks accident, your ranch foreman saw 'em pass together at noon; tried to telephone 'Herald,' but I choked that off; that old fellow once wrote our paper to know about Canadian settlers here. He recognized Calamity and talked about old North West Rebellion days. It's my theory he's here about something that's been hushed up! Like dad, like daughter," Bat pronounced.

"It's my theory when MacDonald comes back from the Upper Pass, Wayland and the old fellow will turn up about the same time. Haven't been able to learn what it is; but I'll bet dollars to doughnuts, they are all absent on the same trail. If we let go a broadside, they'll have to come out with the truth to shut us off; and there is where we are going to get him; see? I've got another theory, too."

"What's that?" asked the Senator, without turning.

"It is, if he sees we're going to involve her, he'll quit."

Moyese didn't answer. He rose from his chair and walked to a rear window, where he stood looking out. Did he credit what he had heard? Was it a recital of facts, or a distortion of facts through a tainted mind? Did Brydges, himself, believe what he had tried to convey? Or was his job to obtain certain results at any cost: and was this part of the cost? Ask yourself that of the tainted news you read every day. Ask why those who recognize the lie do not brand it as such; why those who are uncertain do not verify before they repeat and credit; and you will probably have some clue to the little melodrama of dishonor enacted in the office of a legal luminary at Smelter City that sweltering hot July day. When you come to observe it, Bat's recital contained nothing that might not have been posted in eminent respectability on a church warden's door. Like fresh fruit passed through a mouldy cellar, the facts came from the medium of the narrator with the unclean contagion of cellar mould. The next narrator would not pass on the facts. He would pass on the cellar rot.

"If we served up those two stories together hot," emphasized Bat, "we'd about cut the throat of any opposition to our interests in the Valley? He'd quit! I'll bet before he'd see her involved, he'd jump his job!"

When the Senator turned his face to the handy man, he was very sober. He stood looking over the tops of his glasses boring into Bat's face.

"It's a pity," he said.

"Yes, it's too bad: one hates to have one's faith in human nature all balled out this way; but you never know what kind of a fact you're going ping up against where a woman is concerned." Something in the Senator's look stopped Bat mid-way.

"Brydges, I thought I told you never to meddle with the damphool who makes excuses for what he's going to do. Never do anything, unless you have some end worth while in view; then, if it's worth while, do it, damn it, and don't waste time excusing the means! Now, I'll have nothing to do with this; mind that, Brydges. You do it off your own responsibility. If MacDonald were one of our party, I wouldn't make use of it, if it were ten times over and over true. You'll have to be very careful how you use that, at all! It's effective. I don't deny it's very effective; but it's a pity! If you use that at all, you'll have to use it so it's not libelous."

"Libelous?" burst out the handy man wakening up suddenly, scratching his tousled head and trying to make head or tail of orders that said 'do it' and 'don't do it' in one breath. "I can write it without a name so every man in the State will know who it is: give it as a joke; fetch in Calamity as the mother of the whole mess; the call of the blood, you know; reversion to type! They'll have to prove that the intent was malice before they can get a judgment. They'll have to come out with the truth before they can prove libel. It isn't libelous if it's done as a joke without malice."

Moyese had flung himself down in his chair with a blow of his clenched fist on the desk, when the opening of the office door stopped the oath of disgust on his lips; and Eleanor MacDonald stood framed in the yellow light shining in from the hot street. For a moment, the transition from sun to shade blinded her. Then, she saw who was with the Senator. Brydges sprang up waiting to return her recognition. She made no sign. She walked over where he was standing. The Senator had half risen from his desk. Was it the spirit of the ancestral Indian in her eyes; or of the Man with the Iron Hand? Brydges' oily gloss went to tallow under her look. Moyese knew looks that drilled; and Brydges himself could bore behind for motives; but this look was not a drill: it was a Search Light; and the handy man—well, perhaps, it was the heat—the handy man suddenly wilted.

"You can go, Brydges," ordered Moyese.

"All right! See you again about that, Senator!" Brydges grabbed up the loose notes from the desk and bolted, banging the door behind him.

The Senator's face seemed at once to age and trench with lines. He motioned her to the vacated chair and remained bending forward over his desk till she had seated herself. Then, he sat down, suddenly remembered his hat, and laid it off. If she had sunk forward on the desk weeping; if she had made a sign of appeal; he would have gone round and caressed her and petted her and told her she must stop Wayland. His whole manhood went out to comfort her, to stand between her and what? . . . Was it the drive of those wheels of which he was a cog? But when she looked across the desk, the eyes had no appeal, the Search Light had turned on him.

"You must excuse me if you heard what I was saying, when you came in, Miss Eleanor; but it was a G— doggon lie! I had been angered: I had been angered very much; and that's a bad thing on a hot day." He was slipping back to the usual suavity.



CHAPTER XIX

BALLOTS FOR BULLETS

It was Calamity, who had carried the trouble-making coat across from the Mission Library to the MacDonald Ranch House. Eleanor had found it in the big living room that day after she had read the note saying he was setting out "on the Long Trail, the trail this Nation will have to follow before Democracy arrives; the trail of the Man behind the Thing." Somehow, she lost interest in her reading and her driving, and spent the most of that first week after the funeral in the steamer chair on the Ranch House piazza. Were the topaz gates of the sunset still ajar to a new infinite life; or did satyr faces haunt the shadows of the trail, satyr faces of the Greed that had plotted the bloody villainy of the Rim Rocks? She had thought she knew joy before, joy that rapt her from life in a race reverie. Now, she knew joy, tense as pain; and the consciousness never left her. It was there; beside, inside, above, all round, an enveloping atmosphere to everything she thought and said and did. She could not read; for while her eyes passed over the lines, that consciousness danced in flames between the lines. She tried to forget herself in her work—in the sorting of the littered shelves, in the mending for the ranch hands absent with her father in the Upper Pass; but It was there just the same, at her elbow; in behind the commonplace weaving rainbow mists, a shadowy deity of thought all pervasive as ether. Before, she had been as one standing in front of the up-lifted veil. Now, she knew she had passed in behind the veil, and could not if she would come out to the former place. Life symbols empty of meaning before, suddenly became allegorical of eternity—the bridal veil, the orange wreaths, the ring typical of the infinite, the vows of service, the angel of the drawn sword on the back trail. Yet she knew she had promised to keep him resolute, standing strong to his work, unflinching because of her.

It was, perhaps, typical of those ancestral traits that fear for him never once entered her thoughts. His work was on the firing line; and had she not once said that a life more or less did not matter? That was before his life had become her life. That is, fear for him did not enter her waking thoughts. It was different when she slept. Then the uncurbed thoughts hovered like the face in the picture of "the Sleeping Warrior." One night as she sat in the steamer chair, a cold wind came down from the Pass. The cook explained it was because of the snow slide that had filled up the canyon.

"Calamity," she called, "bring me out something to put round my shoulders; don't bring a shawl: I hate shawls!"

And Calamity, perfectly naturally, brought out Wayland's coat. Eleanor did not laugh; for she knew it was only since Calamity had stopped roving the Black Hills that she had exchanged male attire for the Indian woman's insignia of good conduct, a shawl. She waited till Calamity had pattered down to the basement. Then, she slipped into the coat with a queer little laugh that would have played havoc with Wayland's resolutions, and running her hands up the long dangling sleeve ends, lay back to a reverie that could hardly be called thought. It was consciousness, delirious foolish consciousness, possible only to youth; and the consciousness slipped into a drowse between sleeping and waking. It was—where was it? In the shadow realms of wonderful dream consciousness, his face, the face in "the Happy Warrior"; but not her face: instead was the evil fellow seen that night in the storm on the Rim Rocks clubbing his gun at Fordie's pinto pony through the mists; only he wasn't clubbing it at Fordie; he was aiming at Wayland; and there was the white horse. She wakened herself with her cry. That happened to be the night Wayland had camped in the Desert arroyos.

One afternoon, Sheriff Flood had called to know if her father had come back and what "he intended to do about it." Incidentally, he mentioned that the Forest Ranger had gone through the Pass that led to the Desert: there had been a snow slide; but he "guessed" the Ranger was "too cute a mountain man to be caught." That night, she shivered as she sat in the steamer chair; and she drew Wayland's coat around her; but it was not to delirious thoughts. When she fell asleep, she saw him lying on his face in the Desert; and she called him, and called him, and never could reach him, and awakened herself with her own calling. Wayland's professional friend, who was a psychologist, explained both incidents as auto suggestion from the coat awakened by the uneasiness of the unconscious fears; an explanation that explains by saying x is y.

At all events, she never again used the coat; and having nothing to conceal, didn't conceal it, which is the most damning evidence you can offer to a tortuous mind. She hung the coat in the apartment off the big living room. Then, the despatch came out about the two bodies found in the Desert. The same mail brought a letter from her father asking her to meet him at Smelter City; and there at the Ranch House gate stood Mr. Bat Brydges, handy man of the Valley, quizzing the ranch hands, quizzing the German cook, quizzing Calamity at the very foot of rustic slab steps that ran up from the basement.

"What is he after, Calamity?"

The half breed woman had dashed up the back stairs to Eleanor's room.

"He want t' know if Waylan—Ranga fellah—has ever stay here, dis house—he ever go back Cabin House—tepee on hill—night dey keel leetle boy?"

Even then, Eleanor did not realize the drift of the handy man's activities. She thought perhaps, he, too, might be anxious about Wayland.

"What did you tell him, Calamity?"

"I tell heem," Calamity dropped her soft patois to a guttural, "I tell heem, y' go Hell!"

"Ca-lam-ity?" rebuked Eleanor.

But what was it in the gentleman's jaunty air, in the smile of the sleepy tortoise-shell eyes, in the play of a self-conscious dimple round the fat double chin? Eleanor had not passed from her own apartment to the big living room before a repulsion that she could not define swept over her in a physical shudder; and Mr. Bat Brydges' report to the Senator of that interview had been fairly accurate. She did not know that she had not greeted him with the common courtesy due a caller, that she had stood looking past him to the open door, that she had left him standing first on one leg then on the other till Bat had been forced to terminate the interview; and she had not the faintest conception of what her own feeling of repulsion meant. He had scarcely gone before she wished she had asked him about those two bodies found in the Desert. As a matter of fact, she called up the "Smelter City Independent." The editor could give her no details. He asked her very particularly who was inquiring; and having nothing to conceal, she did not conceal it. He allayed her fears in almost the words that the Senator had used to lay Bat's suspicions, if the bodies had been those of Government men, the Ranger's Badge would have been found and the news flashed all over America.

"Oh, thank you, so much! You know the sheep lost on the Rim Rocks belonged to our ranch; and I wouldn't like to think that he had lost his life defending our interests."

Then something odd occurred with the telephone. She distinctly heard the voice at the other end telling somebody that, "Brydges was up there now." Then, the voice was assuring her, "They would let her know if they heard anything more."

Eleanor rang off with a sense of relief; and yet with a sickening feeling, of what? It was the same feeling she had had when Brydges came in with his jaunty air.

She was standing at the Ranch House gate waiting for the stage to Smelter City. Calamity had carried down the yellow suit case. The words came from Eleanor's lips before she thought; or she could never have asked the question:

"Calamity, who was it took your little baby away?"

The suit case fell from the Indian woman's hand.

"D' pries'," she said, "Father Moran."

Eleanor thought a moment, racking her memory in vain for that name in her convent life of Quebec. She was digging her toe in the dust of the road.

"Was that before or after you went to the Black Hills, Calamity?"

But Calamity had gone without a word; and the stage came whipping across the bridge from the Moyese Ranch; a double-tandem stage driven by a bronzed fellow with one arm, whose management of the reins absorbed Eleanor so that she forgot to notice the fat form hoisting her suit case to the roof. Then, she was inside; and the door had swung shut; and the fat form squeezed in next to the door; and she was lost in her own thoughts oblivious of her close packed neighbors till the stage stopped again with a jerk, and the sharp edge of a black cart-wheel-hat decorated with plumes enough for an undertaker's wagon cut a swath that threatened to slice off one of Eleanor's ears.

"I beg your pardon," said Eleanor.

"Oh, I guess tha' wuz my fault," and a mouthful of gold teeth above an ash colored V of neck and below the most wonderful straw stack of wheat colored hair simpered up at Eleanor from beneath the black cart-wheel-hat; simpered and ended up in a funny little tittering laugh. Eleanor took a quick glance at her neighbors, all men but the cart-wheel-hat to one side and a little young-old lady opposite with a hectic flush, and very protuberant hard mouth and beady little brown eyes. Eleanor noticed the brown eyes were accompanied by red hair, and she recognized the presiding genius of the English Colony.

"A beautiful morning for a ride down the Valley," remarked Eleanor absently.

"What? I beg your pardon? Did you speak to me?"

It wasn't the words. It was the hard tone of surprise.

"We're in luck to have such a morning to ride down," amplified Eleanor.

"Yes," said the lady with the hectic flush; and Eleanor felt the gold teeth simpering beneath the undertaker's plumes.

What was it? Eleanor took a second look at the two women, and recognized both, the Sheriff's wife and the English lady. They were arrayed gorgeously, her neighbor across in lavender silk, her elbow traveller in black with a profusion of cheap lace round the ash colored V of exposed skin: Eleanor wished the woman had powdered all the way down. She, herself, had come garbed for the dust of stage travel, a broad brimmed English sailor and a kakhi duster motoring coat. Was it because she was not garbed as the others that they rebuffed her friendly overtures, she wondered. At the next stop, she passed out to go up and ride on the driver's seat, manifestly an impossible feat for ladies in lavender and undertaker's plumes. A fat hand reached forward to shove the door open. It was Bat Brydges'. She nodded her thanks, and the handy man bowed with a sweep of his hat naming her aloud for the whole stage to hear. If a look could have blasted Mr. Bat Brydges, he would have been dissolved in gaseous matter from the expression that passed over the face under the sailor hat. She heard the hilarity break bounds inside as she mounted the driver's seat; and felt very much as you have felt when you have come out of the clatter of the orchestra pit where you have chanced to sit next to a musk-scented neighbor.

But she forgot the lavender grandee and the gold teeth and the undertaker's plumes, as she sat on the upper seat with the one-armed driver behind the double tandem grays. The sun was coming up over the Rim Rocks in a half fan of fire; and the light was on the Ridge; and all the silver cataracts tossing down the sheer wall shone wind-blown spray against the evergreens. The Valley widened as it dropped to the leap and fume and swirl of the foaming river; and the double tandem grays kept step with a proud chacking up of heads and bristling of arched necks and movement of thigh and shoulder muscles under satin skin like shuttles.

"You must be very proud of your beautiful horses," she said to the driver.

The driver 'lowed he was: that 'un dappled on the rump there, that 'un was foaled, let me see? year o' the rush to the Black Hills, with a squirt of chewing tobacco over the front wheel and a damn't, and another squirt and more damn't's; and before Eleanor realized the one-armed driver had asked her if she wouldn't like to learn to drive double tandems; and she had the reins in her hands; and the double tandem grays took the bit in their teeth to show what double tandem grays and ample oats could do.

"How-do," called the driver with a squirt of tobacco over the front wheel at a rancher loping across the trail. "How-do; y' are up early, y' son of a gun! What d' y' know?"

"Senator's goin' t' stand again this fall," called the man.

The driver emitted another damn't in true Western style just as innocently as an Easterner says "Oh, yes, indeed," or an Englishman says "My word." In fact Eleanor lost count of the damn't's.

"How ever do you manage it?" she asked shifting the reins.

"With my one arm, y' mean?" The stage driver laughed and aimed more chewing tobacco at that innocent front wheel; and the question drew out such a story of heroism in spite of the damn't's and the tobacco squids as made her proud of human clay, just as she had been ashamed of human something or other inside the stage with the lavender silk and the gold teeth and Bat's frozen tallow smile.

"Why, it was the year o' the Kootenay rush, ye mind? No, ye don't mind, ye weren't born then, were y'? Damn't," and a punctuation in tobacco. "Wall, 'twas in the early days 'fore we had steam hoists an' things." (Another punctuation mark—a good big one.) "We was usin' an old hand hoist. Guess the shaft was about hundred feet down—straight down, an' we was gettin' in the pay streak, bringin' up barrels o' rock showin' more color every load. Wall, them loads was hauled up to the dumps by a hand hoist y' onderstand, kind of winch, like y' turn a handle in old fashioned down East wells. Wall—" (Another punctuation mark and another dip for ink, so to speak, from the plug in the hand of the one-armed driver.) "boys were all down under. Say—'twas in the days when ol' Calamity was runnin' the hills. Know Calamity? She was a wild 'un in her day; an' they say MacDonald, the rich sheep man, has kind o' sorter given her a home these late years. Wall—I ain't the one t' say he shouldn't. Her morals weren't much better in them days than the crazy patch quilts ladies used to make down East when I was a boy; but she's settled down I hear; an' I ain't the one to say MacDonald don't deserve credit for what he's done. She saved many a poor miner's life from the Indians in them ol' days, saved 'em by a shave, carried 'em in on her shoulder to the Deadwood Hospital, or nussed 'em well on the spot, an' all the while, she wazn't no better than she ought t' be; wazn't there a woman in Scripture like that? Kind o' seems to me the church folks forgets that Rahub gurl! Wall—'twas about those days." (More showers of damn't's and tobacco on that front wheel.) "Boys was all under. Big load of rock was comin' up. I waz man at the hoist, man on the easy job that day. Wall—wad y' believe it, the damn thing bruk—bruk plum whoop an' started spinnin' round back side first with the load o' rock an' the boys under comin' up the ladder. I yelled for a kid we had workin' round to get me a jack wrench, a hand spike, Hell, any ol' thing to stop her kitin' that load o' rock down on the boys! Kid stood gopin' there an' sayin' 'What d'y' say?' Say,—damn't—an' that load o' rock goin' plumb down on the boys, heavy enough to smash 'em to pulp. There weren't nothin' handy near 'cept me, so I jumped this here arm that you find missin' right into the wheel! It stopped her all right, the load didn't fall on the boys; and they got up all right by the ladder; but—say, mebbe the cogs o' that damn wheel didn't do a thing to my arm. Say—the doctor didn't need to amputate it. That winch did him out o' his job."

"You mean," said Eleanor, slowing the grays to a reluctant walk down grade, while the driver clamped the front wheel brake with his foot, "you mean because there was no crowbar, or anything to stop the hoist flying backwards and killing the men under the load of rock, you mean because there was no crowbar, you jumped into the wheel, yourself?"

"Sure," said the man astonished at her question; and because Eleanor was a true Westerner and didn't mind the tobacco squids and the damn't's in the least (where they belonged) she gave that one-armed driver a look that would have made any man proud: only the one-armed driver didn't see it.

"They took up a purse an' wanted to give me a perscription—damn't, but I told 'em t' turn it in t' the Horspital. Any man w'd a' done same for a yellow dog. What d'y' want t' give a fellow a medal for not bein' stinkin' coward?"

Eleanor laughed. It was a happy silver laugh like the light on the Ridge cataracts. Somehow, the one-armed stage driver with his unconscious heroism and equally unconscious profanity gave her a sense of the big wholesome unconscious outdoor world, just as the lavender silks and undertaker's plumes and tallow smile inside smothered her with a drugged sense of heavy unwholesome musk. The one-time miner did not know it; but what Eleanor was saying to herself was—"So much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us." Then she thought of the Senator and his genial smile and his voice soft as a woman's, and his love of flowers. He, too, must have his vein of heroism, if one could only find it. She thought and thought as the tandem grays arched their necks at the sound of the tramway bells in the nearing city; thought and thought, vague wordless thoughts full of hope; vague womanish thoughts that women have thought since time began of finding that magic vein of heroism in the Man that is to transmute slag into gold, hog into human, and greed into generosity, and lust into love; thought and thought the gentle womanish hoping-against-hope thoughts that women have worn out their lives thinking and enslaved their bodies and pawned their souls. If only one could find that vein in the Senator, the battle would be won without the letting of blood and smashing of reputations; as if peace without victory were ever worth while since time began.

Then, the stage was rattling over the pressed brick pavement of Smelter City; and the tandem grays were pretending to shy at the electric cars; and the one-armed driver came near expectorating his entire internal anatomy out of sheer joy and pride in the arched necks and the frail driver with the black curls under the broad brimmed English sailor hat handling the reins. She had pulled off her heavy buckskin gloves; and she never knew how absurdly like matches her fingers looked to the big one-time miner beside her; nor how the exhilaration brought the tints of the painters' flower to her cheeks and the light of the Alpine pools to her eyes. Every man on the street turned and looked back, while the gold teeth inside blinked with self conscious certainty that they did it; and the lavender silks wore a peculiarly cynical smile. Loafers sat up and followed the stage with eager eyes far as they could see it and said, "By Gawd—whose gurl is that?" Oh, Mr. Bat Brydges intended every bar room buffer and loafer in the State should know, 'whose girl' that was before night. Everything was fair in love and war; and Bat considered he had run down a case of both. According to his lights, he had; but his lights were smutty and in need of trimming.

The stage dropped the gold teeth at a dentist's office, and the lavender silks at a manicure's 'studio,' I believe she called it; and Bat swung off while the coach was still moving; and Eleanor reluctantly gave up the reins at the transcontinental station.

"Thank you so much. I don't know when I have had as good a time," she said, giving the stage driver the sensation of a king in disguise.

And, of course, the transcontinental was late. When was it not late, when you were in a hurry?

"How late?"

"Four hours, last report," the operator answered.

She sent her suit case across to the hotel, and shopped, and loitered up and down the platform. It was not until afterwards she remembered one of the loafer brigade dangling legs from the station platform looking over his shoulder with an evil smile.

"Say—d' y' see the evening paper?" he had asked. "That's her;" and there was a laugh that somehow sent her back inside the station feeling vaguely uneasy.

"I think I'll telephone them up at the Ranch not to keep dinner waiting," she said to the operator.

He was reading the paper. He looked at her a moment before answering. If a human face could have been expressed in a punctuation mark, that agent's face should have been drawn in a big question mark, with the eyes put somewhere in the hook, and the neck growing longer and longer as he looked.

"Public telephone right across the road," he said.

In avoidance of the loafers' looks, she had walked unheeding straight into the Senator's office. Her first instinct was to withdraw. Then, she saw Brydges; and that curious sensation of repulsion obsessed her. She literally shot the handy man in full retreat with one glance. Then, the joy of the ride down, the heroism of the driver, came back. Perhaps it was the jar of roses, but the thought came what if she could find that vein of heroism in the Senator. When women risk their souls on that "if" and the souls of friends and children; is it vanity, I wonder, or is it the will o' the wisp light that lights erring feet to darkness?

She thought more highly of the Senator that he did not offer to shake hands, just as most of us would think more highly of Judas Iscariot if he had not kissed Christ. Being a Westerner, she had the Westerner's horror of a maverick sporting the brand of a thoroughbred. The Senator took off his glasses and sat tapping them above the U. S. Geological Survey map.

"I trust," he began, "that my man expressed to you my deep regret—my deep distress over—"

"Don't . . . please, don't," interrupted Eleanor, with a passionate break in her voice. "I know you are honest, Senator Moyese, honest to what you believe is right; and I don't want you to feel that you have to lie because I am a woman."

The Senator opened his mouth, took a breath, and shut it again.

She understood him well enough to know that if he had to toy with his glasses for a twelve month, he would wait for her to play down first. Yet she recognized the instinct of his manhood to rescue the confusion of her embarrassment when he put forward his hand casually and said—"See my roses, Miss Eleanor? They are a new variety of American Beauties. See, each petal has a white veining? Know how those roses are produced? Ages and ages of poor trash worthless common roses have been sacrificed to produce this perfect type."

"That's your theory of life, isn't it?" she asked, vaguely conscious that the dragon was disarming her anger.

"Isn't it nature's?" asked Moyese gently. "The fit survive because they are fit; the exceptional; the few; while the worthless go to waste?"

Before Eleanor realized, she had lost all consciousness of self and was pleading passionately leaning forward across the desk.

"Isn't Christ's theory better, Senator, to make all the unfit into fit? Isn't Christ's theory the theory of science? Science aims to make a whole field of perfect corn; not just one perfect cob. I know that; for I read it in your speech at the opening of the Agricultural College. If we keep on sacrificing the interests of the many to the interests of the few, aren't we working back to savagery, Senator?"

The Senator drew the finest of the roses from the jar. "It's a matter of taste, perhaps, Miss Eleanor; but I prefer this to a whole jarful of scrubs."

"Then you are not working for democracy. It's just as Mrs. Williams says, all you foreign multimillionaires are subverting our Nation by working for old fashioned despotism in disguise; sacrificing the many to the few."

"Oh, does Mrs. Williams say that?" asked Moyese reflectively, pushing back from the desk and clasping his hands round one knee. "That may be; republicanism doesn't necessarily mean letting the blockheads rule! It may mean giving equal opportunity for the fit men to come to the top and rule. Did you come in to talk over these things with me, Miss Eleanor? I must make a convert of you; it would win over Wayland and Williams and your father."

"No, I didn't. I came in here by mistake. The operator told me I'd find a public telephone across the road; and I wasn't noticing where I was going, and I came in here; but all the way down, I had been thinking of you, Senator Moyese. I kept thinking if you could only be made to see the New Day that is dawning, perhaps you would meet it half way. I rode in the driver's seat coming down; and he told me how he lost his arm; Senator, think of the hero in him?"

"And you thought there might be some of the hero in me, too?" Moyese laughed, the noiseless genial laugh creasing his chin and his white vest.

"While you laugh, you are letting your rose wither."

He handed the rose to her. "Yes, I know that fellow. I was in the Kootenay when he lost his arm, torn out all bloody right from the shoulder socket; had to pry the cogs up to get him out. They collected a purse of a thousand for him; but he wouldn't take a cent: handed it over to the hospital. Something in that fellow bigger than self kind of popped out and surprised himself."

She noticed him looking at the wall clock as he talked, but not being a business woman did not know what that meant.

"There's something bigger than self with us all, Senator; and we have to work for it."

"My dear child, do you think you need to tell an old stager that?" He was kicking the creases out of his trousers. This time, she could not mistake the signal, and felt her womanish idealism of mining for the hidden vein of heroism both childish and cheapening. She rose and placed the flower back on the desk.

"There's something bigger than you or me, my dear," he went on, "something for which every man worth his salt must work and fight, and which a woman does not understand."

"And that is?"

"His party," said Moyese.

"But Senator, there is something bigger than party, and if a man works against That, he'll injure his party."

"And that is?"

"His Nation," said the girl.

Moyese gave her a quick sharp look that was not unkindly. In fact, Eleanor could read that it was lonely, irritated, isolated.

"My dear," he said, coming round where she stood, "we differ on fundamentals. The whole nation to-day is divided on fundamentals. I'm no mealy mouth to curse plutocracy in order to please the mob. Plutocracy fills the workman's dinner pail and keeps the mills going and opens the mines and builds the railroads. Mobocracy, your grubby corn cob and trashy roses, that, what does it do? Mouthe and mouthe and try to pull down what is above it! It will have to be fought out! No? It will not be another French Revolution! Our bullets are ballots, nowadays; and the American people get exactly the form of Government which they want. If they want another form, it remains with them to fight for it. The umpire of all is fact—Miss Eleanor; and the facts of each side will have to be fought out; the better man will win; be sure of that! The facts that are facts not fictions will win, with ballots for bullets. For my part, I'll not dodge the issue; and I hope you'll not think me any the less of the hero for that?"

He had extended his hand as he talked, and to her surprise, she found herself taking it when with a wave of revulsion, the memory of the Ridge and the Rim Rocks came back.

"And government is a mere game of politics?" she said. "And politics resolves itself into brute force; and a murder more or less doesn't matter? Fordie, I suppose, would be classed as one of the scrubs sacrificed for this perfection of party?"

His hand dropped hers as if she had struck him.

"You did not know that you were overheard? 'See that no harm comes to the boy.' You did not mean Fordie to be murdered; but they were to crowd the sheep over 'to beat Hell,' 'the sheep were to go it blind'—my father's and Mr. Williams' property was to be sacrificed to build up the fortune of the cattle barons: they too, I suppose, are scrubs sacrificed among the many for the wealth of the one, who happens to be yourself. You broke the law; but because you did not order Fordie's murder, you think the blood guiltiness from that broken law does not rest upon you. You say it must all be fought out. You force the fight—"

He raised his hand to stop her. She remembered afterwards how ashy white and aged his face became. He walked to the door and opened it. She passed out. So that was to what her womanish mining for the vein of the ideal heroism had led. She had been politely shown out. It was as Wayland had said: there was no middle course; and it was also as the Senator had said, it must be fought out, and the bullets were to be ballots.

The Senator slammed his door shut and snapped the yale lock. Then he noticed the rose she had left, and tossed it in the spittoon.

"Thank God," he ejaculated fervently as he sank back in the swing chair, "Thank God women are not in politics. There is always something to be thankful for."

Then, an idea seemed to strike him. He rang the telephone with fury, and it didn't improve his temper to hear the saucy little central informing her elbow mate that "that ol' fellah wuz burnin' the wire up alive."

"Is that 'The Herald'? Brydges there? That you, Brydges? Listen, the night you were up on the Ridge, have you any perfect proof that Wayland didn't go down when you were asleep? Eh? You turned in at ten; and you found him still stamping about at twelve? Is that it? What? No? Don't be a damphool, cut that out. Of course, he didn't go down to the Ranch House. Cut that whole scandal thing out. There's nothing in it; but I think we can locate our missing knight errant. Understand? He's got to be smashed? What? You had printed the scandal story before you ever came in to me at all? Dictated it right in to the typo machines? In the 'Independent'? Oh, well, I'm glad it didn't go in the 'City Herald'? But it did go in; one evening paper?" Then the wrath of the strong man broke bounds. If he had been a stage villain the curtain drop would have fallen on a red faced gentleman pounding the desk, tearing at the telephone, hurling his chair about the office and generally, as the saucy little central remarked, "eating the wire up alive."

When Brydges' chief indulged in explosives that necessitated the repair of furniture the next day, the handy man always stood strictly and silently at attention. He knew the meaning of the stage thunder: it was the trick of the Indian medicine man, who fires guns to bring down rain. Bat knew that the fulminations were of a piece with all the other orders to do and not to do, an effort to get results while diverting the thunderbolt from the rain maker's head; for by one of those strange contingencies that Shakespeare defines as an opportunity of evil, when the handy man had gone to the 'Herald,' the news editor chanced to be out. Bat crossed to the 'Independent's' office. It lacked but half an hour of the time to lock up the press, and on condition that the story should be "a scoop," Bat was sent out to the composing room to dictate straight to the printer, standing over the linotype machine.

What was "the story" that he dictated? If you know where to look, you can see its prototype seven times a week. It was written jocularly; oh, it was exceedingly funny with all sorts of veiled references to naughtiness that couldn't be printed, pretty naughtiness, you understand, the kind you wink at, as was to be expected from a little beauty, a brunette, chic, etc. (I forget how many French words Bat tucked in: he had to look 'em up in the French-English appendix to Webster's Dictionary as the proof came off the galley), the well known daughter of the richest sheep rancher in the Valley. "The story" was headed: "Pretty Scandal in Peaceful Valley." Bat played "the human interest" feature for all it was worth; also the trick of suspended interest. It began by informing the public that a pretty scandal was disturbing a certain Valley not a hundred miles from the Rim Rocks, the essential details of which could not be given, would probably never be printed, for obvious reasons. Then followed a solid paragraph of nonsense verse inserted as prose; about a Ranger-man, Ranger-man, running away, 'Cause pa-pah, dear pa-pah comes home for to-day; But his Lincoln green coatie the Ranger forgot; And pa-pah, dear pa-pah came home raging hot; The Ranger-man, Ranger-man was still on the run, For pa-pah, dear pa-pah was out with a gun, He'd heaved up his war club and jangled his spear, And swore by my halidom what doth that coat here, etc., etc. Any school boy could have trolled off yards of the same drivelling cleverness; and Eleanor's innocent telephone call was, of course, lugged in.

There followed a garbled account of poor Calamity's errant days among the miners of the Black Hills. The account had no reference to her heroism in the early mining days, when she roved in man's attire over the hills to rescue wounded miners from the Sioux. It set forth only her blazoning sins; evidently on the assumption that carrion is preferable to meat. And then tucked ingeniously into this account was veiled mention of a rich sheepman, too well known to need naming, who was evidently making reparation for the errors of his youth by according to the mother as good treatment as the daughter under the same roof. Not a name was mentioned except Calamity's. I trust it is obvious to you that it was not libelous, because it was without malice. In fact, if you want to know the ear marks of a handy man's "story," look out for the smart gentlemen in veiled references without any facts which can be transfixed by either a pin or a handspike. When you find the innuendo without the handhold of fact, lick your lips if you are keen on carrion; for I promise that you have come on a morsel.

Bat did even better than the clever story dictated straight to the typo in the composing room. Always in the West, there flit in and out what we Westerners used to call "floaters," gentlemen (and ladies) who come in on a pullman car and go out on a pullman car and sometimes venture as far away from safety as a hotel rotunda, then syndicate their impressions of the West, in the East, and gravely correct twenty year Westerners with twenty minute impressions. I don't believe on the whole, as Westerners, we like them very much; but obviously, one doesn't kill a mosquito with a hammer.

Bat caught such a floater on the delayed transcontinental express. He was seeing the West through a car window. The East will not see the jocularity of that fact. The West will, though it may smile with a twist. Bat's floater was working for a Chicago boomster, who had issued a magazine to boom Western real estate, suburban lots seven miles from a flat car, which was all there was of the city. For exactly fifteen dollars (when the floater's impressions came out, I made exact inquiries as to what Bat had paid him; and it seemed to me that floater sold himself very cheap) the travelling impressionist took over Bat's story of "the Pretty Scandal in Peaceful Valley" and rehashed it with the name MacDonald given as Macdonel, and syndicated the scandal against the Forest Service throughout the East.