"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.

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

"She has a big sadness, which makes her ride to the pass. She rides out

so she can ride back smiling."

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

As Firio did not understand the meaning of this he said nothing. Probably

he would have said nothing even if he had understood.

"I'll show you the nature of the big sadness and that the devil is a joy

devil when we harvest our first crop of alfalfa," Jack concluded. "Then I

shall make a holiday! Then I shall be a real rancher and something is

going to happen!"

"The trail!" exclaimed Firio, and the soft light in his eyes flashed.

"_Sí_! The trail and the big spurs and the revolver in the holster!"

"No!"

But Firio said "_Sí_"! with the supreme confidence of one who holds that

belief in fulfilment will make any wish come true.

XVI

A CHANGE OF MIND

It was Sunday afternoon; or, to date it by an epochal event, the day

after Jack's alfalfa crop had fallen before the mower. Mary was seated on

the bench under the avenue of umbrella-trees reading a thin edition of

Marcus Aurelius bound in flexible leather. Of late she had developed a

fondness for the more austere philosophers. Jack, whose mood was entirely

to the sonneteers, came softly singing down the avenue of palms and

presented himself before her in a romping spirit of interruption.

"O expert in floriculture!" he said, "the humble pupil acting as a

Committee of One has failed utterly to agree with himself as to the form

of his new flowerbed. There must be a Committee of Two. Will you come?"