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OVER THE PASS

BY FREDERICK PALMER

AUTHOR OF THE VAGABOND, DANBURY RODD, ETC.

1912

CONTENTS

PART I—AN EASY TRAVELLER

CHAPTER

I YOUTH IN SPURS

II DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO

III JACK RIDES IN COMPANY

IV HE CARRIES THE MAIL

V A SMILE AND A SQUARE CHIN

VI OBLIVION IS NOT EASY

VII WHAT HAPPENED AT LANG'S

VIII ACCORDING TO CODE

IX THE DEVIL IS OUT

X MARY EXPLAINS

XI SEÑOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES

XII MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE

XIII A JOURNEY ON CRUTCHES

XIV "HOW FAST YOU SEW!"

XV WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS

XVI A CHANGE OF MIND

XVII THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND

XVIII ANOTHER STRANGER ARRIVES

XIX LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES

XX A PUZZLED AMBASSADOR

XXI "GOOD-BY, LITTLE RIVERS!"

XXII "LUCK, JACK, LUCK!"

PART II—HE FINDS HIMSELF

XXIII LABELLED AND SHIPPED

XXIV IN THE CITADEL OF THE MILLIONS

XXV "BUT WITH YOU, YES, SIR!"

XXVII BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY

XXVIII JACK GETS A RAISE

XXIX A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL

XXX WITH THE PHANTOMS

XXXI PRATHER WOULD NOT WAIT

XXXII A CRISIS IN THE WINGFIELD LIBRARY

XXXIII PRATHER SEES THE PORTRAIT

XXXIV "JOHN WINGFIELD, YOU—"

PART III—HE FINDS HIS PLACE IN LIFE

XXXV BACK TO LITTLE RIVERS

XXXVI AROUND THE WATER-HOLE

XXXVII THE END OF THE WEAVING

XXXVIII THEIR SIDE OF THE PASS

PART I

AN EASY TRAVELLER

I

YOUTH IN SPURS

Here time was as nothing; here sunset and sunrise were as incidents of an uncalendared, everlasting day; here chaotic grandeur was that of the earth's crust when it cooled after the last convulsive movement of genesis.

In all the region about the Galeria Pass the silence of the dry Arizona air seemed luminous and eternal. Whoever climbed to the crotch of that V, cut jagged against the sky for distances yet unreckoned by tourist folders, might have the reward of pitching the tents of his imagination at the gateway of the clouds.

Early on a certain afternoon he would have noted to the eastward a speck far out on a vast basin of sand which was enclosed by a rim of tumbling mountains. Continued observation at long range would have shown the speck to be moving almost imperceptibly, with what seemed the impertinence of infinitesimal life in that dead world; and, eventually, it would have taken the form of a man astride a pony.

The man was young, fantastically young if you were to judge by his garb, a flamboyant expression of the romantic cowboy style which might have served as a sensational exhibit in a shop-window. In place of the conventional blue wool shirt was one of dark blue silk. The chaparejos, or "chaps," were of the softest leather, with the fringe at the seams generously long; and the silver spurs at the boot-heels were chased in antique pattern and ridiculously large. Instead of the conventional handkerchief at the neck was a dark red string tie; while the straight-brimmed cowpuncher hat, out of keeping with the general effect of newness and laundered freshness, had that tint which only exposure to many dewfalls and many blazing mid-days will produce in light-colored felt.

There was vagrancy in the smile of his singularly sensitive mouth and vagrancy in the relaxed way that he rode. From the fondness with which his gaze swept the naked peaks they might have been cities en fête calling him to their festivities. If so, he was in no haste to let realization overtake anticipation. His reins hung loose. He hummed snatches of Spanish, French, and English songs. Their cosmopolitan freedom of variety was as out of keeping with the scene as their lilt, which had the tripping, self-carrying impetus of the sheer joy of living.

Lapsing into silence, his face went ruminative and then sad. With a sudden indrawing of breath he freed himself from his reverie, and bending over from his saddle patted a buckskin neck in affectionate tattoo. Tawny ears turned backward in appreciative fellowship, but without any break in a plodding dog-trot. Though the rider's aspect might say with the desert that time was nothing, the pony's expressed a logical purpose. Thus the speed of their machine-like progress was entirely regulated by the prospect of a measure of oats at the journey's end.

When they came to the foot-hills and the rider dismounted and led the way, with a following muzzle at times poking the small of his back, up the tortuous path, rounding pinnacles and skimming the edge of abysses, his leg muscles answered with the readiness of familiarity with climbing. At the top he saw why the pass had received its name of Galeria from the Spanish. A great isosceles of precipitous walls formed a long, natural gallery, which the heaving of the earth's crust had rent and time had eroded. It lay near the present boundary line of two civilizations: in the neutral zone of desert expanses, where the Saxon pioneer, with his lips closed on English s's, had paused in his progress southward; and the conquistadore, with tongue caressing Castilian vowels, had paused in his progress northward.

At the other side the traveller beheld a basin which was a thousand feet higher than the one behind him. It approached the pass at a gentler slope. It must be cooler than the other, its ozone a little rarer. A sea of quivering and singing light in the afternoon glow, it was lost in the horizon.

Not far from the foot-hills floated a patch of foliage, checkered by the roofs of the houses of an irrigation colony, hanging kitelike at the end of the silver thread of a river whose waters had set gardens abloom in sterile expanses. There seemed a refusal of intimacy with the one visible symbol of its relations with the outer world; for the railroad, with its lines of steel flashing across the gray levels, passed beyond the outer edge of the oasis.

"This beats any valley I've seen yet," and the traveller spoke with the confidence of one who is a connoisseur of Arizona valleys.

He paused for some time in hesitancy to take a farewell of the rapturous vista. A hundred feet lower and the refraction of the light would present it in different coloring and perspective. With his spell of visual intoxication ran the consciousness of being utterly alone. But the egoism of his isolation in the towering infinite did not endure; for the sound of voices, a man's and a woman's, broke on his ear.

The man's was strident, disagreeable, persistent. Its timbre was such as he had heard coming out of the doors of border saloons. The woman's was quiet and resisting, its quality of youth peculiarly emphasized by its restrained emotion.

Now the easy traveller took stock of his immediate surroundings, which had interested him only as a foothold and vantage-point for the panorama that he had been breathing in. Here, of all conceivable places, he was in danger of becoming eavesdropper to a conversation which was evidently very personal. Rounding the escarpment at his elbow he saw, on a shelf of decaying granite, two waiting ponies. One had a Mexican saddle of the cowboy type. The other had an Eastern side-saddle, which struck him as exotic in a land where women mostly ride astride. And what woman, whatever style of riding she chose, should care to come to this pass?

Judging by the direction from which the voices came, the speakers were hidden by still another turn in the defile. A few more steps brought eye as well as ear back to the living world with the sight of a girl seated on a bowlder. He could see nothing of her face except the cheek, which was brown, and the tip of a chin, which he guessed was oval, and her hair, which was dark under her hatbrim and shimmering with gold where it was kissed by the rays of the sun. An impression as swift as a flash of light could not exclude inevitable curiosity as to the full face; a curiosity emphasized by the poised erectness of her slender figure.

The man was bending over her in a familiar way. He was thirty, perhaps, in the prime of physical vigor, square-jawed, cocksure, a six-shooter slung at his hip. Though she was not giving way before him, her attitude, in its steadiness, reflected distress in a bowstrung tremulousness. Suddenly, at something he said which the easy traveller could not quite understand, she sprang up aflame, her hand flying back against the rock wall behind her for support. Then the man spoke so loud that he was distinctly audible.

"When you get mad like that you're prettier'n ever," he said.

It was a peculiar situation. It seemed incredible, melodramatic, unreal, in sight of the crawling freight train far out on the levels.

"Aren't you overplaying your part, sir?" the easy traveller asked.

The man's hand flew to his six-shooter, while the girl looked around in swift and eager impulse to the interrupting voice. Its owner, the color scheme of his attire emphasized by the glare of the low sun, expressed in his pose and the inquiring flicker of a smile purely the element of the casual. Far from making any movement toward his own six-shooter, he seemed oblivious of any such necessity. With the first glimpse of her face, when he saw the violet flame of her anger go ruddy with surprise and relief, then fluid and sparkling as a culminating change of emotion, he felt cheap for having asked himself the question—which now seemed so superficial—whether she were good-looking or not. She was, undoubtedly, yes, undoubtedly good-looking in a way of her own.

"What business is it of yours?" demanded the man, evidently under the impression that he was due to say something, while his fingers still rested on his holster.

"None at all, unless she says so," the deliverer answered. "Is it?" he asked her.

After her first glance at him she had lowered her lashes. Now she raised them, sending a direct message beside which her first glance had been dumb indifference. He was seeing into the depths of her eyes in the consciousness of a privilege rarely bestowed. They gave wing to a thousand inquiries. He had the thrill of an explorer who is about to enter on a voyage of discovery. Then the veil was drawn before his ship had even put out from port. It was a veil woven with fine threads of appreciative and conventional gratitude.

"It is!" she said decisively.

"I'll be going," said the persecutor, with a grimace that seemed mixed partly of inherent bravado and partly of shame, as his pulse slowed down to normal.

"As you please," answered that easy traveller. "I had no mind to exert any positive directions over your movements."

His politeness, his disinterestedness, and his evident disinclination to any kind of vehemence carried an implication more exasperating than an open challenge. They changed melodrama into comedy. They made his protagonist appear a negligible quantity.

"There's some things I don't do when women are around," the persecutor returned, grudgingly, and went for his horse; while oppressive silence prevailed. The easy traveller was not looking at the girl or she at him. He was regarding the other man idly, curiously, though not contemptuously as he mounted and started down the trail toward the valley, only to draw rein as he looked back over his shoulder with a glare which took the easy traveller in from head to foot.

"Huh! You near-silk dude!" he said chokingly, in his rancor which had grown with the few minutes he had had for self-communion.

"If you mean my shirt, it was sold to me for pure silk," the easy traveller returned, in half-diffident correction of the statement.

"We'll meet again!" came the more definite and articulate defiance.

"Perhaps. Who can tell? Arizona, though a large place, has so few people that it is humanly very small."

Now the other man rose in his stirrups, resting the weight of his body on the palm of the hand which was on the back of his saddle. He was rigid, his voice was shaking with very genuine though dramatic rage drawn to a fine point of determination.

"When we do meet, you better draw! I give you warning!" he called.

There was no sign that this threat had made the easy traveller tighten a single muscle. But a trace of scepticism had crept into his smile.

"Whew!" He drew the exclamation out into a whistle.

"Whistle—whistle while you can! You won't have many more chances! Draw, you tenderfoot! But it won't do any good—I'll get you!"

With this challenge the other settled back into the saddle and proceeded on his way.

"Whew!" The second whistle was anything but truculent and anything but apologetic. It had the unconscious and spontaneous quality of the delight of the collector who finds a new specimen in wild places.

From under her lashes the girl had been watching the easy traveller rather than her persecutor; first, studiously; then, in the confusion of embarrassment that left her speechless.

"Well, well," he concluded, "you must take not only your zoology, but your anthropology as you find it!"

His drollness, his dry contemplation of the specimen, and his absurdly gay and unpractical attire, formed a combination of elements suddenly grouped into an effect that touched her reflex nerves after the strain with the magic of humor. She could not help herself: she burst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; looked around puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, began laughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsical turn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no less potent in the concrete.

"Quite like the Middle Ages, isn't it?" he said.

"But Walter Scott ceased writing in the thirties!" she returned, quick to fall in with his cue.

"The swooning age outlasted him—lasted, indeed, into the era of hoop-skirts; but that, too, is gone."

"They do give medals," she added.

"For rescuing the drowning only; and they are a great nuisance to carry around in one's baggage. Please don't recommend me!"

Both laughed again softly, looking fairly at each other in understanding, twentieth-century fashion. She was not to play the classic damsel or he the classic rescuer. Yet the fact of a young man finding a young woman brutally annoyed on the roof of the world, five or six miles from a settlement—well, it was a fact. Over the bump of their self-introduction, free of the serious impression of her experience, she could think for him as well as for herself. This struck her with sudden alarm.

"I fear I have made you a dangerous enemy," she said. "Pete Leddy is the prize ruffian of our community of Little Rivers."

"I thought that this would be an interesting valley," he returned, in bland appreciation of her contribution of information about the habits of the specimen.

II

DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO

She faced a situation irritating and vitalizing, and inevitably, under its growing perplexity, her observation of his appearance and characteristics had been acute with feminine intuition, which is so frequently right, that we forget that it may not always be. She imagined him with a certain amiable aimlessness turning his pony to one side so as not to knock down a danger sign, while he rode straight over a precipice.

What would have happened if Leddy had really drawn? she asked herself. Probably her deliverer would have regarded the muzzle of Leddy's gun in studious vacancy before a bullet sent him to kingdom come. All speculation aside, her problem was how to rescue her rescuer. She felt almost motherly on his account, he was so blissfully oblivious to realities. And she felt, too, that under the circumstances, she ought to be formal.

"Now, Mister—" she began; and the Mister sounded odd and stilted in her ears in relation to him.

"Jack is my name," he said simply.

"Mine is Mary," she volunteered, giving him as much as he had given and no more. "Now, sir," she went on, in peremptory earnestness, "this is serious."

"It was," he answered. "At least, unpleasant."

"It is, now. Pete Leddy meant what he said when he said that he would draw."

"He ought to, from his repeated emphasis," answered Jack, in agreeable affirmation.

"He has six notches on his gun-handle—six men that he has killed!"
Mary went on.

"Whew!" said Jack. "And he isn't more than thirty! He seems a hard worker who keeps right on the job."

She pressed her lips together to control her amusement, before she asked categorically, with the precision of a school-mistress:

"Do you know how to shoot?"

He was surprised. He seemed to be wondering if she were not making sport of him.

"Why should I carry a six-shooter if I did not?" he asked.

This convinced her that his revolver was a part of his play cowboy costume. He had come out of the East thinking that desperado etiquette of the Bad Lands was opéra bouffe.

"Leddy is a dead shot. He will give you no chance!" she insisted.

"I should think not," Jack mused. "No, naturally not; otherwise there might have been no sixth notch. The third or the fourth, even the second object of his favor might have blasted his fair young career as a wood-carver. Has he set any limit to his ambition? Is he going to make it an even hundred and then retire?"

"I don't know!" she gasped.

"I must ask," he added, thoughtfully.

Was he out of his head? Certainly his eye was not insane. Its bluish-gray was twinkling enjoyably into hers.

"You exasperated him with that whistle. It was a deadly insult to his desperado pride. You are marked—don't you see, marked?" she persisted. "And I brought it on! I am responsible!"

He shook his head in a denial so unmoved by her appeal that she was sure he would send Job into an apoplectic frenzy.

"Pardon me, but you're contradicting your own statement. You just said it was the whistle," he corrected her. "It's the whistle that gives me Check Number Seven. You haven't the least bit of responsibility. The whistle gets it all, just as you said."

This was too much. Confuting her with her own words! Quibbling with his own danger in order to make her an accomplice of murder! She lost her temper completely. That fact alone could account for the audacity of her next remark.

"I wonder if you really know enough to come in out of the rain!" she stormed.

"That's the blessing of living in Arizona," he returned. "It is such a dry climate."

She caught herself laughing; and this only made her the more intense a second later, on a different tack. Now she would plead.

"Please—please promise me that you will not go to Little Rivers to-night. Promise that you will turn back over the pass!"

"You put me between the devil and the dragon. What you ask is impossible. I'll tell you why," he went on, confidentially. "You know this is the land of fossil dinosaurs."

"I had a brute on my hands," she thought; "now I have the Mad Hatter and the March Hare in collaboration!"

"There is a big dinosaur come to life on the other side," he proceeded. "I just got through the pass in time. I could feel his breath on my back—a hot, gun-powdery breath! It was awful, simply awful and horrible, too. And just as I had resigned myself to be his entrée, by great luck his big middle got wedged in the bottom of the V, and his scales scraped like the plates of a ship against a stone pier!"

To her disgust she was laughing again.

"If I went back now out of fear of Pete Leddy," he continued, "that dinosaur would know that I was such insignificant prey he would not even take the trouble to knock me down with a forepaw. He would swallow me alive and running! Think of that slimy slide down the red upholstery of his gullet, not to mention the misery of a total loss of my dignity and self-respect!"

He had spoken it all as if he believed it true. He made it seem almost true.

"I like nonsense as much as anybody," she began, "and I do not forget that you did me a great kindness."

"Which any stranger, any third person coming at the right moment might have done," he interrupted. "Sir Walter's age has passed."

"Yes, but Pete Leddy belongs still farther back. We may laugh at his ruffianly bravado, but no one may laugh at a forty-four calibre bullet! Think what you are going to make me pay for your kindness! I must pay with memory of the sound of a shot and the fall of a body there in the streets of Little Rivers—a nightmare for life! Oh, I beg of you, though it is fun for you to be killed, consider me! Don't go down into that valley! I beg of you, go back over the pass!"

There was no acting, no suspicion of a gesture. She stood quite still, while all the power of her eyes reflected the misery which she pictured for herself. The low pitch of her voice sounded its depths with that restraint which makes for the most poignant intensity. As she reached her climax he had come out of his languid pose. He was erect and rigid. She saw him as some person other than the one to whom she had begun her appeal. He was still smiling, but his smile was of a different sort. Instead of being the significant thing about him in expression of his casualness, it seemed the softening compensation for his stubbornness.

"I'd like to, but it is hardly in human nature for me to do that. I can't!" And he asked if he might bring up her pony.

"Yes," she consented.

She thought that the faint bow of courtesy with which he had accompanied the announcement of his decision he would have given, in common politeness, to anyone who pointed at the danger sign before he rode over the precipice.

"May I ride down with you, or shall I go ahead?" he inquired, after he had assisted her to mount.

"With me!" she answered, quickly. "You are safe while you are with me."

The decisive turn to her mobile lips and the faint wrinkles of a frown, coming and going in various heraldry, formed a vividly sentient and versatile expression of emotions while she watched his silhouette against the sky as he turned to get his own pony.

"Come, P.D.—come along!" he called.

In answer to his voice an equine face, peculiarly reflective of trail wisdom, bony and large, particularly over the eyes, slowly turned toward its master. P.D. was considering.

"Come along! The trail, P.D.!" And P.D. came, but with democratic
independence, taking his time to get into motion. "He is never fast,"
Jack explained, "but once he has the motor going, he keeps at it all day.
So I call him P.D. without the Q., as he is never quick."

"Pretty Damn, you mean!" she exclaimed, with a certain spontaneous pride of understanding. Then she flushed in confusion.

"Oh, thank you! It was so human of you to translate it out loud! It isn't profane. Look at him now. Don't you think it is a good name for him?" Jack asked, seriously.

"I do!"

She was laughing again, oblivious of the impending tragedy.

III

JACK RIDES IN COMPANY

Let not the Grundy woman raise an eyebrow of deprecation at the informal introduction of Jack and Mary, or we shall refute her with her own precepts, which make the steps to a throne the steps of the social pyramid. If she wishes a sponsor, we name an impeccable majesty of the very oldest dynasty of all, which is entirely without scandal. We remind her of the ancient rule that people who meet at court, vouched for by royal favor, need no introduction.

These two had met under the roof of the Eternal Painter. His palette is somewhere in the upper ether and his head in the interplanetary spaces. His heavy eyebrows twinkle with star-dust. Dodging occasional flying meteors, which harass him as flies harass a landscapist out of doors on a hot day, he is ever active, this mighty artist of the changing desert sky. So fickle his moods, so versatile his genius, so quick to creation his fancy, that he never knows what his next composition will be till the second that it is begun.

No earthly rival need be jealous of him. He will never clog the galleries. He always paints on the same canvas, scraping off one picture to make room for another. And you do not mind the loss of the old. You live for the new.

His Majesty has no artistic memory. He is as young as he was the day that he flung out his first tentative lunette after chaos. He is the patron saint of all pilgrims from the city's struggle, where they found no oases of rest. He melts "pasts" and family skeletons and hidden stories of any kind whatsoever into the blue as a background with the abandoned preoccupation of his own brushwork. His lieges, who seek oblivion in the desert, need not worry about the water that will never run over the millwheel again, or dwell in prophecy on floods to come. The omnipotence of the moment transports and soothes them.

"Time is nothing!" says the Eternal Painter. "If you feel important, remember that man's hectic bustling makes but worm-work on the planet. Live and breathe joyfully and magnificently! Do not strain your eyes over embroidery! Come to my open gallery! And how do you like the way I set those silver clouds a-tumbling? Do you know anything better under the dome of any church or capitol? Shall I bank them? Line them with purple? It is done! But no! Let us wipe it all out, change the tint of our background, and start afresh!"

With his eleven hundred million billionth sunset, or thereabouts, His Majesty held a man and a woman who had met on the roof of the world in thrall. He was lurid at the outset, dipping his camel's hair in at the round furnace door sinking toward the hills, whose red vortex shot tongues of flame into canyons and crevasses and drove out their lurking shadows with the fire of its inquisition. The foliage of Little Rivers became a grove of quivering leaves of gold, set on a vast beaten platter of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles and sovereigns are ephemeral dross.

"I love it all—all the desert!" said Mary Ewold.

"And I, too!"

"I have for six years."

"I for five."

The sentences had struck clearly as answering chimes, impersonally, in their preoccupied gazing.

"It gave me life!" he added.

"And it gave me life!"

Then they looked at each other in mutual surprise and understanding; each in wonder that the other had ever been anything but radiant of out-of-doors health. That fleck on the lungs which brought a doctor's orders had long ago been healed by the physician of the ozone they were breathing.

"And you remained," he said.

"And you, also," she answered.

Their own silence seemed to become a thing apart from the silence of the infinite. It was as if both recognized a common thought that even the Eternal Painter could not compel oblivion of the past to which they did not return; of the faith of cities to which they had been bred. But it is one of the Eternal Painter's rules that no one of his subjects should ask another of his subjects why he stays on the desert. Jack was the first to speak, and his voice returned to the casual key.

"Usually I watch the sunset while we make camp," he said. "I am very late to-night—late beyond all habit; and sunset and sunrise do make one a creature of habit out here. Firio and my little train will grow impatient waiting for me."

"You mean the Indian and the burro with the silver bells that came over the pass some time before you?"

Of course they belonged to him, she was thinking, even as she made the inquiry. This play cowboy, with his absurdly enormous silver spurs, would naturally put bells on his burro.

"Yes, I sent Firio with Wrath of God and Jag Ear on ahead and told him to wait at the foot of the descent. Wrath of God will worry—he is of a worrying nature. I must be going."

In view of the dinosaur nonsense she was already prepared for a variety of inventional talk from him. As they started down from the pass in single file, she leading, the sun sank behind the hills, leaving the Eternal Painter, unhindered by a furnace glare in the centre of the canvas, to paint with a thousand brushes in the radiant tints of the afterglow.

"You don't like that one, O art critics!" we hear him saying. "Well, here is another before you have adjusted your pince-nez, and I will brush it away before you have emitted your first Ah! I do not criticise. I paint—I paint for the love of it. I paint with the pigments of the firmament and the imagination of the universe."

The two did not talk of that sky which held their averted glances, while knowing hoofs that bore their weight kept the path. For how can you talk of the desert sky except in the banality of exclamations? It is lèse majesté to the Eternal Painter to attempt description.

At times she looked back and their eyes met in understanding, as true subjects of His Majesty, and then they looked skyward to see what changes the Master's witchery had wrought. In supreme intoxication of the senses, breathing that dry air which was like cool wine coming in long sips to the palate, they rode down the winding trail, till, after a surpassing outburst, the Eternal Painter dropped his brush for the night.

It was dusk. Shadows returned to the crevasses. Free of the magic of the sky, with the curtains of night drawing in, the mighty savagery of the bare mountains in their disdain of man and imagination reasserted itself. It dropped Mary Ewold from the azure to the reality of Pete Leddy. She was seeing, the smoking end of a revolver and a body lying in a pool of blood; and there, behind her, rode this smiling stranger, proceeding so genially and carelessly to the fate which she had provided for him.

With the last turn, which brought them level with the plain, they came upon an Indian, a baggage burro, and a riding-pony. The Indian sprang up, grinning: his welcome and doffing a Mexican steeple-hat.

"I must introduce you all around," Jack told Mary.

She observed in his manner something new!—a positive enthusiasm for his three retainers, which included a certain well-relished vanity in their loyalty and character.

"Firio has Sancho Panza beaten to a frazzle," Jack said. "Sancho was fat
and unresourceful; even stupid. Fancy him broiling a quail on a spit!
Fancy what a lot of trouble Firio could have saved Don Quixote de la
Mancha! Why, confound it, he would have spoiled the story!"

Firio was a solid grain, to take Jack's view, winnowed out of bushels of aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish blood in the primitive southern strain.

"And Firio rides Wrath of God," Jack continued, nodding to a pony with a low-hung head and pendant lip, whose lugubrious expression was exaggerated by a scar. "He looks it, don't you think?—always miserable, whether his nose is in the oats or we run out of water. He is our sad philosopher, who has just as dependable a gait as P.D. I have many theories about the psychology of his ego. Sometimes I explain it by a desire both to escape and to pursue unhappiness, which amounts to a solemn kind of perpetual motion. But he has a positively sweet nature. There is no more malice in his professional mournfulness than in the cheerful humor of Jag Ear."

"It is plain to see which is Jag Ear," she observed, "and how he earned his name."

Every time a burro gets into the corn, an Indian master cuts off a bit of long, furry ear as a lesson. Before Jag Ear passed into kindlier hands he had been clipped closer than a Boston terrier. Only a single upstanding fragment remained in token of a graded education which had availed him nothing.

"There's no curtailing Jag Ear's curiosity," said Jack. "To him, everything is worth trying. That is why he is a born traveller. He has been with me from Colorado to Chihuahua, on all my wanderings back and forth."

While he spoke, Firio mounted Wrath of God and, with Jag Ear's bells jingling, the supply division set out on the road. Jack and Mary followed, this time riding side by side, pony nose to pony nose, in an intimacy of association impossible in the narrow mountain trail. It was an intimacy signalized by silence. There was an end to the mighty transports of the heights; the wells of whimsicality had dried up. The weight of the silence seemed balancing on a brittle thread. All the afternoon's events aligned themselves in a colossal satire. In the half light Jack became a gaunt and lonely figure that ought to be confined in some Utopian kindergarten.

Mary could feel her temples beating with the fear of what was waiting for him in Little Rivers, now a dark mass on the levels, just dark, without color or any attraction except the mystery that goes with the shroud of night. She knew how he would laugh at her fears; for she guessed that he was unafraid of anything in the world which, however, was no protection from Pete Leddy's six-shooter.

"I—I have a right to know—won't you tell me how you are going to defend yourself against Pete Leddy?" she demanded, in a sudden outburst.

"I hadn't thought of that. Certainly, I shall leave it to Pete himself to open hostilities. I hadn't thought of it because I have been too busy thinking out how I was going to break a piece of news to Firio. I have been an awful coward about it, putting it off and putting it off. I had planned to do it on my birthday two weeks ago, and then he gave me these big silver spurs—spent a whole month's wages on them, think of that! I bought this cowboy regalia to go with them. You can't imagine how that pleased him. It certainly was great fun."

Mary could only shake her head hopelessly.

"Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of God and old P.D. here—we've sort of grown used to one another's foolishness. Now I can't put it off any longer, and I'd about as soon be murdered as tell him that I am going East in the morning."

"You mean you are going to leave here for good?" She mistrusted her own hearing. She was dazzled by this sudden burst of light through the clouds.

"Yes, by the first train. This is my last desert ride."

Why had he not said so at first? It would not only have saved her from worry, but from the humiliation of pleading with a stranger. Doubtless he had enjoyed teasing her. But no matter. The affair need not last much longer, now. She told herself that, if necessary, she would mount guard over him for the remaining twelve hours of his stay. Once he was aboard the Pullman he would be out of danger; her responsibility would be over and the whole affair would become a bizarre memory; an incident closed.

"Back to New York," he said, as one who enters a fog without a compass. "Back to fight pleosaurs, dinosaurs, and all kinds of monsters," he added, with a cheeriness which rang with the first false note she had heard from him. "I don't care," he concluded, and broke into a Spanish air, whose beat ran with the trickling hoof-beats of the ponies in the sand.

"That is it!" she thought. "That explains. He just does not care about anything."

Ahead, the lamps were beginning to twinkle in the little settlement which had sent such a contrast in citizenship as Mary Ewold and Pete Leddy out to the pass. They were approaching a single, isolated building, from the door of which came a spray of light and the sound of men's voices.

"That is Bill Lang's place," Mary explained. "He keeps a store, with a bar in the rear. He also has the post-office, thanks to his political influence, and this is where I have to stop for the mail when I return from the pass."

She had not spoken with any sense of a hint which it was inevitable he should accept.

"Let me get it for you;" and before she had time to protest, he had dismounted, drawing rein at the edge of the wooden steps.

She rode past where his pony was standing. When he entered the door, his tallness and lean ease of posture silhouetted in the light, she could look in on the group of idling male gossips.

"Don't!"

It was a half cry from her, hardly audible in an intensity which she knew was futile in the surge of her torturing self-incrimination. Why had she not thought that it would be here that Pete Leddy was bound to wait for anyone coming in by the trail from Galeria? The loungers suddenly dropped to the cover of boxes and barrels, as a flicker of steel shot upward, and behind the gleaming rim of a revolver muzzle held rigid was a brown hand and Leddy's hard, unyielding face.

What matter if the easy traveller could shoot? He was caught like a man coming out of an alley. He had no chance to draw in turn. In the click of a second-hand the thing would be over. Mary's eyes involuntarily closed, to avoid seeing the flash from the revolver. She listened for the report; for the fall of a body which should express the horror she had visualized for the hundredth time. A century seemed to pass and there was no sound except the beat of her heart, which ran in a cataract throb to her temples; no sound except that and what seemed to be soft, regular steps on the bare floor of the store.

"Coward!" she told herself, with the agony of her suspense breaking. "He saved you from inexpressible humiliation and you are afraid even to look!"

She opened her eyes, prepared for the worst. Had she gone out of her head? Could she no longer trust her own eyesight? What she saw was inconceivable. The startled faces of the loungers were rising from behind the boxes and barrels. Pete Leddy's gun had dropped to his side and his would-be victim had a hand on Pete's shoulder. Jack was talking apparently in a kindly and reasoning tone, but she could not make out his words.

One man alone evidently had not taken cover. It was Jim Galway, a rancher, who had been standing at the mail counter. To judge by his expression, what Jack was saying had his approval.

With a nod to Leddy and then a nod to the others, as if in amicable conclusion of the affair, Jack wheeled around to the counter, disclosing Leddy's face wry with insupportable chagrin. His revolver was still in his hand. In the swift impulse of one at bay who finds himself released, he brought it up. There was murder, murder from behind, in the catlike quickness of his movement; but Jim Galway was equally quick. He threw his whole weight toward Leddy in a catapult leap, as he grasped Leddy's wrist and bore it down. Jack faced about in alert readiness. Seeing that Galway had the situation pat, he put up his hand in a kind of questioning, puzzled remonstrance; but Mary noticed that he was very erect. He spoke and Galway spoke in answer. Evidently he was asking that Leddy be released. To this Galway consented at length, but without drawing back until he had seen Leddy's gun safe in the holster.

Then Leddy raised himself challengingly on tiptoes to Jack, who turned to Galway in the manner of one extending an invitation. On his part, Leddy turned to Ropey Smith, another of Little Rivers' ruffians. After this, Leddy went through the door at the rear; the loungers resumed their seats on the cracker barrels and gazed at one another with dropped jaws, while Bill Lang proceeded with his business as postmaster.

IV

HE CARRIES THE MAIL

When the suspense was over for Mary, the glare of the store lamp went dancing in grotesque waves, and abruptly, uncannily, fell away into the distant, swimming glow of a lantern suffused with fog. She swayed. Only the leg-rest kept her from slipping off the pony. Her first returning sense of her surroundings came with the sound of a voice, the same careless, pleasant voice which she had heard at Galeria asking Pete Leddy if he were not overplaying his part.

"You were right," said the voice. "It was the whistle that made him so angry."

Indistinctly she associated a slowly-shaping figure with the voice and realized that she had been away in the unknown for a second. Yes, it was all very well to talk about Sir Walter being out of fashion, but she had been near to fainting, and in none of the affectation of the hoop-skirt age, either. Had she done any foolish thing in expression of a weakness that she had never known before? Had she extended her hand for support? Had he caught her as she wobbled in the saddle? No. She was relieved to see that he was not near enough for that.

"By no stretch of ethics can you charge yourself with further responsibility or fears," he continued. "Pete and I understand each other perfectly, now."

But in his jocularity ran something which was plain, if unspoken. It was that he would put an end to a disagreeable subject. His first words to her had provided a bridge—and burned it—from the bank of the disagreeable to the bank of agreeable. Her own desire, with full mastery of her faculties coming swiftly, fell in with his. She wanted to blot out that horror and scotch a sudden uprising of curiosity as to the exact nature of the gamble in death through which he had passed. It was enough that he was alive.

The blurry figure became distinct, smiling with inquiry in a glance from her to the stack of papers, magazines, and pamphlets which crowded his circling arms. He seemed to have emptied the post-office. There had not been any Pete Leddy; there had been no display of six-shooters. He had gone in after the mail. Here he was ready to deliver it by the bushel, while he waited for orders. She had to laugh at his predicament as he lowered his chin to steady a book on the top of the pile.

"Oh, I meant to tell you that you were not to bring the second-class matter!" she told him. "We always send a servant with a basket for that. You see what comes of having a father who is not only omnivorous, but has a herbivorous capacity."

He saw that the book had a row of Italian stamps across the wrapper.
Unless that popular magazine stopped slipping, both the book and a heavy
German pamphlet would go. He took two hasty steps toward her, in mock
distress of appeal.

"I'll allow salvage if you act promptly!" he said.

She lifted the tottering apex just in time to prevent its fall.

"I'll take the book," she said. "Father has been waiting months for it. We can separate the letters and leave the rest in the store to be sent for."

"The railroad station is on the other side of the town, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes."

"I shall camp nearby, so it will be no trouble to leave my burden at your door as I pass."

"He does have the gift of oiling the wheels in either, big or little moments," she thought, as she realized how simple and considerate had been his course from the first. He was a stranger going on his way, stopping, however, to do her or any other traveller a favor en route.

"Firio, we're ready to hear Jag Ear's bells!" he called.

"Sí!" answered Firio.

All the while the Indian had kept in the shadow, away from the spray of light from the store lamp, unaware of the rapid drama that had passed among the boxes and barrels. He had observed nothing unusual in the young lady, whose outward manifestation of what she had, witnessed was the closing of her eyes.

It was out of the question that Jack should mount a horse when both arms were crowded with their burden. He walked beside Mary's stirrup leather in the attitude of that attendant on royalty who bears a crown on a cushion.

"Little Rivers is a new town, isn't it?" he asked.

"Yes, the Town Wonderful," she answered. "Father founded it."

She spoke with an affection which ran as deep into the soil as young roots after water. If on the pass she had seemed a part of the desert, of great, lonely distances and a far-flung carpet of dreams, here she seemed to belong to books and gardens.

"I wish I had time to look over the Town Wonderful in the morning, but my train goes very early, I believe."

After his years of aimless travelling, to which he had so readily confessed, he had tied himself to a definite hour on a railroad schedule as something commanding and inviolable. Such inconsistency did not surprise her. Had she not already learned to expect inconsistencies from him?

"Oh, it is all simple and primitive, but it means a lot to us," she said.

"What one's home and people mean to him is pretty well all of one's own human drama," he returned, seriously.

The peace of evening was in the air and the lights along the single street were a gentle and persistent protest of human life against the mighty stretch of the enveloping mantle of night. From the cottages of the ranchers came the sound of voices. The twang of a guitar quivering starward made medley with Jag Ear's bells.

Here, for a little distance, the trail, in its long reach on the desert, had taken on the dignity of the urban name of street. On either side, fronting the cottages, ran the slow waters of two irrigation ditches, gleaming where lamp-rays penetrated the darkness. The date of each rancher's settlement was fairly indicated by the size of the quick-growing umbrella and pepper-trees which had been planted for shade. Thus all the mass of foliage rose like a mound of gentle slope toward the centre of the town, where Jack saw vaguely the outlines of a rambling bungalow, more spacious if no more pretentious than its neighbors in its architecture. At a cement bridge over the ditch, leading to a broad veranda under the soft illumination of a big, wrought-iron lantern, Mary drew rein.

"This is home," she said; "and—and thank you!"

He could not see her face, which was in the shadow turned toward him, as he looked into the light of the lantern from the other side of her pony.

"And—thank you!"

It was as if she had been on the point of saying something else and could not get the form of any sentence except these two words. Was there anything further to say except "Thank you"? Anything but to repeat "Thank you"?

There he stood, this stranger so correctly introduced by the Eternal Painter, with his burden, waiting instructions in this moment of awkward diffidence. He looked at her and at the porch and at his bundle of mail in a quizzical appeal. Then she realized that, in a peculiar lapse of abstraction, she had forgotten about his encumberment.

Before she could speak there was a sonorous hail from the house; a hail in keeping with the generous bulk of its owner, who had come through the door. He was well past middle-age, with a thatch of gray hair half covering his high forehead. In one hand he held the book that he had been reading, and in the other a pair of big tortoise-shell glasses.

"Mary, you are late—and what have we here?"

He was beaming at Jack as he came across the bridge and he broke into hearty laughter as he viewed Jack's preoccupation with the second-class matter.

"At last! At last we have rural free delivery in Little Rivers! We are the coming town! And your uniform, sir"—Jasper Ewold took in the cowboy outfit with a sweeping glance which warmed with the picturesque effect—"it's a great improvement on the regulation; fit for free delivery in Little Rivers, where nobody studies to be unconventional in any vanity of mistaking that for originality, but nobody need be conventional."

He took some of the cargo in his own hands. With the hearty breeze of his personality he fairly blew Jack onto the porch, where magazines and pamphlets were dropped indiscriminately in a pile on a rattan settee.

"You certainly have enough reading matter," said Jack. "And I must be getting on to camp."

For he had no invitation to stay from Mary and the conventional fact that he had to recognize is that a postman's call is not a social call. As he turned to go he faced her coming across the bridge. An Indian servant, who seemed to have materialized out of the night, had taken charge of her pony.

"To camp! Never!" said Jasper Ewold. "Sir Knight, slip your lance in the ring of the castle walls—but having no lance and this being no castle, well, Sir Knight in chaparejos—that is to say, Sir Chaps—let me inform you"—here Jasper Ewold threw back his shoulders and tossed his mane of hair, his voice sinking to a serious basso profundo—"yes, inform you, sir, that there is one convention, a local rule, that no stranger crosses this threshold at dinner-time without staying to dinner." There was a resonance in his tone, a liveliness to his expression, that was infectious.

"But Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of God wait for me," Jack said, entering with real enjoyment into the grandiose style.

"High sounding company, sir! Let me see them!" demanded Jasper Ewold.

Jack pointed to his cavalcade waiting in the half shadows, where the lamp-rays grew thin. Wrath of God's bony face was pointed lugubriously toward the door; Jag Ear was wiggling his fragment of ear.

"And Moses on the mountain-top says that you stay!" declared
Jasper Ewold.

Jack looked at Mary. She had not spoken yet and he waited on her word.

"Please do!" she said. "Father wants someone to talk to."

"Yes, Sir Chaps, I shall talk; otherwise, why was man given a tongue in his head and ideas?"

Refusal was out of the question. Accordingly, Firio was sent on to make camp alone.

"Now, Sir Chaps, now, Mr.—" began Jasper Ewold, pausing blankly. "Why,
Mary, you have not given me his city directory name!"

"Mr.—" and Mary blushed. She could only pass the, blame back to the
Eternal Painter's oversight in their introduction.

"Jack Wingfield!" said Jack, on his own account.

"Jack Wingfield!" repeated Jasper Ewold, tasting the name.

A flicker of surprise followed by a flicker of drawn intensity ran over his features, and he studied Jack in a long glance, which he masked just in time to save it from being a stare. Jack was conscious of the scrutiny. He flushed slightly and waited for some word to explain it; but none came. Jasper Ewold's Olympian geniality returned in a spontaneous flood.

"Come inside, Jack Wingfield," he said. "Come inside, Sir Chaps—for that is how I shall call you."

The very drum-beat of hospitality was in his voice. It was a wonderful voice, deep and warm and musical; not to be forgotten.

V

A SMILE AND A SQUARE CHIN

When a man comes to the door book in hand and you have the testimony of the versatility and breadth of his reading in half a bushel of mail for him, you expect to find his surroundings in keeping. But in Jasper Ewold's living-room Jack found nothing of the kind.

Heavy, natural beams supported the ceiling. On the gray cement walls were four German photographs of famous marbles. The Venus de Milo looked across to the David of Michael Angelo; the Flying Victory across to Rodin's Thinker. In the centre was a massive Florentine table, its broad top bare except for a big ivory tusk paper-knife free from any mounting of silver. On the shelf underneath were portfolios of the reproductions of paintings.

An effect which at first was one of quiet spaciousness became impressive and compelling. Its simplicity was without any of the artificiality that sometimes accompanies an effort to escape over-ornamentation. No one could be in the room without thinking through his eyes and with his imagination. Wherever he sat he would look up to a masterpiece as the sole object of contemplation.

"This is my room. Here, Mary lets me have my way," said Jasper Ewold.
"And it is not expensive."

"The Japanese idea of concentration," said Jack.

Jasper Ewold, who had been watching the effect of the room on Jack, as he watched it on every new-comer, showed his surprise and pleasure that this young man in cowboy regalia understood some things besides camps and trails; and this very fact made him answer in the vigorous and enjoyed combatancy of the born controversialist.

"Japanese? No!" he declared. "The little men with their storks and vases have merely discovered to us in decoration a principle which was Greek in a more majestic world than theirs. It was the true instinct of the classic motherhood of our art before collectors mistook their residences for warehouses."

"And the books?" Jack asked, boyishly. "Where are they? Yes, what do you do with all the second-class matter?"

The question was bait to Jasper Ewold. It gave him an opportunity for discourse.

"When I read I want nothing but a paper-cutter close at hand—a good, big paper-cutter, whose own weight carries it through the leaves. And I want to be alone with that book. If I am too lazy to go to the library for another, then it is not worth reading. When I get head-achy with print and look up, I don't want to stare at the backs of more books. I want something to rest and fill the eye. I—"

"Father," Mary admonished him, "I fear this is going to be long. Why not continue after Mr. Wingfield has washed off the dust of travel and we are at table?"

"Mary is merely jealous. She wants to hurry you to the dining-room, which was designed to her taste," answered her father, with an affectation of grand indignation. "The dust of travel here is clean desert dust—but I admit that it is gritty. Come with me, Sir Chaps!"

He bade Jack precede him through a door diagonally opposite the one by which he had entered from the veranda. On the other side Jack found himself surrounded by walls of books, which formed a parallelogram around a great deal table littered with magazines and papers. Here, indeed, the printed word might riot as it pleased in the joyous variety and chaos of that truly omnivorous reader of herbivorous capacity. Out of the library Jack passed into Jasper Ewold's bedroom. It was small, with a soldier's cot of exaggerated size that must have been built for his amplitude of person, and it was bare of ornament except for an old ivory crucifix.

"There's a pitcher and basin, if you incline to a limited operation for outward convention," said Jasper Ewold; "and through that door you will find a shower, if you are for frank, unlimited submersion of the altogether."

"Have I time for the altogether?" Jack asked.

"When youth has not in this house, it marks a retrocession toward barbarism for Little Rivers which I refuse to contemplate. Take your shower, Sir Chaps, and"—a smile went weaving over the hills and valleys of Jasper Ewold's face—"and, mind, you take off those grand boots or they will get full of water! You will find me in the library when you are through;" and, shaking with subterranean enjoyment of his own joke, he closed the door.

Cool water from the bowels of the mountains fell on a figure as slender as that of the great Michael's David pictured in the living-room; a figure whose muscles ran rippling with leanness and suppleness, without the bunching over-development of the athlete. He bubbled in shivery delight with the first frigid sting of the downpour; he laughed in ecstasy as he pulled the valve wide open, inviting a Niagara.

While he was still glowing with the rough intimacy of the towel, he viewed the trappings thrown over the chair and his revolver holster on the bureau in a sense of detachment, as if in the surroundings of civilization some voice of civilization made him wish for flannels in which to dine. Then there came a rap at the door, and an Indian appeared with an envelope addressed in feminine handwriting. On the corner of the page within was a palm-tree—a crest to which anybody who dwelt on the desert might be entitled; and Jack read:

"DEAR MR. WINGFIELD:

"Please don't tell father about that horrible business on the pass. It will worry him unnecessarily and might interfere with my afternoon rides, which are everything to me. There is not the slightest danger in the future. After this I shall always go armed.

"Sincerely yours,

"MARY EWOLD."

The shower had put him in such lively humor that his answer was born in a flash from memory of her own catechising of him on Galeria.

"First, I must ask if you know how to shoot," he scribbled beneath her signature.

The Indian seemed hardly out of the doorway before he was back with a reply:

"I do, or I would not go armed," it said.

She had capped his satire with satire whose prick was, somehow, delicious. He regarded the sweep of her handwriting with a lingering interest, studying the swift nervous strokes before he sent the note back with still another postscript:

"Of course I had never meant to tell anybody," he wrote. "It is not a thing to think of in that way."

This, he thought, must be the end of the correspondence; but he was wrong. The peripatetic go-between reappeared, and under Jack's last communication was written, "Thank you!" He could hardly write "Welcome!" in return. It was strictly a case of nothing more to say by either duelist. In an impulse he slipped the sheet, with its palm symbolic of desert mystery and oasis luxuriance, into his pocket.

"Here I am in the midst of the shucks and biting into the meat of the kernel," said Jasper Ewold, as Jack entered the library to find him standing in the midst of wrappings which he had dropped on the floor; "yes, biting into very rich meat."

He held up the book which was evidently the one that had balanced uncertainly on the pile which Jack had brought from the post-office.

"Professor Giuccamini's researches! It is as interesting as a novel. But come! You are hungry!"

Book in hand, and without removing his tortoise-shell spectacles, he passed out into the garden at the rear. There a cloth was laid under a pavilion.

"In a country where it never rains," said the host, "where it is eternal spring, walls to a house are conventions on which to stack books and hang pictures. Mary has chosen nature for her decorative effect—cheaper, even, than mine. In the distance is Galeria; in the foreground, what was desert six years ago."

The overhead lamp deepened to purple the magenta of the bougainvillea vines running up the pillars of the pavilion; made the adjacent rows of peony blossoms a pure, radiant white; while beyond, in the shadows, was a broad path between rows of young palms.

Mary appeared around a hedge which hid the open-air kitchen. The girl of the gray riding-habit was transformed into a girl in white. Jack saw her as a domestic being. He guessed that she had seen that the table was set right; that she had had a look-in at the cooking; that the hands whose boast it was that they could shoot, had picked the jonquils in the slender bronze vase on the table.

"Father, there you are again, bringing a book to the dining-room against the rules," she warned him; "against all your preachments about reading at meals!"

"That's so, Mary," said Jasper Ewold, absently, regarding the book as if some wicked genius had placed it in his hand quite unbeknown to him. "But, Mary, it is Professor Giuccamini at last! Giuccamini that I have waited for so long! I beg your pardon, Sir Chaps! When I have somebody to talk to I stand doubly accused. Books at dinner! I descend into dotage!"

In disgust he started toward the house with the book. But in the very doorway he paused and, reopening the book, turned three or four pages with ravenous interest.

"Giuccamini and I agree!" he shouted. "He says there is no doubt that Burlamacchi and Pico were correct. Cosmo de' Medici did call Savonarola to his death-bed, and I am glad of it. I like good stories to turn out true! But here I have a listener—a live listener, and I ramble on about dead tyrants and martyrs. I apologize—I apologize!" and he disappeared in the library.

"Father does not let me leave books in the living-room, which is his. Why should he bring them to the dining-room, which is mine?" Mary explained.

"There must be law in every household," Jack agreed.

"Yes, somebody fresh to talk to, at, around, and through!" called Jasper Ewold, as he reappeared. "Yes, and over your head; otherwise I shall not be flattered by my own conversation."

"He glories in being an intellectual snob," Mary said. "Please pretend at times not to understand him."

"Thank you, Mary. You are the corrective that keeps my paternal superiority in balance," answered her father, with a comprehending wave of his hand indicating his sense of humor at the same time as playful insistence on his role as forensic master of the universe.

How he did talk! He was a mill to which all intellectual grist was welcome. Over its wheel the water ran now singing, again with the roar of a cataract. He changed theme with the relish of one who rambles at will, and the emotion of every opinion was written on the big expanse of his features and enforced with gestures. He talked of George Washington, of Andrea del Sarto, of melon-growing, trimming pepper-trees, the Divina Commedia, fighting rose-bugs, of Schopenhauer and of Florence—a great deal about Florence, a city that seemed to hang in his mind as a sort of Renaissance background for everything else, even for melon-growing.

"You are getting over my head!" Jack warned him at times, politely.

"That is the trouble," said Jasper Ewold. "Consider the hardship of being the one wise man in the world! I find it lonely, inconvenient, stupefying. Why, I can't even convince Jim Galway that I know more about dry farming than he!"

Jack listened raptly, his face glowing. Once, when he looked in his host's direction suddenly, after speaking to Mary, he found that he was the object of the same inquiring scrutiny that he had been on the porch. In lulls he caught the old man's face in repose. It had sadness, then, the sadness of wreckage; sadness against which he seemed to fence in his wordy feints and thrusts.

"Christian civilization began in the Tuscan valley," the philosopher proceeded, harking back to the book which had arrived by the evening's mail. "Florence was a devil—Florence was divine. They raised geniuses and devils and martyrs: the most cloud-topping geniuses, the worst devils, the most saintly martyrs. But better than being a drone in a Florence pension is all this"—with a wave of his hand to the garden and the stars—"which I owe to Mary and the little speck on her lungs which brought us here after—after we had found that we had not as much money as we thought we had and an old fellow who had been an idling student, mostly living abroad all his life, felt the cramp of the material facts of board-and-clothes money. It made Mary well. It made me know the fulness of wisdom of the bee and the ant, and it brought me back to the spirit of America—the spirit of youth and accomplishment. Instead of dreaming of past cities, I set out to make a city like a true American. Here we came to camp in our first travelled delight of desert spaces for her sake; and here we brought what was left of the fortune and started a settlement."

The spectator-philosopher attitude of audience to the world's stage passed. He became the builder and the rancher, enthusiastically dwelling on the growth of orchards and gardens in expert fondness. As Jack listened, the fragrance of flowers was in his nostrils and in intervals between Jasper Ewold's sentences he seemed to hear the rustle of borning leaf-fronds breaking the silence. But the narrative was not an idyll. Toil and patience had been the handmaidens of the fecundity of the soil. Prosperity had brought an entail of problems. Jasper Ewold mentioned them briefly, as if he would not ask a guest to share the shadows which they brought to his brow.

"The honey of our prosperity brings us something besides the bees. It brings those who would share the honey without work," said he. "It brings the Bill Lang hive and Pete Leddy."

At the mention of the name, Jack's and Mary's glances met.

"You have promised not to tell," hers was saying.

"I will not," his was answering.

But clearly he had grasped the fact that Little Rivers was getting out of its patron's hands, and every honest man in that community wanted to be rid of Pete Leddy.

"I should think your old friend, Cosmo de' Medici, would have found a way," Jack suggested.

"Cosmo is for talk," said Mary. "At heart father is a Quaker."

"Some are for lynching," said Jasper Ewold, thoughtfully. "Begin to promote order with disorder and where will you end?" he inquired, belligerently. "This is not the Middle Ages. This is the Little Rivers of peace."

Then, after a quotation from Cardinal Newman, which seemed pretty far-fetched to deal with desert ruffians, he was away again, setting out fruit trees and fighting the scale.

"And our Date Tree Wonderful!" he continued. "This year we get our first fruit, unless the book is wrong. You cannot realize what this first-born of promise means to Little Rivers. Under the magic of water it completes the cycle of desert fecundity, from Scotch oats and Irish potatoes to the Arab's bread. Bananas I do not include. Never where the banana grows has there been art or literature, a good priesthood, unimpassioned law-makers, honest bankers, or a noble knighthood. It is just a little too warm. Here we can build a civilization which neither roasts us in summer nor freezes us in winter."

There was a fluid magnetism in the rush of Jasper Ewold's junketing verbiage which carried the listener on the bosom of a pleasant stream. Jack was suddenly reminded that it must be very late and he had far overstayed the retiring hour of the desert, where the Eternal Painter commands early rising.

"Going—going so soon!" protested Jasper Ewold.

"So late!" Jack smiled back.

To prove that it was, he called attention to the fact, when they passed through the living-room to the veranda, that not a light remained in any ranch-house.

"I have not started my talk yet," said Jasper. "But next time you come I will really make a beginning—and you shall see the Date Tree Wonderful."

"I go by the morning train," Jack returned.

"So! so!" mused Jasper. "So! so!" he objected, but not gloomily. "I get a good listener only to lose him!"

But Jack was hardly conscious of the philosopher's words. In that interval he had still another glimpse of Mary's eyes without the veil and saw deeper than he had before; saw vast solitudes, inviting yet offering no invitation, where bright streams seemed to flash and sing under the sunlight and then disappear in a desert. That was her farewell to the easy traveller who had stopped to do her a favor on the trail. And he seemed to ask nothing more in that spellbound second; nor did he after the veil had fallen, and he acquitted himself of some spoken form of thanks for an evening of happiness.

"A pleasant journey!" Mary said.

"Luck, Sir Chaps, luck!" called Jasper Ewold.

Jack's easy stride, as he passed out into the night, confirmed the last glimpse of his smiling, whimsical "I don't care" attitude, which never minded the danger sign on the precipice's edge.

"He does not really want to go back to New York," Mary remarked, and was surprised to find that she had spoken her thought aloud.

"I hardly agree with that opinion," said her father absently, his thoughts far afield from the fetter of his words. "But of one thing I am sure, John Wingfield! A smile and a square chin!"

VI

OBLIVION IS NOT EASY

"A smile and a square chin!" Mary repeated, as they went back into the living-room.

"Yes, hasn't he both, this Wingfield?" asked her father.

"This Wingfield"—on the finish of the sentence there was a halting, appreciable accent. He moved toward the table with the listlessness of some enormous automaton of a man to whom every step of existence was a step in a treadmill. There was a heavy sadness about his features which rarely came, and always startled her when it did come with a fear that they had so set in gloom that they would never change. He raised his hand to the wick screw of the lamp, waiting for her to pass through the room before turning off the flame which bathed him in its rays, giving him the effect of a Rodinesque incarnation of memory.

Any melancholy that beset him was her own enemy, to be fought and cajoled. Mary slipped to his side, dropping her head on his shoulder and patting his cheek. But this magic which had so frequently rallied him brought only a transient, hazy smile and in its company what seemed a random thought.

"And you and he came down the pass together? Yes, yes!" he said. His tone had the vagueness of one drawing in from the sea a net that seemed to have no end.

Had Jack Wingfield been more than a symbol? Had he brought something more than an expression of culture, manner, and ease of a past which nothing could dim? Had he suggested some personal relation to that past which her father preferred to keep unexplained? These questions crowded into her mind speculatively. They were seeking a form of conveyance when she realized that she had been adrift with imaginings. He was getting older. She must expect his preoccupation and his absent-mindedness to become more exacting.

"Yes, yes!" His voice had risen to its customary sonority; his eyes were twinkling; all the hard lines had become benignant wrinkles of Olympian charm. "Yes, yes! You and this funny tourist! What a desert it is! I wonder—now, I wonder if he will go aboard the Pullman in that stage costume. But come, come, Mary! It's bedtime for all pastoral workers and subjects of the Eternal Painter. Off you go, or we shall be playing blind-man's-buff in the dark!" He was chuckling as he turned down the wick. "His enormous spurs, and Jag Ear and Wrath of God!" he said.

Her fancy ran dancing rejoicingly with his mood.

"Don't forget the name of his pony!" she called merrily from the stairs.
"It's P.D."

"P.D.!" said her father, with the disappointment of one tempted by a good morsel which he finds tasteless. "There he seems to have descended to alphabetic commonplace. No imagery in that!"

"He is a slow, reliable pony," put in Mary, "without the Q."

"Pretty Damn, without the Quick! Oh, I know slang!"

Jasper Ewold burst into laughter. It was still echoing through the house when she entered her room. As it died away it seemed to sound hollow and veiled, when the texture of sunny, transparent solidity in his laugh was its most pronounced characteristic.

Probably this, too, was imagination, Mary thought. It had been an overwrought day, whose events had made inconsiderable things supreme over logic. She always slept well; she would sleep easily to-night, because it was so late. But she found herself staring blankly into the darkness and her thoughts ranging in a shuttle play of incoherency from the moment that Leddy had approached her on the pass till a stranger, whom she never expected to see again, walked away into the night. What folly! What folly to keep awake over an incident of desert life! But was it folly? What sublime egoism of isolated provincialism to imagine that it had been anything but a great event! Naturally, quiet, desert nerves must still be quivering after the strain. Inevitably, they would not calm instantly, particularly as she had taken coffee for supper. She was wroth about the coffee, though she had taken less than usual that evening.

She heard the clock strike one; she heard it strike two, and three. And he, on his part—this Sir Chaps who had come so abruptly into her life and evidently set old passions afire in her father's mind—of course he was sleeping! That was the exasperating phlegm of him. He would sleep on horseback, riding toward the edge of a precipice!

"A smile and a square chin—and dreamy vagueness," she kept repeating.

The details of the scene in the store recurred with a vividness which counting a flock of sheep as they went over a stile or any other trick for outwitting insomnia could not drive from her mind. Then Pete Leddy's final look of defiance and Jack Wingfield's attitude in answer rose out of the pantomime in merciless clearness.

All the indecisiveness of the interchange of guesses and rehearsed impressions was gone. She got a message, abruptly and convincingly. This incident of the pass was not closed. An ultimatum had been exchanged. Death lay between these two men. Jack had accepted the issue.

The clock struck four and five. Before it struck again daylight would have come; and before night came again, what? To lie still in the torment of this new experience of wakefulness with its peculiar, half-recognized forebodings, had become unbearable. She rose and dressed and went down stairs softly, candle in hand, aware only that every agitated fibre of her being was whipping her to action which should give some muscular relief from the strain of her overwrought faculties. She would go into the garden and walk there, waiting for sunrise. But at the edge of the path she was arrested by a shadow coming from the servants' sleeping-quarters. It was Ignacio, the little Indian who cared for her horse, ran errands, and fought garden bugs for her—Ignacio, the note-bearer.

"Señorita! señorita!" he exclaimed, and his voice, vibrant with something stronger than surprise, had a certain knowing quality, as if he understood more than he dared to utter. "Señorita, you rise early!"

"Sometimes one likes to look at the morning stars," she remarked.

But there were no stars; only a pale moon, as Ignacio could see for himself.

"Señorita, that young man who was here and Pete Leddy—do you know, señorita?"

"The young man who came down from the pass with me, you mean?" she asked, inwardly shamed at her simulation of casual curiosity.

"Yes, he and Leddy—bad blood between them'" said Ignacio. "You no know, señorita? They fight at daybreak."

The pantomime in the store, Jack's form disappearing with its easy step into the night, analyzed in the light of this news became the natural climax of a series of events all under the spell of fatality.

"Come, Ignacio!" she said. "We must hurry!" And she started around the house toward the street.

VII

WHAT HAPPENED AT LANG'S

While Jack had been playing the pioneer of rural free delivery in Little Rivers, Pete Leddy, in the rear of Bill Lang's store, was refusing all stimulants, but indulging in an unusually large cud of tobacco.

"Liquor ain't no help in drawing a bead," he explained to the loungers who followed him through the door after Jack had gone.

If Pete did not want to drink it was not discreet to press him, considering the mood he was in. The others took liberal doses, which seemed only to heighten the detail of the drama which they had witnessed. To Mary it had been all pantomime; to them it was dynamic with language. It was something beyond any previous contemplation of possibility in their cosmos.

The store had been enjoying an average evening. All present were expressing their undaunted faith in the invincibility of James J. Jeffries, when a smiling stranger appeared in the doorway. He was dressed like a regular cowboy dude. His like might have appeared on the stage, but had never been known to get off a Pullman in Arizona. And the instant he appeared, up flashed Pete Leddy's revolver.

The gang had often discussed when and how Pete would get his seventh victim, and here they were about to be witnesses of the deed. Instinct taught them the proper conduct on such occasions. The tenderfoot was as good as dead; but, being a tenderfoot and naturally a bad shot and prone to excitement, he might draw and fire wild. They ducked with the avidity of woodchucks into their holes—all except Jim Galway, who remained leaning against the counter.

"I gin ye warning!" they heard Pete say, and closed their eyes involuntarily—all except Jim Galway—with their last impression the tenderfoot's ingenuous smile and the gleam on Pete's gun-barrel. They waited for the report, as Mary had, and then they heard steps and looked up to see that dude tenderfoot, still smiling, going straight toward the muzzle pointed at his head, his hands at his side in no attempt to draw. The thing was incredible and supernatural.

"Pete is letting him come close first," they thought.

But there, unbelievable as it was, Pete was lowering his revolver and the tenderfoot's hand was on his shoulder in a friendly, explanatory position. Pete seemed in a trance, without will-power over his trigger finger, and Pete was the last man in the world that you would expect to lose his nerve. Jim Galway being the one calm observer, whose vision had not been disturbed by precipitancy in taking cover, let us have his version.

"He just walked over to Pete—that's all I can say—walked over to him, simple and calm, like he was going to ask for a match. All I could think of and see was his smile right into that muzzle and the glint in his eyes, which were looking into Pete's. Someway you couldn't shoot into that smile and that glint, which was sort of saying, 'Go ahead! I'm leaving it to you and I don't care!'—just as if a flash of powder was all the same to him as a flash of lightning."

The desert had given Jack life; and it would seem as if what the desert had given, it might take away. He was not going to humble himself by throwing up his arms or standing still for execution. He was on his way into the store and he continued on his way. If something stopped him, then he would not have to take the train East in the morning.

"Now if you want to kill me, Pete Leddy," the astonished group heard this stranger say, "why, I'm not going to deny you the chance. But I don't want you to do it just out of impulse, and I know that is not your own reasoned way. You certainly would want sporting rules to prevail and that I should have an equal chance of killing you. So we will go outside, stand off any number of paces you say, let our gun-barrels hang down even with the seams of our trousers, and wait for somebody to say 'one, two, three—fire!'"

Not once had that peculiar smile faded from Jack's lips or the glint in his eyes diverted from its probe of Leddy's eyes. His voice went well with the smile and with an undercurrent of high voltage which seemed the audible corollary of the glint. Every man knew that, despite his gay adornment, he was not bluffing. He had made his proposition in deadly earnest and was ready to carry it out. Pete Leddy shuffled and bit the ends of his moustache, and his face was drawn and white and his shoulder burning under the easy grip of Jack's hand. From the bore of the unremitting glance that had confounded him he shifted his gaze sheepishly.

"Oh, h—l!" he said, and the tone, in its disgust and its attempt to laugh off the incident, gave the simplicity of an exclamation from his limited vocabulary its character. "Oh, h—l! I was just trying you out as a tenderfoot—a little joke!"

At this, all the crowd laughed in an explosive breath of relief. The inflection of the laugh made Pete go red and look challengingly from face to face, with the result that all became piously sober.

"Then it is all right? I meant in no way to wound your feelings or even your susceptibilities," said Jack; and, accepting the incident as closed, he turned to the counter and asked for the Ewold mail.

Free from that smile and the glint of the eyes, Pete came to in a torrent of reaction. He, with six notches on his gun-handle, had been trifled with by a grinning tenderfoot. Rage mounted red to his brow. No man who had humiliated him should live. He would have shot Jack in the back if it had not been for Jim Galway, lean as a lath, lantern-jawed, with deep-set blue eyes, his bearing different from that of the other loungers. Jim had not joined in the laugh over Pete's explanation; he had remained impassive through the whole scene; but the readiness with which he knocked Leddy's revolver down showed that this immovability had let nothing escape his quiet observation.

When Jack looked around and understood what had passed, his face was without the smile. It was set and his body had stiffened free of the counter.

"I'll take the gun away from him. It's high time somebody did," said Galway.

"I think you had better, if that is the only way that he knows how to fight," said Jack. "I have wondered how he got the six. Presumably he murdered them."

"To their faces, as I'll get you!" Leddy answered. "I'll play your way now, one, two, three—fire!"

Galway, convinced that this stranger did not know how to shoot, turned to Jack:

"It's not worth your being a target for a dead shot," he said.

"In the morning, yes," answered Jack; and he was smiling again in a way that swept the audience with uncanniness. "But to-night I am engaged. Make it early to-morrow, as I have to take the first train East."

"Well, are you going to let me go?" Leddy asked Jim, while he looked in appeal to the loungers, who were his men.

"Yes, by all means," Jack told Galway. "And as I shall want a man with me, may I rely on you? Four of us will be enough, with a fifth to give the word."

"Ropey Smith can go with me," said Leddy.

It scarcely occurred to them to give the name of duel to this meeting, which Jack held was the only fair way when one felt that he must have satisfaction from an adversary in the form of death. An arroyo a mile from town was chosen and the time dawn, for a meeting which was to reverse the ethics of that boasted fair-play in which the man who first gets a bead is the hero.

"It seems a mediaeval day for me," Jack said, when the details were concluded. "Good-night, gentlemen," he added, after Bill Lang, with fingers that bungled from agitation, had filled his arms with second-class matter.

Jim Galway resumed his position, leaning against the counter watchfully as the gang filed out to the rear to wet up, and in his right hand, which was in his pocket, nestled an automatic pistol.

"I'd shot Pete Leddy dead—'twas the first real fair chance within the law—so help me, God! I would," he thought, "if there had been time to spare, and save that queer tenderfoot's life. And me a second in a regular duel! Well, I'll be—but it ain't no regular duel. One of 'em is going to drop—that is, the tenderfoot is. I don't just know how to line him up. He beats me!"

VIII

ACCORDING TO CODE

It was the supreme moment of night before dawn. A violet mist shrouded everything. The clamminess of the dew touched Mary's forehead and her hand brushed the moisture-laden hedge as she left the Ewold yard. She remembered that Jack had said that he would camp near the station, so there was no doubt in which direction she should go. Hastening along the silent street, it was easy for her to imagine that she and Ignacio were the only sentient beings, abroad in a world that had stopped breathing.

Softly, impalpably, with both the graciousness of a host and the determinedness of an intruder who will not be gainsaid, the first rays of morning light filtered into the mist. The violet went pink. From pale pink it turned to rose-pink; to the light of life which was as yet as still as the light of the moon. The occasional giant cactus in the open beyond the village outskirts ceased to be spectral.

For the first time Mary Ewold was in the presence of the wonder of daybreak on the desert without watching for the harbinger of gold in the V of the pass, with its revelation of a dome of blue where unfathomable space had been. For the first time daybreak interested her only in broadening and defining her vision of her immediate surroundings.

When the permeating softness suddenly yielded to full transparency, spreading from the fanfare of the rising sun come bolt above the range, and the mist rose, she left the road at sight of two ponies and a burro in a group, their heads together in drooping fellowship. She knew them at once for P.D., Wrath of God, and Jag Ear. Nearby rose a thin spiral of smoke and back of it was a huddled figure, Firio, preparing the morning meal. Animals and servant were as motionless as the cactus. Evidently they did not hear her footsteps. They formed a picture of nightly oblivion, unconscious that day had come. Firio's face was hidden by his big Mexican hat; he did not look up even when she was near. She noted the two blanket-rolls where the two comrades of the trail had slept. She saw that both were empty and knew that Jack had already gone.

"Where is Mr. Wingfield?" she demanded, breathlessly.

Firio was not startled. To be startled was hardly in his Indian nature. The hat tipped upward and under the brim-edge his black eyes gleamed, as the sandy soil all around him gleamed in the dew. He shrugged his shoulders when he recognized the lady speaking as the one who had delayed him at the foot of the pass the previous afternoon. Thanks to her, he had been left alone without his master the whole evening.

"He go to stretch his legs," answered Firio.

Apparently, Sir Chaps had been disinclined to disturb the routine of camp by telling Firio anything about the duel.

"Where did he go? In which direction?" Mary persisted.

Firio moved the coffee-pot closer to the fire. This seemed to require the concentration of all his faculties, including that of speech. He was a fit servant for one who took duels so casually.

"Where? Where?" she repeated.

"Where? Have you no tongue?" snapped Ignacio.

Firio gazed all around as if looking for Jack; then nodded in the direction of rising ground which broke at the edge of a depression about fifty yards away. Her impatience had made the delay of a minute seem hours, while the brilliance of the light had now become that of broad day. She forgot all constraint. She ran, and as she ran she listened for a shot as if it were something inevitable, past due.

And then she uttered a muffled cry of relief, as the scene in a depression which had been the bed of an ancient river flashed before her with theatric completeness. In the bottom of it were five men, two moving and three stationary. Jim Galway and Ropey Smith were walking side by side, keeping a measured step as they paced off a certain distance, while Bill Lang and Pete Leddy and Jack stood by. Leddy and Lang were watching the process inflexibly. Jack was in the costume which had flushed her curiosity so vividly on the pass and he appeared the same amused, disinterested and wondering traveller who had then come upon strange doings.

She stopped, her temples throbbing giddily, her breaths coming in gasps; stopped to gain mastery of herself before she decided what she would do next. On the opposite bank of the arroyo was a line of heads, like those of infantry above a parapet, and she comprehended that, in the same way that news of a cock-fight travels, the gallery gods of Little Rivers had received a tip of a sporting event so phenomenal that it changed the sluggards among them into early risers. They were making themselves comfortable lying flat on their stomachs and exposing as little as possible of their precious bodies to the danger of that tenderfoot firing wild.

It was a great show, of which they would miss no detail; and all had their interest whetted by some possible new complication of the plot when they saw the tall, familiar figure of Jasper Ewold's daughter standing against the skyline. She felt the greedy inquiry of their eyes; she guessed their thoughts.

This new element of the situation swept her with a realization of the punishment she must suffer for that chance meeting on Galeria and then with resentful anger, which transformed Jack Wingfield's indifference to callous bravado.

Must she face that battery of leers from the town ruffians while she implored a stranger, who had been nothing to her yesterday and would be nothing tomorrow, to run away from a combat which was a creation of his own stubbornness? She was in revolt against herself, against him, and against the whole miserable business. If she proceeded, public opinion would involve her in a sentimental interest in a stranger. She must live with the story forever, while to an idle traveller it was only an adventure at a way-station on his journey.

She had but to withdraw in feigned surprise from the sight of a scene which she had come upon unawares and she would be free of any association with it. For all Little Rivers knew that she was given to random walks and rides. No one would be surprised that she was abroad at this early hour. It would be ascribed to the nonsense which afflicted the Ewolds, father and daughter, about sunrises.

Yes, she had been in a nightmare. With the light of day she was seeing clearly. Had she not warned him about Leddy? Had not she done her part? Should she submit herself to fruitless humiliation? Go to him in as much distress as if his existence were her care? If he would not listen to her yesterday, why should she expect him to listen to her now?

She would return to her garden. Its picture of content and isolation called her away from the stare of the faces on the other bank. She turned on her heel abruptly, took two or three spasmodic steps and stopped suddenly, confronted with another picture—one of imagination—that of Jack Wingfield lying dead. The recollection of a voice, the voice that had stopped the approach of Leddy's passion-inflamed face to her own on the pass, sounded in her ears.

She faced around, drawn by something that will and reason could not overcome, to see that Jim Galway and Ropey Smith had finished their task of pacing off the distance. The two combatants were starting for their stations, their long shadows in the slant of the morning sunlight travelling over the sand like pursuing spectres. Leddy went with the quick, firm step which bespoke the keenness of his desire; Jack more slowly, at a natural gait. His station was so near her that she could reach him with a dozen steps. And he was whistling—the only sound in a silence which seemed to stretch as far as the desert—whistling gaily in apparent unconsciousness that the whole affair was anything but play. The effect of this was benumbing. It made her muscles go limp. She sank down for very want of strength to keep erect; and Ignacio, hardly observed, keeping close to her dropped at her side.

"Ignacio, tell the young man, the one who was our guest last evening, that I wish to see him!" she gasped.

With flickering, shrewd eyes Ignacio had watched her distress. He craved the word that should call him to service and was off with a bound. His rushing, agitated figure was precipitated into a scene hard set as men on a chess-board in deadly serenity. Leddy and Jack, were already facing each other.

"Señor! Señor!" Ignacio shouted, as he ran. "Señor Don't Care of the Big
Spurs—wait!"

The message which he had to give was his mistress's and, therefore, nobody else's business. He rose on tiptoes to whisper it into Jack's ear. Jack listened, with head bent to catch the words. He looked over to Mary for an instant of intent silence and then raised his empty left hand in signal.

"Sorry, but I must ask for a little delay!" he called to Leddy. His tone was wonderful in its politeness and he bowed considerately to his adversary.

"I thought it was all bluff!" Leddy answered. "You'll get it, though—you'll get it in the old way if you haven't the nerve to take it in yours!"

"Really, I am stubbornly fond of my way," Jack said. "I shall be only a minute. That will give you time to steady your nerves," he added, in the encouraging, reassuring strain of a coach to a man going to the bat.

He was coming toward Mary with his easy, languid gait, radiant of casual inquiry. The time of his steps seemed to be reckoned in succeeding hammer-beats in her brain. He was coming and she had to find reasons to keep him from going back; because if it had not been for her he would be quite safe. Oh, if she could only be free of that idea of obligation to him! All the pain, the confusion, the embarrassment was on her side. His very manner of approach, in keeping with the whole story of his conduct toward her, showed him incapable of such feelings. She had another reaction. She devoutly wished that she had not sent for him.

Had not his own perversity taken his fate out of her hands? If he preferred to die, why should it be her concern? Should she volunteer herself as a rescuer of fools? The gleaming sand of the arroyo rose in a dazzling mist before her eyes, obscuring him, clothing him with the unreality of a dream; and then, in physical reality, he emerged. He was so near as she rose spasmodically that she could have laid her hand on his shoulder. His hat under his arm, he stood smiling in the bland, questioning interest of a spectator happening along the path, even as he had in her first glimpse of him on the pass.

"I don't care! Go on! Go on!" she was going to say. "You have made sport of me! You make sport of everything! Life itself is a joke to you!"

The tempest of the words was in her eyes, if it did not reach her tongue's end. It was halted by the look of hurt surprise, of real pain, which appeared on his face. Was it possible, after all, that he could feel? The thought brought forth the passionate cry of her mission after that sleepless night.

"I beg of you—I implore you—don't!"

Had anyone told her yesterday that she would have been begging any man in melodramatic supplication for anything, she would have thought of herself as mad. Wasn't she mad? Wasn't he mad? Yet she broke into passionate appeal.

"It is horrible—unspeakable! I cannot bear it!"

A flood of color swept his cheeks and with it came a peculiar, feminine, almost awkward, gentleness. His air was that of wordless humility. He seemed more than ever an uncomprehending, sure prey for Leddy.

"Don't you realize what death is?" she asked.

The question, so earnest and searching, had the contrary effect on him. It changed him back to his careless self. He laughed in the way of one who deprecates another's illusion or passing fancy. This added to her conviction that he did not realize, that he was incapable of realizing, his position.

"Do you think I am about to die?" he asked softly.

"With Pete Leddy firing at you twenty yards away—yes! And you pose—you pose! If you were human you would be serious!"

"Pose?" He repeated the word. It startled him, mystified him. "The clothes I bought to please Firio, you mean?" he inquired, his face lighting.

"No, about death. It is horrible—horrible! Death for which I am responsible!"

"Why, have you forgotten that we settled all that?" he asked. "It was not you. It was the habit I had formed of whistling in the loneliness of the desert. I am sorry, now, that I did not stick to singing, even at the expense of a sore throat."

Now he called to Leddy, and his voice, high-pitched and powerful, seemed to travel in the luminous air as on resilient, invisible wires.

"Leddy, wasn't it the way I whistled to you the first time we met that made you want satisfaction? You remember"—and he broke into a whistle. His tone was different from that to Leddy on the pass; the whistle was different. It was shrill and mocking.

"Yes, the whistle!" yelled Leddy. "No man can whistle to me like that and live!"

Jack laughed as if he appreciated all the possibilities of humor inherent in the picture of the bloodthirsty Leddy, the waiting seconds and the gallery. He turned to Mary with a gesture of his outstretched hands:

"There, you see! I brought it on myself."

"You are brutal! You are without feeling—you are ridiculous—you—" she stormed, chokingly.

And in face of this he became reasoning, philosophical.

"Yes, I admit that it is all ridiculous, even to farce, this little comédie humaine. But we must remember that beside the age of the desert none of us last long. Ridiculous, yes; but if I will whistle, why, then, I must play out the game I've started."

He was looking straight into her eyes, and there was that in his gaze which came as a surprise and with something of the effect of a blade out of a scabbard. It chilled her. It fastened her inactive to the earth with a helplessness that was uncanny. It mixed the element of fear for him with the element of fear of him.

"Remember I am of age—and I don't mind," he added, with the faintest glint of satire in his reassurance.

He was walking away, with a wave of his hand to Leddy; he was going over the precipice's edge after thanking the danger sign. He did not hasten, nor did he loiter. The precipice resolved itself into an incident of a journey of the same order as an ankle-deep stream trickling across a highway.

IX

THE DEVIL IS OUT

She had done her best and she had failed. What reason was there for her to remain? Should she endure witnessing in reality the horror which she had pictured so vividly in imagination? A flash of fire! The fall of a careening figure to the earth! Leddy's grin of satisfaction! The rejoicing of his clan of spectators over the exploit, while youth which sang airs to the beat of a pony's hoofs and knew the worship of the Eternal Painter lay dead!

What reason to remain except to punish herself! She would go. But something banished reason. She was held in the leash of suspense, staring with clearness of vision in one second; staring into a mist the next; while the coming and going of Ignacio's breaths between his teeth was the only sound in her ears.

"Señor Don't Care of the Big Spurs will win!" he whispered.

"He will?" she repeated, like one marvelling, in the tautness of every nerve and muscle, that she had the power of speech.

She peered into Ignacio's face. Its Indian impassivity was gone. His lips were twitching; his eyes were burning points between half-closed lids.

"Why?" she asked. "How?"

"I know. I watch him. I have seen a mountain lion asleep in a tree. His paw is like velvet. He smiles. There seems no fight in him. I know. There is a devil, a big devil, in Señor Don't Care. It sleeps so much it very terrible when it awakes. And Pete Leddy—he is all the time awake; all the time too ready. Something in him will make his arm shake when the moment to shoot comes and something in Señor Don't Care—his devil—will make his arm steady."

Could Ignacio be right? Did Jack really know how to shoot? Was he confident of the outcome? Were his smiles the mask of a conviction that he was to kill and not to be killed? After all, had his attitude toward her been merely acting? Had she undergone this humiliation as the fish on the line of the mischievous play of one who had stopped over a train in order to do murder? No! If he were capable of such guile he knew that Leddy could shoot well and that twenty yards was a deadly range for a good shot. He was taking a chance and the devil in him was laughing at the chance, while it laughed at her for thinking that he was an innocent going to slaughter in expression of a capricious sense of chivalry.

"He will win—he will win if Leddy plays fair!" Ignacio repeated.

Now she was telling herself that it was solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see Señor Don't Care survive; solely for the sake of her conscience that she wanted to see him go aboard the train safe. After that, she could forget ever having owed this trifler the feeling of gratitude for a favor done. Literally, he must live in order to be a dead and unremembered incident of her existence.

And Jack was back at his station, with the bright sunlight heightening the colors of his play cowboy attire, his weight on the ball of his right foot thrown well ahead of the other, his head up, but the whole effect languid, even deferential. He seemed about to take off his hat to the joyous sky of a fair day in May. His shadow expressed the same feeling as his pose, that of tranquil youth with its eyes on the horizon. Leddy had the peculiar slouch of the desperado, which is associated with the spread of pioneering civilization by the raucous criers of red-blooded individualism. If Jack's bearing was amateurish, then Pete's was professional in its threatening pose; and his shadow, like himself, had an unrelieved hardness of outline.

Both drew their guns from their holsters and lowered them till the barrels lay even with the trousers seams. They awaited the word to fire which Bill Lang, who stood at an angle equidistant from the two men, was to give.

"Wait!" Jack called, in a tone which indicated that something had recurred to him. Then a half laugh from him fell on the brilliant, shining, hard silence with something of the sound of a pebble slipping over glare ice.

"Leddy, it has just occurred to me that we are both foolish—honestly, we are!" he said. "The idea when Arizona is so sparsely settled of our starting out to depopulate it in such a premeditated manner on such a beautiful morning, and all because I was such an inept whistler! Why, if I had realized what a perfectly bad whistler I was I would never have whistled again. If my whistle hurt your feelings I am sorry, and I—"

"No, you don't!" yelled Leddy. "I've waited long enough! It's fight, you—"

"Oh, all right! You are so emphatic," Jack answered. His voice was still pleasant, but shot with something metallic. The very shadow of him seemed to stiffen with the stiffening of his muscles.

"Ready!" called Bill Lang.

The ruling passion that had carved six notches on his gun-handle overwhelmed Pete Leddy. At least, let us give him the benefit of the doubt and say that this and not calculation was responsible for his action. Before the word for preparation was free of Lang's lips, and without waiting for the word to fire, his revolver came up in a swift quarter-circle. He was sure of his aim at that range with a ready draw. Again and again he had thus hit his target in practice and six times he had winged his man by such agile promptness.

With the flash from the muzzle all the members of the gallery rose on hands and knees. They were as sure that there was to be a seventh notch as of their identity. There was no question in their minds but Pete had played a smart trick. They had known from the first that he would win. And the proof of it was in the sudden, uncontrollable movement of the adversary.

Jack whirled half round. He was falling. But even as he fell he was still facing his adversary. He plunged forward unsteadily and came to rest on his left elbow. A trickle of blood showed on the chap of his left leg, which had tightened as his knee twisted under him. Leddy's rage had been so hot that for once his trigger finger had been too quick. He had aimed too low. But he was sure that he had done for his man and he looked triumphantly toward the gallery gods whose hero he was. They had now risen to their feet. In answer to their congratulations he waved his left hand, palm out, in salutation. His gun-hand had dropped back to his trousers seam.

Even as it dropped, Jack's revolver had risen, his own gun-hand steadied in the palm of his left hand, which had an elbow in the sand for a rest. Victor and spectators, in their preoccupation with the relief and elation of a drama finished, had their first warning of what was to come in a voice that did not seem like the voice of the tenderfoot as they had heard it, but of another man. And Leddy was looking at a black hole in a rim of steel which, though twenty yards away, seemed hot against his forehead, while he turned cold.

"Now, Pete Leddy, do not move a muscle!" Jack told him. "Pete Leddy, you did not play my way. I still have a shot due, and I am going to kill you!"

Jack's face seemed never to have worn a smile. It was all chin, and thin, tightly-pressed lips, and solid, straight nose, bronze and unyielding.

"And I am going to kill you!"

This was surely the devil of Ignacio's imagery speaking in him—a cold, passionless, gray-eyed devil. Though they had never seen him shoot, everybody felt now that he could shoot with deadly accuracy and that there was no play cowboy in his present mood. He had the bead of death on Leddy and he would fire with the first flicker of resistance. His call seemed to have sunk the feet of everyone beneath the sand to bed-rock and riveted them there. Lang and the two seconds were as motionless as statues.

Mary recalled Leddy's leer at her on the pass, with its intent of something more horrible than murder. Savagery rose in her heart. It was right that he should be killed. He deserved his fate. But no sooner was the savagery born—born, she felt, of the very hypnosis of that carved face—than she cast it out shudderingly in the realization that she had wished the death of a fellow human being! She looked away from Jack; and then it occurred to her that he must be bleeding. He was again a companion of the trail, his strength ebbing away. Her impulse was retarded by no fear of the gallery now. It brought her to her feet.

"But first drop your revolver!" she heard Jack call, as she ran.

She saw it fall from Leddy's trembling hand, as a dead leaf goes free of a breeze-shaken limb. All the fight was out of him. The courage of six notches was not the courage to accept in stoicism the penalty of foul play. And that black rim was burning his forehead.

"Galway, you have a gun?" Jack asked.

"Yes," Galway answered, mechanically. His presence of mind, which had been so sure in the store, was somewhat shaken. He had seen men killed, but never in such deliberate fashion.

"Take it out'"

There was a quality in the command like frosty madness, which one instinctively obeyed. The half-prostrate figure of the tenderfoot seemed to dominate everything—men, earth, and air.

Mary had a glimpse of Galway drawing an automatic pistol from his pocket when she dropped at Jack's side. She knew that Jack had not heard or seen her approach. All his will was flowing out along a pistol's sight, even as his blood was flowing out on the sand in a broadening circle of red.

It was well that she had come. Her fingers were splashed as she felt for the artery, which she closed by leaning her whole weight on the thumb.

Ignacio had followed her and immediately after him came Firio, who had been startled in his breakfast preparations by the sound of a shot and had set out to investigate its cause. He was as changed as his master; a twitching, fierce being, glaring at her and at the wound and then prolongedly and watchfully at Pete Leddy.

"Can you shoot to kill?" Jack asked Galway, in a piercing summons.

"Yes," drawled Galway.

"Then up with your gun—quick! There! A bead on Ropey Smith!"

Galway had the bead before Ropey could protest.

"Give Ropey ten seconds to drop his gun or we will care for him at the same time as Pete'" Jack concluded.

Ropey did not wait the ten seconds. He was over-prompt for the same reasons of temperament that made Pete Leddy prefer his own way of fighting.

"I take it that we can count on the neutrality of our spectators. They cannot be interested in the success of either side," Jack observed, with dry humor, but still methodically. "All they ask is a spectacle."

"Yes, you bet!" came a voice from the gallery, undisguisedly eager to concur.

"Now, Pete and Ropey," Jack began, and broke off.

There was a poignant silence that waited on the processes of his mind. Not only was there no sound, but to Mary there seemed no movement anywhere in the world, except the pulse of the artery trying to drive its flood past the barrier of her thumb. Jack kept his bead unremittingly on Pete. It was Firio who broke the silence.

"Kill him! He is bad! He hates you!" said Firio.

"Sí, sí! If you do not kill him now, you must some time," said Ignacio.

Mary felt that even if Jack heard them he would not let their advice influence him. On the bank before she had hastened to him a strange and awful visitor in her heart had wished for Leddy's death. Now she wished for him to go away unharmed. She wished it in the name of her own responsibility for all that had happened. Yet her tongue had no urging word to offer. She waited in a supernatural and dreadful curiosity on Jack's decision. It was as if he were to answer one more question in explanation of the mystery of his nature. Could he deliberately shoot down an unarmed man? Was he that hard?

"I am thinking just how to deal with you, Pete and Ropey," Jack proceeded. "As I understand it, you have not been very useful citizens of Little Rivers. You can live under one condition—that you leave town and never return armed. Half a minute to decide!"

"I'll go!" said Pete.

"I'll go!" said Ropey.

"And keep your words?"

"Yes!" they assented.

But neither moved. The fact that Jack had not yet lowered his revolver made them cautious. They were obviously over-anxious to play safe to the last.

"Then go!" called Jack.

Pete and Ropey slouched away, leaving behind Ropey's gun, which was unimportant as it had only one notch, and Pete's precious companion of many campaigns with its six notches, lying on the sand.

"And, gentlemen," Jack called to the spectators, "our little entertainment is over now. I am afraid that you will be late for breakfast."

Apparently it came as a real inspiration to all at once that they might be, for they began to withdraw with a celerity that was amazingly spontaneous. Their heads disappeared below the skyline and only the actors were left. Pete and Ropey—Bill Lang following—walked away along the bed of the arroyo, instead of going over the bank. Pete paused when he was out of range. The old threat was again in his pose.

"I'm not through with you, yet!" he called.

"Why, I hope you are!" Jack answered.

He let his revolver fall with a convulsion of weakness. Mary wondered if he were going to faint. She wondered if she herself were not going to faint, in a giddy second, while the red spot on the sand shaped itself in revolving grotesquery. But the consciousness that she must not lift her weight from the artery was a centering idea to keep her faculties in some sort of equilibrium.

He was looking around at her, she knew. Now she must see his face after this transformation in him which had made her fears of his competency silly imaginings; after she had linked her name with his in an overwhelming village sensation. She was stricken by unanalyzable emotions and by a horror of her nearness to him, her contact with his very blood, and his power. She was conscious of a glimpse of his turning profile, still transfixed with the cool purpose of action. Then they were gazing full at each other, eyes into eyes, directly, questioningly. He was smiling as he had on the pass; as he had when he stood with his arms full of mail waiting for the signal to deposit his load. His devil had slipped back into his inner being.

He spoke first, and in the voice that went with his vaguest mood; the voice in which he had described his escape from the dinosaur whose scales had become wedged in the defile at the critical moment.

"You have a strong thumb and it must be tired, as well as all bluggy," he said, falling into a childhood symbol for taking the whole affair in play.

Could he be the same man who had said, "I am going to kill you!" so relentlessly? He had eased the situation with the ready gift he had for easing situations; but, at the same time, he had made those unanalyzable emotions more complex, though they were swept into the background for the moment. He glanced down at his leg with comprehending surprise.

"Now, certainly, you are free of all responsibility," he added. "You kept the strength in me to escape the fate you feared. Jim Galway will make a tourniquet and relieve you."

The first available thing for tightening the tourniquet was the barrel of Pete Leddy's gun and the first suggestion for material came from her. It was the sash of her gown, which Galway knotted with his strong, sunburned fingers.

When she could lift her numbed thumb from its task and rose to her feet she had a feeling of relief, as if she were free of magnetic bonds and uncanny personal proximity. The incident was closed—surely closed. She was breathing a prayer of thanks when a remark from Galway to Jack brought back her apprehension.

"I guess you will have to postpone catching to-day's train," he said.

Certainly, Jack must remain until his wound had healed and his strength had returned. And where would he go? He could not camp out on the desert. As Jasper Ewold had the most commodious bungalow it seemed natural that any wounded stranger should be taken there. The idea chilled her as an insupportable intrusion. Jack hesitated a moment. He was evidently considering whether he could not still keep to his programme.

"Yes, Jim, I'm afraid I shall have to ask you for a cot for a few days," he said, finally.

Again he had the right thought at the right moment. Had he surmised what was passing in her mind?

"Seeing that you've got Pete Leddy out of town, I should say that you were fairly entitled to a whole bed," Jim drawled. "These two Indians here can make a hustle to get some kind of a litter."

Now she could go. That was her one crying thought: She could go! And again he came to her rescue with his smiling considerateness.

"You have missed your breakfast, I'll warrant," he said to her. "Please don't wait. You were so brave and cool about it all, and—I—" A faint tide of color rose to his cheeks, which had been pale from loss of blood. For once he seemed unable to find a word.

Mary denied him any assistance in his embarrassment.

"Yes," she answered, almost bluntly. Then she added an excuse: "And you should have a doctor at once. I will send him."

She did not look at Jack again, but hastened away. When she was over the bank of the arroyo out of sight she put her fingers to her temples in strong pressure. That pulse made her think of another, which had been under her thumb, and she withdrew her fingers quickly.

"It is the sun! I have no hat," she said to herself, "and I didn't sleep well."

X

MARY EXPLAINS

Dr. Patterson was still asleep when Mary rapped at his door. Having aroused him to action by calling out that a stranger had been wounded in the arroyo, she did not pause to offer any further details. With her eyes level and dull, she walked rapidly along the main street where nobody was yet abroad, her one thought to reach her room uninterrupted. As she approached the house she saw her father standing on the porch, his face beaming with the joy of a serenely-lived moment as he had his morning look at the Eternal Painter's first display for the day. She had crossed the bridge before he became conscious of her presence.

"Mary! You are up first! Out so early when you went to bed so late!" he greeted her.

"I did not sleep well," she explained.

"What, Mary, you not sleep well!" All the preoccupation with the heavens went from his eyes, which swept her from head to foot. "Mary! Your hand is covered with blood! There is blood on your dress' What does this mean?"

She looked down and for the first time saw dark red spots on her skirt.
The sight sent a shiver through her, which she mastered before she spoke.

"Oh, nothing—or a good deal, if you put it in another way. A real sensation for Little Rivers!" she said.

"But you are not telling!"

"It is such a remarkable story, father, it ought not to be spoiled by giving away its plot," she said, with assumed lightness. "I don't feel equal to doing full justice to it until after I've had my bath. I will tell you at breakfast. That's a reason for your waiting for me."

And she hastened past him into the house.

"Was it—was it something to do with this Wingfield?" he called excitedly after her.

"Yes, about the fellow of the enormous spurs—Señor Don't Care, as
Ignacio calls him," she answered from the stair.

Some note underneath her nonchalance seemed to disturb, even to distress him. He entered the house and started through the living-room on his way to the library. But he paused as if in answer to a call from one of the four photographs on the wall, Michael Angelo's young David, in the supple ease of grace. The David which Michael made from an imperfect piece of marble! The David which sculptors say is ill-proportioned! The David into which, however, the master breathed the thing we call genius, in the bloom of his own youth finding its power, even as David found his against Goliath.

This David has come out of the unknown, over the hills, with the dew of morning freshness on his brow. He is unconscious of self; of everything except that he is unafraid. If all other aspirants have failed in downing the old champion, why, he will try.

Now, Jasper Ewold frowned at David as if he were getting no answer to a series of questions.

"I must make a change. You have been up a long time, David," he thought; for he had many of these photographs which he kept in a special store-room subject to his pleasure in hanging. "Yes, I will have a Madonna—two Madonnas, perhaps, and a Velasquez and a Rembrandt next time."

In the library he set to reading Professor Giuccamini; but he found himself disagreeing with the professor.

"I want your facts which you have dug out of the archives," he said, speaking to the book as if it were alive. "I don't want your opinions. Confound it!" he threw Giuccamini on the table. "I'll make my own opinions! Nothing else to do out here on the desert. Time enough to change them as often as I want, too."

He went into the garden—the garden which, next to Mary, was the most intimate thing in his affections. Usually, every new leaf that had burst forth over night set itself in the gelatine of his mind like so many letterpress changes on a printed page to a proof-reader. This time, however, a new palm leaf, a new spray of bougainvillea blossoms, a bud on the latest rose setting which he had from Los Angeles, said "Good morning," without any response from him.

He paced back and forth, his hands clasped behind him, his head bowed moodily, and his shoulders drawn together in a way that made him seem older and more portly. With each turn he looked sharply, impatiently, toward the door of the house.

Never had Mary so felt the charm of her room as on this morning; never had it seemed so set apart from the world and so personal. It was the breadth of the ell and the size of her father's library and bedroom combined. The windows could hardly be called windows in a Northern sense, for there was no glass. It was unnecessary to seal up the source of light and air in a dry climate, where a blanket at night supplied all the extra warmth one's body ever required. The blinds swung inward and the shades softened the light and added to the privacy which the screen of the growing young trees and creeping vines were fast supplying. Here she could be more utterly alone than on the summit of the pass itself. She paused in the doorway, surveying familiar objects in the enjoyed triumph of complete seclusion.

While she waited for the water to run into the bowl, she looked fixedly at the stains of a fluid which had been so warm in its touch. It was only blood, she told herself. It would wash off, and she held her hands in the water and saw the spread of the dye through the bowl in a moment of preoccupation. Then she scrubbed as vigorously as if she were bent on removing the skin itself. After she had held up her dripping fingers in satisfied inspection, the spots on her gown caught her eye. For a moment they, too, held her staring attention; then she slipped out of the gown precipitately.

With this, her determined haste was at an end. She was about to enjoy the feminine luxury of time. The combing of her hair became a delightful and leisurely function in the silky feel of the strands in her fingers and the refreshing pull at the roots. The flow of the bath water made the music of pleasurable anticipation, and immersion set the very spirit of physical life leaping and tingling in her veins. And all the while she was thinking of how to fashion a narrative.

When she started down-stairs she was not only refreshed but remade. She was going to breakfast at the usual hour, after the usual processes of ushering herself from the night's rest into the day's activities. There had been no stealthy trip out to the arroyo; no duel; no wound; no Señor Don't Care. She had only a story which involved all these elements, a most preposterous story, to tell.

"Now you shall hear all about it!" she called to her father as soon as she saw him; "the strangest, most absurd, most amusing affair"—she piled up the adjectives—"that has ever occurred in Little Rivers!"

She began at once, even before she poured his coffee, her voice a trifle high-pitched with her simulation of humor. And she was exactly veracious, avoiding details, yet missing nothing that gave the facts a pleasant trail. She told of the meeting with Leddy on the pass and of the arrival of the gorgeous traveller; of Jack's whistle; of Pete's challenge.

Jasper Ewold listened with stoical attentiveness. He did not laugh, even when Jack's vagaries were mentioned.

"Why didn't you tell me last night?" was his first question.

"To be honest, I was afraid that it would worry you. I was afraid that you would not permit me to go to the pass alone again. But you will?" She slipped her hand across the table and laid her fingers appealingly on the broad back of his heavily tanned hand, from which the veins rose in bronze welts. "And he was nice about it in his ridiculous, big-spurs fashion. He said that it was all due to the whistle."

"Go on! Go on! There must be more!" her father insisted impatiently.

She gave him the pantomime of the store, not as a bit of tragedy—she was careful about that—but as something witnessed by an impersonal spectator and narrator of stories.

"He walked right toward a muzzle, this Wingfield?" Jasper asked, his brows contracting.

"Why, yes. I told you at the start it was all most preposterous," she answered.

"And he was not afraid of death—this Wingfield!" Jasper repeated.

He was looking away from her. The contraction of his brows had become a scowl of mystification.

"Why do you always speak of him as 'this Wingfield,'" she demanded, "as if the town were full of Wingfields and he was a particular one?"

He looked around quickly, his features working in a kind of confusion.
Then he smiled.

"I was thinking of the whistle," he explained. "Well, we'll call him this Sir Chaps, this Señor Don't Care, or whatever you please. As for his walking into the gun, there is nothing remarkable in that. You draw on a man. You expect him to throw up his hands or reach for his gun. He does nothing but smile right along the level of the sight into your eyes. It was disturbing to Pete's sense of etiquette on such occasions. It threw him off. There are similar instances in history. A soldier once put a musket at Bonaparte's head. Some of Caesar's legionaries once pressed their swords at his breast. Such old hands in human psychology had the presence of mind to smile. And the history of the West is full of examples which have not been recorded. Go on, Mary!"

"Ignacio says he has a devil in him," she added.

"That little Indian has a lot of primitive race wisdom. Probably he is right," her father said soberly.

"It explains what followed," she proceeded.

She was emphatic about the reason for her part. She went out to the arroyo on behalf of her responsibility for a human life.

"But why did you not rouse me? Why did you go alone?" he asked.

"I didn't think—there wasn't time—I was upset and hurried."

She proceeded in a forced monotone which seemed to allow her hardly a single full breath.

"And I am going to kill you!" she repeated, shuddering, at the close of the narrative.

"When he said that did his face change completely? Did it seem like the face of another man? Yes, did it seem as if there were one face that could charm and another that could kill?" Jasper's words came slowly and with a drawn exactness. They formed the inquiry of one who expected corroboration of an impression.

"Yes."

"You felt it—you felt it very definitely, Mary?"

"Yes."

She was living over the moment of Jack's transformation from silk to steel. The scene in the arroyo became burning clear. Under the strain of the suppression of her own excitement, concentrated in her purpose to make all the realism of the duel an absurdity, she did not watch keenly for the signs of expression by which she usually knew what was passing in her father's mind. But she was not too preoccupied to see that he was relieved over her assent that there was a devil in Jack Wingfield, which struck her as a puzzle in keeping with all that morning's experience. It added to the inward demoralization which had suddenly dammed her power of speech.

"Ignacio saw it, too, so I was interested," Jasper added quickly, in a more natural tone, settling back into his chair. His agitation had passed.

So that was it. Her father's dominant, fine old egoism was rejoicing in another proof of his excellence as a judge of character.

"Finis! The story is told!" he continued softly.

All told! And it had been a success. Mary caught her breath in a gay, high-pitched exclamation of realization that she had not to go on with explanations.

"Our singular cavalier is safe!" she said. "My debt is paid. I need not worry any further lest someone who did me a favor should suffer for it!"

"True! true!"

Jasper's outburst of laughter when he had paused in turning down the wick of the lamp the previous evening had been as a forced blast from the brasses. Anyone with strong lungs may laugh majestically; but it takes depth of feeling and years rich with experience to express the gratification that now possessed him. He stretched his hands across the table to her and the laugh that came then came as a cataract of spontaneity.

"Exactly, Mary! The duel provided the way to pay a debt," he said. "Why, it is you who have done our Big Spurs a favor! He has a wound to show to his friends in the East! I am proud that you could take it all so coolly and reasonably."

She improved her opportunity while he held her hands.

"I will go armed next time, and I do know how to shoot, so you won't worry"—she put it that way, rather than openly ask his consent—"if I ride out to the pass?"

"Mary, I have every reason to believe that you know how to take care of yourself," he answered.

And that very afternoon she rode out to Galeria, starting a little earlier than usual, returning a little later than usual, in jubilant mood.

"Everything is the same!" she had repeated a dozen times on the road. "Everything is the same!" she told herself before she fell asleep; and her sleep was long and sweet, in nature's gratitude for rest after a storm.

The sunlight breaking through the interstices of the foliage of a poplar, sensitive to a slight breeze, came between the lattices in trembling patchwork on the bed, flickering over her face and losing itself in the strands of her hair.

"Everything is the same!" she said, when her faculties were cleared of drowsiness.

For the second time she gave intimate, precious thanks for a simple thing that had never occurred to her as a blessing before: for the seclusion and silence of her room, free from all invasion except of her own thoughts. The quicker flow of blood that came with awaking, the expanding thrill of physical strength and buoyancy of life renewed, brought with it the moral courage which morning often brings to flout the compromises of the confusion of the evening's weariness. The inspiriting, cool air of night electrified by the sun cleared her vision. She saw all the pictures on the slate of yesterday and their message plainly, as something that could not be erased by any Buddhistic ritual of reiterated phrase.

"No, everything is not the same, not even the ride—not yet!" she admitted. "But time will make it so—time and a sense of humor, which I hope I have."

XI

SEÑOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES

Jack lounged in an armchair in the Galway sitting-room with his bandaged leg bolstered on a stool after Dr. Patterson had fished a bit of lead out of the wound. Tribute overflowed from the table to the chairs and from the chairs to the floor; pineapples, their knobby jackets all yellow from ripening in the field, with the full succulency of root-fed and sun-drawn flavor; monstrous navel oranges, leaden with the weight of juice, richer than cloth of gold and velvet soft; and every fruit of the fertile soil and benignant climate; and jellies, pies, and custards. But these were only the edibles. There were flowers in equal abundance. They banked the windows.

"It's Jasper Ewold's idea to bring gifts when you call," explained Jim Galway. "Jasper is always sowing ideas and lots of them have sprung up and flourished."

Jack had not been in Little Rivers twenty-four hours, and he had played a part in its criminal annals and become subject to all the embarrassment of favors of a royal bride or a prima donna who is about to sail. In a bower, amazed, he was meeting the world of Little Rivers and its wife. Men of all ages; men with foreign accent; men born and bred as farmers; men to whom the effect of indoor occupation clung; men still weak, but with red corpuscles singing a song of returning health in their arteries—strapping, vigorous men, all with hands hardened by manual labor and in their eyes the far distances of the desert, in contrast to the sparkle of oasis intimacy.

Women with the accent of college classrooms; women who made plural nouns the running mates of singular verbs; women who were novices in housework; women drilled in drudgery from childhood—all expanding, all dwelling in a democracy that had begun its life afresh in a new land, and all with the wonder of gardens where there had been only sagebrush in their beings.

There was something at odds with Jack's experience of desert towns in the picture of a bronzed rancher, his arms loaded with roses, saying, in boyish diffidence:

"Mister, you fit him fair and you sure fixed him good. Just a few roses—they're so thick over to our place that they're getting a pest. Thought mebbe they'd be nice for you to look at while you was tied up to a chair nursing Pete's soovenir!"

One visitor whose bulk filled the doorway, the expansion of his smile spreading over a bounteous rotundity of cheek, impressed himself as a personality who had the distinction in avoirdupois that Jim Galway had in leanness. In his hand he had five or six peonies as large as saucers.

"Every complete community has a fat man, seh!" he announced, with a certain ample bashfulness in keeping with his general amplitude and a musical Southern accent.

"If it wants to feel perfectly comfortable it has!" said Jack, by way of welcome.

"Well, I'm the fat man of Little Rivers, name being Bob Worther!" said he, grinning as he came across the room with an amazingly quick, easy step.

"No rivals?" inquired Jack.

"No, seh! I staked out the first claim and I've an eye out for any new-comers over the two hundred mark. I warn them off! Jasper Ewold is up to two hundred, but he doesn't count. Why, you ought to have seen me, seh, before I came to this valley!"

"A living skeleton?"

"No, seh! Back in Alabama I had reached a point where I broke so many chairs and was getting so nervous from sudden falls in the midst of conversation, when I made a lively gesture that I didn't dare sit down away from home except at church, where they had pews. I weighed three hundred and fifty!"

"And now?"

"I acknowledge two hundred and forty, including my legs, which are very powerful, having worked off that extra hundred. I've got the boss job for making a fat man spider-waisted—inspector of ditches and dams. Any other man would have to use a horse, but I hoof it, and that's economy all around. And being big I grow big things. Violets wouldn't be much more in my line than drawnwork. I've got this whole town beat on peonies and pumpkins. Being as it's a fat man's pleasure to cheer people up, I dropped in to bring you a few peonies and to say that, considering the few well-selected words you spoke to Pete Leddy on this town's behalf, I'm prepared to vote for you for anything from coroner to president, seh!"

Later, after Bob had gone, a small girl brought a spray of gladiolus, their slender stems down to her toe-tips and the opening blossoms half hiding her face. Jack insisted on having them laid across his knee She was not a fairy out of a play, as he knew by her conversation.

"Mister, did you yell when you was hit?" she asked.

Jack considered thoughtfully. It would not do to be vagarious under such a shrewd examination; he must be exact.

"No, I don't think I did. I was too busy."

"I'll bet you wanted to, if you hadn't been so busy. Did it hurt much?"

"Not so very much."

"Maybe that was why you didn't yell. Mother says that all you can see is a little black spot—except you can't see it for the bandages. Is that the way yours is?"

"I believe so. In fact, I'll tell you a secret: That's the fashion in wounds."

"Mother will be glad to know she's right. She sets a lot by her opinion, does mother. Say, do you like plums?"

Jack already had a peck of plums, but another peck would not add much to the redundancy as far as he was concerned.

"I'll bring you some. We've got the biggest plums in Little Rivers—oh, so big! Bigger'n Mr. Ewold's! I'll bring some right away." She paused, however, in the doorway. "Don't you tell anybody I said they were bigger'n Mr. Ewold's," she went on. "It might hurt his feelings. He's what they call the o-rig-i-nal set-tler, and we always agree that he grows the biggest of everything, because—why, because he's got such a big laugh and such a big smile. Mother says sour-faced people oughtn't to have a face any bigger'n a crab apple; but Mr. Ewold's face couldn't be too big if it was as big as all outdoors! Good-by. I reckon you won't be s'prised to hear that I'm the dreadful talker of our family."

"Wait!" Jack called. "You haven't told me your name."

"Belvedere Smith. Father says it ain't a name for living things. But mother is dreadfully set in her ideas of names, and she doesn't like it because people call me Belvy; but they just naturally will."

"Belvedere, did you ever hear of the three little blue mice"—Jack was leaning toward her with an air of fascinating mystery—"that thought they could hide in the white clover from the white cat that had two black stripes on her back?"

There was a pellmell dash across the room and her face, with wide-open eyes dancing in curiosity, was pressed close to his:

"Why did the cat have two black stripes? Why? why?"

"Just what I was going to tell," said the pacifier of desperadoes.

"They were off on a tremendous adventure, with anthills for mountains and clover-stems for the tree-trunks of forests in the path. Tragedy seemed due for the mice, when a bee dropped off a thistle blossom for a remarkable reason—none other than that a hummingbird cuffed him in the ear with his wing—and the bee, looking for revenge with his stinger on the first vulnerable spot, stung the cat right in the Achilles tendon of his paw, just as that paw was about to descend with murderous purpose. The cat ran away crying, with both black stripes ridges of fur sticking up straight, while the rest of the fur lay nice and smooth; and the mice giggled so that their ears nearly wiggled off their heads. So all ended happily."

"He does beat all!" thought Mrs. Galway, who had overheard part of the nonsense from the doorway. "Wouldn't it make Pete Leddy mad if he could hear the man who took his gun away getting off fairy stuff like that!"

Mrs. Galway had brought in a cake of her own baking. She was slightly jealous of the neighbors' pastry as entering into her own particular field of excellence. Jack saw that the supply of cake in the Galway pantry must be as limitless as the pigments on the Eternal Painter's palette.

"The doctor said that I was to have a light diet," he expostulated; "and
I am stuffed to the brim."

"I'll make you some floating island," said Mrs. Galway, refusing to strike her colors.

"That isn't filling and passes the time," Jack admitted.

"Jim says if you had to Fletcherize on floating island you would starve to death and your teeth would get so used to missing a step on the stairs that they would never be able to deal with real victuals at all."

"Mrs. Galway," Jack observed sagely, dropping his head on the back of the chair, "I see that it has occurred to you and Jim that it is an excellent world and full of excellent nonsense. I am ready to eat both fluffy isles and the yellow sea in which they float. I am ready to keep on getting hungry with my efforts, even though you make it continents and oceans!"

From his window he had a view, over the dark, polished green of Jim's orange trees, of the range, brown and gray and bare, holding steady shadows of its own and host to the shadows of journeying clouds, with the pass set in the centre as a cleft in a forbidding barrier. In the yard Wrath of God, Jag Ear, and P.D. were tethered. Deep content illumined the faces of P.D. and Jag Ear; but Wrath of God was as sorrowful as ever. A cheerful Wrath of God would have excited fears for his health.

"Yet, maybe he is enjoying his rest more than the others," Jack told Firio, who kept appearing at the window on some excuse or other. "Perhaps he takes his happiness internally. Perhaps the external signs are only the last stand of a lugubriousness driven out by overwhelming forces of internal joy."

"Sí, sí!" said Firio.

"Firio, you are eminently a conversationalist," said Jack. "You agree with any foolishness as if it were a new theory of ethics. You are an ideal companion. I never have to listen to you in order that I may in turn have my say."

"Sí," said Firio. He leaned on the windowsill, his black eyes shining with ingenuous and flattering appeal: "I will broil you a quail on a spit," he whispered. "It's better than stove cooking."

"Don't talk of that!" Jack exclaimed, almost sharply. The suggestion brought a swift change to sadness over his face and drew a veil of vagueness over his eyes. "No, Firio, and I'll tell you why: the odor of a quail broiled on a spit belongs at the end of a day's journey, when you camp in sight of no habitation. You should sit on a dusty blanket-roll; you should eat by the light of the embers or a guttering candle. No, Firio, we'll wait till some other day. And it's not exactly courtesy to our hostess to bring in provender from the outside."

The trail had apparently taught Firio all the moods of his master. He knew when it was unwise to persist.

"Sí!" he whispered, and withdrew.

Jack looked at Galeria and then back quickly, as if resisting its call. He smiled half wryly and readjusted his position in the chair. Over the hedge he could see the heads and shoulders of passers-by. Jim Galway had come into the room, when Jasper Ewold's broad back and great head hove in sight with something of the steady majesty of progress of a full-rigged ship.

"The Doge!" Jack exclaimed, brightening.

Jim was taken unawares. Was it the name of a new kind of semi-tropical fruit not yet introduced into Arizona?

"Not the Doge of Venice—hardly, when Mr. Ewold's love runs to Florence!
The Doge of Little Rivers!"

"Why, the Doge—of course!" Jim was "on" now and grinning. "I didn't think of my history at first. That's a good one for Jasper Ewold!"

"O Doge of Little Rivers, I expected you in a gondola of state!" said Jack, with a playfully grandiloquent gesture, as Jasper's abundance filled the doorway. "But it is all the more compliment to me that you should walk."

"Doge, eh?" Jasper tasted the word. "Pooh!" he said. "Persiflage! persiflage! I saw at once yesterday that you had a weakness for it."

"And Miss Ewold? How is she?" Jack asked. Remembering the promise that Mary had exacted from him, he took care not to refer to her part in the duel.

His question fell aptly for what Jasper had to say. Being a man used to keeping the gate ever open to the full flood of spontaneity, he became stilted in the repetition of anything he had thought out and rehearsed. He was overcheerful, without the mellowness of tone which gave his cheer its charm on the previous evening.

"She's not a bit the worse. Why, she went for a ride out to the pass this afternoon as usual! I've had the whole story, from the pass till the minute that Jim put the tourniquet on your leg. She recognizes the great kindness you did her."

"Not a kindness—an inevitable interruption by any passer-by,"
Jack put in.

"Naturally she felt that it was a kindness, a service, and when she knew you were in danger she acted promptly for herself, with a desert girl's self-reliance. When it was all over she saw the whole thing in its proper perspective, as an unpleasant, preposterous piece of barbarism which had turned out fortunately."

"Oh, I am glad of that!" Jack exclaimed, in relief that spoke rejoicing in every fibre. "I had worried. I had feared lest I had insisted too much on going on. But I had to. And I know that it was a scene that only men ought to witness—so horrible I feared it might leave a disagreeable impression."

"Ah, Mary has courage and humor. She sees the ridiculous. She laughs at it all, now!"

"Laughs?" asked Jack. "Yes, it was laughable;" and he broke into laughter, in which Jasper joined thunderously.

Jasper kept on laughing after Jack stopped, and in genuine relief to find that the affair was to be as uninfluencing a chapter in the easy traveller's life as in Mary's.

"Our regret is that we may have delayed you, sir," Jasper proceeded. "You may have had to postpone an important engagement. I understand that you had planned to take the train this morning."

"When one has been in the desert for a long time," Jack answered, "a few days more or less hardly matter in the time of his departure. In a week Dr. Patterson says that I may go. Meanwhile, I shall have the pleasure of getting acquainted with Little Rivers, which, otherwise, I should have missed."

"I am glad!" Jasper Ewold exclaimed with dramatic quickness. "Glad that your wound is so slight—glad that you need not be shut up long when you are due elsewhere."

What books should he bring to the invalid to while away the time? "The Three Musketeers" or "Cyrano"? Jack seemed to know his "Cyrano" so well that a copy could be only a prompt. He settled deeper in his chair and, more to the sky than to Jasper Ewold, repeated Cyrano's address to his cadets, set to a tune of his own. His body might be in the chair, with a bandaged leg, but clearly his mind was away on the trail.

"Yes, let me see," he said, coming back to earth. "I should like the 'Road to Rome,' something of Charles Lamb, Aldrich's 'Story of a Bad Boy,' Heine—-but no! What am I saying? Bring me any solid book on economics. I ought to be reading economics. Economics and Charles Lamb, that will do. Do you think they could travel together?"

"All printed things can, if you choose. I'll include Lamb."

"And any Daudet lying loose," Jack added.

"And Omar?"

"I carry Omar in my head, thank you, O Doge!"

"Sir Chaps of the enormous spurs, you have a broad taste for one who rides over the pass of Galeria after five years in Arizona," said the Doge as he rose. He was covertly surveying that soft, winning, dreamy profile which had turned so hard when the devil that was within came to the surface.

"I was fed on books and galleries in my boyhood," Jack said; but with a reticence that indicated that this was all he cared to tell about his past.

XII

MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE

Every resident except the cronies of Pete Leddy considered it a duty, once a day at least, to look over the Galway hedge and ask how Señor Don't Care was doing. That is, everyone with a single exception, which was Mary. Jack had never seen her even pass the house. It was as if his very existence had dropped out of her ken. The town remarked the anomaly.

"You have not been in lately," Mrs. Galway reminded her.

"My flowers have required a lot of attention; also, I have been riding out to the pass a good deal," she answered, and changed the subject to geraniums, for the very good reason that she had just been weeding her geranium bed.

Mrs. Galway looked at her strangely and Mary caught the glance. She guessed what Mrs. Galway was thinking: that she had been a little inconsiderate of a man who had been wounded in her service.

"Probably it is time I bore tribute, too," she said to herself.

That afternoon she took down a glass of jelly from the pantry shelves and set forth in the line of duty, frowning and rehearsing a presentation speech as she went. With every step toward the Galway cottage she was increasingly confused and exasperated with herself for even thinking of a speech. As she drew near she heard a treble chorus of "ohs!" and "ahs!" and saw Jack on the porch surrounded by children.

"It's dinosaur foolishness again!" she thought, pungently.

He was in the full fettle of nonsense, his head a little to one side and lowered, while he looked through his eyebrows at his hearers, measuring the effect of his words. She thought of that face when he called to Leddy, "I am going to kill you!" and felt the pulse of inquiry beat over all that lay in this man's repertory between the two moods.

"Then, counting each one in his big, deep, bass voice, like this," he was saying, "that funny little dwarf kept dropping oranges out of the tree on the big giant, who could not wiggle and was squeaking in protest in his little, old woman's voice. Every orange hit him right on the bridge of his nose, and he was saying: 'You know I never could bear yellow! It fusses me so.'"

"He doesn't need any jelly! I am going on!" Mary thought.

Then Jack saw a slim, pliant form hastening by and a brown profile under hair bare of a hat, with eyes straight ahead. Mary might have been a unit of marching infantry. The story stopped abruptly.

"Yes—and—and—go on!" cried the children.

Jack held up his hand for silence.

"How do you do?" he called, and she caught in his tone and in her first glimpse of his face a certain mischievousness, as if he, who missed no points for idle enjoyment of any situation, had a satisfaction in taking her by surprise with his greeting. This put her on her mettle with the quickness of a summons to fence. She was as nonchalant as he.

"And you are doing well, I learn," she answered.

"Oh, come in and hear it, Miss Ewold! It's the best one yet!" cried
Belvedere Smith. "And—and—"

"And—and—" began the chorus.

Mary went to the hedge. She dropped the glass of jelly on the thick carpet of the privet.

"I have just brought my gift. I'll leave it here. Belvy will bring it when the story is over. I am glad you are recovering so rapidly."

"And—and—" insisted the chorus.

"You oughtn't to miss this story. It's a regular Jim dandy!"
Belvedere shouted.

"Yes, won't you come in?" Jack begged in serious urgency. "I pride myself that it is almost intellectual toward the close."

"I have no doubt," she said, looking fairly at him from under her hand, which she held up to shade her face, so he saw only the snap of her eyes in the shadow. "But I am in a hurry."

And he was looking at a shoulder and a quarter profile as she turned away.

"Did you make the jelly yourself?" he called.

"Yes, I am not afraid of the truth—I did!" she answered with a backward glance and not stopping.

"Oh, bully!" he exclaimed with great enthusiasm, in which she detected a strain of what she classified as impudence.

"But all the time the giant was fumbling in his pocket for his green handkerchief. You know the dwarf did not like green. It fussed him just as much as yellow fussed the giant. But it was a narrow pocket, so narrow that he could only get his big thumb in, and very deep. So, you see—" and she heard the tale proceeding as she walked on to the end of the street, where she turned around and came back across the desert and through the garden.

On the way she found it amusing to consider Jack judicially as a human exhibit, stripped of all the chimera of romance with which Little Rivers had clothed his personality. If he had not happened to meet her on the pass, the townspeople would have regarded this stranger as an invasion of real life by a character out of a comic opera. She viewed the specimen under a magnifying glass in all angles, turning it around as if it were a bronze or an ivory statuette.

1. In his favor: Firstly, children were fond of him; but his extravagance of phrase and love of applause accounted for that. Secondly, Firio was devoted to him. Such worshipful attachment on the part of a native Indian to any Saxon was remarkable. Yet this was explained by his love of color, his foible for the picturesque, his vagabond irresponsibility, and, mostly, by his latent savagery—which she would hardly have been willing to apply to Ignacio's worshipful attachment to herself.

2. Against him: Everything of any importance, except in the eyes of children and savages; everything in logic. He would not stand analysis at all. He was without definite character. He was posing, affected, pleased with himself, superficial, and theatrical, and interested in people only so long as they amused him or gratified his personal vanity.

"I had the best of the argument in leaving the jelly on the hedge, and that is the last I shall hear of it," she concluded.

Not so. Mrs. Galway came that evening, a bearer of messages.

"He says it is the most wonderful jelly that ever was," said Mrs. Galway. "He ate half the glass for dinner and is saving the rest for breakfast—I'm using his own words and you know what a killing way he has of putting things—saving it for breakfast so that he will have something to live through the night for and in the morning the joy of it will not be all a memory. He wants to know if you have any more of the same kind."

"Yes, a dozen glasses," Mary returned. "Tell him we are glad of the opportunity of finishing last year's stock, and I send it provided he eats half a glass with every meal."

"I don't know what his answer will be to that," said Mrs. Galway, contracting her brow studiously at Mary. "But he would have one quick. He always has. He's so poetic and all that, we're planning to go to the station to see him off and pelt him with flowers; and Dr. Patterson is going to fashion a white cat out of white carnations, with deep red ones for the black stripes, for the children to present."

"Hurrah!" exclaimed Mary blithely, and went for the jelly.

She was spared further bulletins on the state of health of the wounded until her father returned from his daily call the next morning. She was in the living-room and she knew by his step on the porch, vigorous yet light, that he was uplifted by good news or by the anticipation of the exploitation of some new idea—a pleasure second only to that of the idea's birth. Such was his elation that he broke one of his own rules by tossing some of the books loaned to Jack onto the broad top of the table of the living-room, which was sacred to the isolation of the ivory paper-knife.

"He has named the date!" shouted the Doge. "He goes by to-morrow's train! It will be a gala affair, almost an historical moment in the early history of this community. I am to make a speech presenting him with the freedom of the whole world. Between us we have hit on a proper modern symbol of the gift. He slips me his Pullman ticket and I formally offer it to him as the key to the hospitality of the seven seas, the two hemispheres, and the teeming cities that lie beyond the range. It will be great fun, with plenty of persiflage. And, Mary, they suggest that you write some verses—ridiculous verses, in keeping with the whole nonsensical business."

"You mean that I am to stand on the platform and read poetry dedicated to him?" she demanded.

"Poetry, Mary? You grow ambitious. Not poetry—foolish doggerel. Or someone will read it for you."

He had not failed to watch the play of her expression. She had received all his nonsense, announced in his best style of simulated forensic grandeur, with a certain unchanging serenity which was unamused: which was, indeed, barely interested.

"And someone else shall write it, for I don't think of any verses," she said, with a slight shrug of the shoulder. "Besides, I shall not be there."

"Not be there! People will remark your absence!"

"Will they?" she asked, thoughtfully, as if that had not occurred to her. "No, they will be too occupied with the persiflage. I am going to ride out to the pass in the morning very early—before daybreak."

"But"—he was positively frolicsome as he caught her hands and waved them back and forth, while he rocked his shoulders—"when you are stubborn, Mary, have your way. I will make your excuses. And I to work now. It is the hour of the hoe," as he called all hours except those of darkness and the hot midday.

For Jasper Ewold was no idler in the affairs of his ranch or of the town. Few city men were so busy. His everlasting talk was incidental, like the babbling of a brook which, however, keeps steadily flowing on; and the stored scholarship of his mind was supplemented by long evenings with no other relaxation but reading. Now as he went down the path he broke into song; and when the Doge sang it was something awful, excusable only by the sheer happiness that brought on the attack.

Mary had important sewing, which this morning she chose to do in her room rather than in her favorite spot in the garden. She closed the shutters on the sunny side and sat down by the window nearest the garden, peculiarly sensible of the soft light and cool spaciousness of an inner world. The occasional buzz of a bee, the flutter of the leaves of the poplar, might have been the voice of the outer world in Southern Spain or Southern Italy, or anywhere else where the air is balmy.

And to-morrow! Out to Galeria in the fervor of a pilgrim to some shrine, with the easy movement of her pony and the rigid lines of the pass gradually drawing nearer and the sky ever distant! She would be mistress of her thoughts in all the silent glamour of morning on the desert. She would hear the train stop at the station, its heavy effort as it pulled out, and watch it winding over the flashing steel threads in a clamor of stridency and harshness, which grew fainter and fainter. And she would smile as it disappeared around a bend in the range. She would smile at him, at the incident, just as carelessly as he had smiled when he told of the dinosaur.

XIII

A JOURNEY ON CRUTCHES

The sun became benign in its afternoon slant. Little Rivers was beginning to move after its siesta, with the stretching of muscles that would grow more vigorous as evening approached and freshened life came into the air with the sprinkle of sunset brilliance.

To Jack the hour palpably brought a reminder of the misery of the moment when a thing long postponed must at last be performed. The softness of speculative fancy faded from his face. His lips tightened in a way that seemed to bring his chin into prominence in mastery of his being. As he called Firio, his voice unusually high-pitched, he did not look out at P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear.

Firio came with the eagerness of one who is restless for action. He leaned on the windowsill, his elbows spread, his chin cupped in his hands, his Indian blankness of countenance enlivened by the glow of his eyes, as jewels enliven dull brown velvet.

"Firio, I have something to tell you."

"Sí!"

There was a laboring of Jack's throat muscles, and then he forced out the truth in a few words.

"Firio," he said, "this is my trail end. I am going back to New York to-morrow."

"Sí!" answered Firio, without a tremor of emotion; but his eyes glowed confidently, fixedly, into Jack's.

"There will be money for you, and—"

"Sí!" said Firio mechanically, as if repeating the lines of a lesson.

Was this Indian boy prepared for the news? Or did he not care? Was he simply clay that served without feeling? The thought made Jack wince. He paused, and the dark eyes, as in a spell, kept staring into his.

"And you get P.D. and Wrath of God and Jag Ear and, yes, the big spurs and the chaps, too, to keep to remember me by."

Firio did not answer.

"You are not pleased? You—"

"Sí! I will keep them for you. You will want them; you will come back to all this;" and suddenly Firio was galvanized into the life of a single gesture. He swept his arm toward the sky, indicating infinite distance.

"No, I shall never come back! I can't!" Jack said; and his face had set hard, as if it were a wall about to be driven at a wall. "I must go and I must stay."

"Sí!" said Firio, resuming his impassiveness, and slipped around the corner of the house.

"He does care!" Jack cried with a smile, which, however, was not the smile of gardens, of running brooks, and of song. "I am glad—glad!"

He picked up his crutches and went out to the three steeds of trail memory:

"And you care—you care!" he repeated to them.

He drew a lugubrious grimace in mockery at Wrath of God. He tickled the sliver of the donkey's ear, whereat Jag Ear wiggled the sliver in blissful unconsciousness that he had lost any of the ornamental equipment of his tribe.

"You are like most of us; we don't see our deformities, Jag Ear," Jack told him. "And if others were also blind to them, why, we should all be good-looking!"

His arm slipped around P.D.'s neck and he ran a finger up and down P.D.'s nose with a tickling caress.

"You old plodder!" he said. "You know a lot. It's good to have the love of any living thing that has been near me as long as you have."

This preposterous being was preposterously sentimental over a pair of ponies and an earless donkey. When Mrs. Galway, who had watched him from the window, came out on the porch she saw that he was on his way through the gate in the hedge to the street.

"Look here! Did the doctor say you might?" she called.

"No, my leg says it!" Jack answered, gaily. "Just a little walk!
Back soon."

It was his first enterprise in locomotion outside the limits of Jim Galway's yard since he had been wounded. He turned blissful traveller again. Having come to know the faces of the citizens, now he was to look into the faces of their habitations. The broad main street, with its rows of trees, narrowed with perspective until it became a gray spot of desert sand. Under the trees leisurely flowed those arteries of ranch and garden-life, the irrigation ditches. Continuity of line in the hedge-fences was evidently a municipal requirement; but over the hedges individualism expressed itself freely, yet with a harmony which had been set by public fashion.

The houses were of cement in simple design. They had no architectural message except that of a background for ornamentation by the genius of the soil's productivity. They waited on vines to cover their sides and trees to cast shade across their doorways. One need not remain long to know the old families in this community, where the criterion of local aristocracy was the size of your plums or the number of crops of alfalfa you could grow in a year.

Already Jack felt at home. It was as if he were friends with a whole world, lacking the social distinctions which only begin when someone acquires sufficient worldly possessions to give exclusive, formal dinners. He knew every passer-by well enough to address him or her by the Christian name. Women called to him from porches with a dozen invitations to visit gardens.

"Just a saunter, just a try-out before I take the train. Not going far," he always answered; yet there was something in his bearing that suggested a definite mission.

"We hate to lose you!" called Mrs. Smith.

"I hate to be lost!" Jack called back; "but that is just my natural luck."

"I suppose you've got your work cut out for you back East, same's everybody else, somewhere or other, 'less they're millionaires, who all stay in the city and try to run from microbes in their automobiles."

"Yes, I have work—lots of it," said Jack, ruefully. He shifted his weight on the crutches, paused and looked at the sky. The Eternal Painter was dipping his brush lightly and sweeping soft, silvery films, as a kind of glorified finger-exercise, over an intangible blue.

"Why care? Why care?" His Majesty was asking. "Why not leave all the problems of earthly existence to your lungs? Why not lie back and look on at things and breathe my air? That is enough to keep your whole being in tune with the Infinite."

It was his afternoon mood. At sunset he would have another. Then he would be crying out against the folly of wasting one precious moment in the eons, because that moment could never return to be lived over.

Jack kept on until he recognized the cement bridge where he had stopped when he came from the post-office with Mary. Left bare of its surroundings, the first habitation in Little Rivers, with the ell which had been added later, would have appeared a barracks. But Jasper Ewold had the oldest trees and the most luxuriant hedge and vines as the reward of his pioneerdom.

When Jack crossed the bridge and stood in the opening of the hedge there was no one on the porch in the inviting shade of the prodigal bougainvillea vines. So he hitched his way up the steps. Feeling that it was a formal occasion, he searched for the door-bell. There was none. He rapped on the casing and waited, while he looked at the cool, quiet interior, with the portrait of David facing him from the wall.

"David, you seem to be the only one at home," he remarked, for there had been no answer to his raps; "and you are too busy getting a bead on Goliath to answer the immaterial questions of a wayfarer."

Accepting the freedom of the Little Rivers custom on such occasions, he followed the path to the rear. His head knocked off the dead petals of a rambler rose blossom, scattering them at his feet. Rounding the corner of the house, he saw the arbor where he had dined the night of his arrival, and beyond this an old-fashioned flower garden separated by a path from a garden of roses. There was a sound of activity from the kitchen behind a trellis screen, but he did not call out for guidance. He would trust to finding his own way.

When he came to the broad path, its stretch lay under a crochet-work of shadows from the ragged leaves of two rows of palms which ran to the edge of an orange grove, and the centre of this path was in a straight line with the bottom of the V of Galeria.

Jasper Ewold had laid out his little domain according to a set plan before the water was first let go in laughing triumph over the parched earth, and this plan, as one might see on every hand, was expressive of the training of older civilizations in landscape gardening, which ages of men striving for harmonious forms of beauty in green and growing things had tested, and which the Doge, in all his unconventionalism of personality, was as little inclined to amend as he was to amend the classic authors. An avenue of palms is the epic of the desert; a bougainvillea vine its sonnet.

Between the palms to the right and left Jack had glimpses of a vegetable garden; of rows of berry bushes; of a grove of young fig-trees; of rows of the sword-bundles of pineapple tops. Everything except the old-fashioned flower-bed, with its border of mignonette, and the generous beds of roses and other flowers of the bountiful sisterhood of petals of artificial cultivation, spoke of utility which must make the ground pay as well as please.

Jack took each step as if he were apprehensive of disturbing the quiet Midway of the avenue of palms ran a cross avenue, and at the meeting-point was a circle, which evidently waited till the oranges and the olives should pay for a statue and surrounding benches. Over the breadth of the cross avenue lay the glossy canopy of the outstretched branches of umbrella-trees. A table of roughly planed boards painted green and green rattan chairs were in keeping with the restful effect, while the world without was aglare with light.

Here Mary had brought her sewing for the afternoon. She was working so intently that she had not heard his approach. He had paused just as his line of vision came flush with the trunks of the umbrella-trees. For the first time he saw his companion in adventure in repose, her head bent, leaving clear the line of her neck from the roots of her hair to the collar, and the soft light bringing out the delicate brown of her skin.

There seemed no movement anywhere in the world at the moment, except the flash of her needle in and out.

XIV

"HOW FAST YOU SEW!"

And she had not seen him! He was touched with a sense of guilt for having looked so long; for not having at once called to her; and rather than give her the shock of calling now, he moved toward her, the scuff of his limp, pendent foot attracting her attention. Her start at the sound was followed, when she saw him, with amazement and a flush and a movement as if she would rise. But she controlled the movement, if not the flush, and fell back into her chair, picking up her sewing, which had dropped on the table.

It was like him, she might well think, to come unexpectedly, without invitation or announcement. She was alert, ready to take the offensive as the best means of defence, and wishing, in devout futility, that he had stayed away. He was smiling happily at everything in cosmos and at her as a part of it.

"Good afternoon!"

"Good afternoon!"

"That last lot of jelly was better than the first," he said softly.

"Was it? You must favor vintage jelly!"

"I came to call—my p.p.c. call—and to see your garden," he added.

"Is there any particular feature that interests you?" she asked. "The date-trees? The aviary? The nursery?"

"No," he answered, "not just yet. It is very cool here under the umbrella-trees, isn't it? I have walked all the way from the Galways and I'll rest a while, if I may."

He was no longer the play cavalier in overornamented chaparejos and cart-wheel spurs, but a lame fellow in overalls, who was hitching toward her on crutches, his cowpuncher hat held by the brim and flopping with every step. But he wore the silk shirt and the string tie, and somehow he made even the overalls seem "dressy."

"Pray sit down," she said politely.

Standing his crutches against the table, he accepted the invitation. She resumed her sewing, eyes on the needle, lips pressed into a straight line and head bending low. He might have been a stranger on a bench in a public park for all the attention she was paying to him. She realized that she was rude and took satisfaction in it as the only way of expressing her determination not to reopen a closed incident.

"It's wonderful—wonderful!" he observed, in a voice of contemplative awe.

"What is?" she asked.

"Why, how fast you sew!"

"Yes?" she said, as automatically as she stitched. "Your wound is quite all right? No danger of infection?"

"I don't blame you!" he burst out. His tone had turned sad and urgent.

She looked up quickly, with the flare of a frown. His remark had brought her out of her pose and she became vivid and real.

"Blame me!" she demanded, sharply, as one who flies to arms.

But she met a new phase—neither banter, nor fancy, nor unvarying coolness in the face of fire. He was all contrition and apology. Must she be the audience to some fresh exhibition of his versatility?

"I do not blame you for feeling the way that you do," he said.

"How do you know how I feel?" she asked; and as far as he could see into her eyes there was nothing but the flash of sword-points.

"I don't. I only know how I think you feel—how you might well feel," he answered delicately. "After Pete let his gun drop in the store I should not have named terms for an encounter. I should have turned to the law for protection for the few hours that I had to remain in town."

"But to you that would have been avoiding battle!" she exclaimed.

"Which may take courage," he rejoined. "What I did was selfish. It was bravado, with no thought of your position."

"It is late to worry about that now. What does it matter? I did not want anyone killed on my account, and no one was," she insisted. "Besides, you should not be blue," this with a ripple of satire; "it is not quite all bravado to face Pete Leddy's gun at twenty yards."

"And it is not courage. Courage is a force of will driving you into danger for some high purpose. I want you to realize that I am not such a barbarian that I do not know that I could have kept you out of it all if I had had proper self-control. Though probably, on the impulse, I would do the fool thing over again! Yes, that's the worst of it!"

"There is a devil in him!" Ignacio's words were sounding in her ears. To how many men had he said, "I am going to kill you?" What other quarrels had he known in his wanderings from Colorado to Chihuahua?

"If you really want my opinion, I am glad, so far as I am concerned, that you did fight," she said lightly. "Aren't you a hero? Isn't the town free of Leddy? And you take the train in the morning!"

"Yes."

The monosyllable was drawn out rather faintly. For the first time since they had met on the pass she felt she was mistress of the situation. This time she had not to plead with him in fear for his life. She could regard him without any sense of obligation, this invader of her garden retreat who had to put in one more afternoon in a dull desert town before he was away to that outside world which she might know only through books and memory.

She rose exultantly, disregarding any formality that she would owe to the average guest; for an average guest he was not. Her attitude meant that she was having the last word; that she was showing her mettle.

He did not rise. He was staring into the sunlight, as if it were darkness alive with flitting spectres which baffled identification.

"Yes, back—back to armies of Leddys!" he said slowly.

But this she saw as still another pose. It did not make her pause in gathering up her sewing. She was convinced that there was nothing more for her to say, except to give their parting an appearance of ease and unconcern.

"Is it work you mean? You are not used to that, I take it?" she inquired a little sarcastically.

"Yes, call it work," he answered, looking away from the spectres and back to her.

"And you have never done any work!" she added.

"Not much," he admitted, with his old, airy carelessness. He was smiling at the spectres now, as he had at the dinosaur.

"As there is nothing particular about the garden that I can show you—" she was moving away.

"No, I will be walking back to the house," he said after she had taken a few steps. "Will you wait on my slow pace?"

He reached for his crutches, lifted himself to his feet and swung to her side. She who wished that the interview were over saw that it must be prolonged. Then suddenly she realized the weakness as well as the brusqueness of her attitude. She had been about to fly from him as from something that she feared. It was not necessary. It was foolish, even cowardly.

"I thought perhaps you preferred to be alone, you seemed so abstracted," she said, lamely; and then, as they came out into the sunlight in the circle, she began talking of the garden as she would to any visitor; of its beginnings, its growth, and its future, when her father's plans should have been fulfilled.

"And in all these years you have never been back East?" he asked.

"No. We are always planning a trip, but the money which we save for it goes into more plantings."

They had been moving slowly toward the house, but now he stopped and his glance swept the sky and rested on Galeria.

"It is the best valley of all! I knew it as soon as I saw it from the pass!" and the rapture of the scene was sounding in every syllable like chimes out of the distance. She knew that he was far away from the garden, and delaying, still delaying. If she spoke she felt that he would not hear what she said. If she went on it seemed certain that she would leave him standing there like a statue.

"And there is more land here to make gardens like this?" he asked slowly, absorbed.

"Yes, with water and labor and time."

Though his face was in the full light of the sun, it seemed at times in shadow; then it glowed, as if between two passions. For an instant it was grim, the chin coming forward, the brows contracting; then it was transformed with something that was as a complete surrender to the transport of irresistible temptation. He looked down at her quickly and she saw him in the mood of story-telling to the children, suffused with the radiance of a decision.

"I prefer the Leddys of Little Rivers to the Leddys of New York," he said. "I am not going to-morrow! I am going to have land and a home under the aegis of the Eternal Painter and in sight of Galeria, and worship at the shrine of fecund peace. Will you and the Doge help me?" he asked with an enthusiasm that was infectious. "May I go to his school of agriculture, horticulture, and floriculture?"

Dumfounded, she bent her head and stared at the ground to hide her astonishment.

"You want citizens, industrious young citizens, don't you?" he persisted.

"Yes, yes!" she said hastily and confusedly.

"Do you know a good piece of land?" he continued.

"Yes, several parcels," she answered, recovering her poise and smiling in mockery.

"Come on!" he cried.

He was taking long, jumping steps on his crutches as they went up the path.

"You will take me to look at the land, won't you, please—now? I want to get acquainted with my future estate. I mean to beat the Smiths at plums, Jim Galway at alfalfa, even rival Bob Worther at pumpkins and peonies. And you will help me lay out the flower garden, won't you? You see, I shall have to call in the experts in every line to start with, before I begin to improve on them and make them all jealous. I may find a kind of plum that will grow on alfalfa stalks," he hazarded. "What a horticultural sensation!"

"And a spineless cactus called the Leddy!"

His eyes were laughing into hers and hers irresistibly laughed back. She guessed that he was only joking. He had acted so well in the latest rôle that she had actually believed in his sincerity for a moment. He meant to take the train, of course, but his resourceful capriciousness had supplied him with a less awkward exit from the garden than she had provided. He would yet have the last word if she did not watch out—a last mischievous word at her expense.

"First, you will have to plow the ground, in the broiling hot sun," she said tauntingly, when they had passed around to the porch. She was starting into the house with nervous, precipitate triumph. The last word was hers, after all.

"But you are going to show me the land now!"

His tone was so serious and so hurt that she paused.

"And"—with the seriousness electrified by a glance that sought for mutual understanding—"and we are to forget about that duel and the whole hero-desperado business. I am a prospective settler who just arrived this afternoon. I came direct to headquarters to inquire about property. The Doge not being at home, won't you show me around?"

Again he had said the right thing at the right time, with a delightful impersonality precluding sentiment.

"I couldn't be unaccommodating," she admitted. "It is against all Little
Rivers ethics."

"I feel like a butterfly about to come out of his miserable chrysalis!
Haven't you a walking-stick? I am going to shed the crutches!"

She became femininely solicitous at once.

"Are you sure you ought? Did the doctor say you might? Is the wound healed?"

"There isn't any wound!" he answered. "That is one of the things which we are to forget."

She brought a stick and he laid the crutches on the porch.

He favored the lame leg, yet he kept up a clipping pace, talking the while as fast as the Doge himself as they passed through one of the side streets out onto the cactus-spotted, baking, cracked levels.

"This is it!" she said finally. "This is all that father and I had to begin with."

"Enough!" he answered, and held out his hands, palms open. "With callouses I will win luxuriance!"

She showed him the irrigation ditch from which he should draw his water; she told him of the first steps; She painted all the difficulties in the darkest colors, without once lessening the glow of his optimism. He was so overwhelmingly, boyishly happy that she had to be happy with him in making believe that he was about to be a real rancher. But he should not have the sport all on his side. He must not think that she accepted this latest departure of his imagination incarnated by his Thespian gift in anything but his own spirit.

"You plowing! You spraying trees for the scale! You digging up weeds! You stacking alfalfa! You settling down in one place as a unit of co-ordinate industry! You earning bread by the sweat of your brow! You with callouses!" Thus she laughed at him.

Very seriously he held out his hands and ran a finger around a palm and across the finger-joints:

"That is where I shall get them," he said. "But not on the thumb. I believe you get them on the thumb only by playing golf."

He asked about carpenters and laborers; he chose the site for his house; he plotted the walks and orchards. She could not refuse her advice. Who can about the planning of new houses and gardens? He had everything quite settled except the land grant from the Doge when they started back; while the sun, with the swift passage of time in such fascinating diversion, had swung low in its ellipse. When they reached the main street the Doge was on the porch passing his opinion on the Eternal Painter's evening work.

"Some very remarkable purples to-night, I admit, Your Majesty, without any intention of giving you too good an opinion of yourself; but otherwise, you are not up to your mark. There must have been a downpour in the rainy world on the other side of the Sierras that moistened your pigments. Next thing we know you will be turning water-colorist!" he was saying, when he heard Jack's voice.

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

"You are joking!" gasped the Doge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, it looks like Arabic."

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

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

"A tempting thought!" declared the Doge unctuously.

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

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

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

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

"Very!" declared Jack.

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

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

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

"You take nothing for yourself!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

XV

WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS

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

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

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

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

"Passably so!" answered Mary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The promise of what might come!"

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

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

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

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

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

"Why, the Doge has a kingdom!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not armed!" said Jack.

"Do you think he will keep his word?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"No," said Jack.

"But—"

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

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

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

"Señores! It is great honor! Be seated, señores!" he said with eloquent deference.

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

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

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

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

Pedro was quite impassive.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sí, señor!" said Pedro wincing.

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

"You got no gun!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Never the trail again!" Jack declared firmly.

"Sí, sí, sí—the trail again!"

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

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

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

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

"She—yes?" Jack asked.

"She—" Firio started again.

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

"Never mind!" he said, rather sharply.