Chapter XV: Part III: He Finds His Place in Life (3)

"You are his friends! You have come to rescue him!" Prather cried.

He seemed overcome by his relief. At all events, the wildness of his exclamation in face of the force barring the trail was without affectation.

"There is time? There is hope?"

"Yes! yes!" gasped Prather, as the men began to surround him.

"Why are you here? Why on his horse?"

"Leddy turned on me, too! I was fighting at Wingfield's side! We got two of them before dark! Then I was wounded and couldn't see to shoot. And I came for help. And you will be in time! He's in a good position!"

"I think you are lying!" said Galway.

"He couldn't help it!" said Bob Worther.

"How--how would I have his horse if he weren't willing?" protested Prather, frantically.

"By stealing it, in keeping with your character!"

"Yes! On general principles we ought to--"

"I have a piece of rope!" called a voice from the rear.

"There isn't any tree. But we can drop him over the wall of a chasm!"

Spectral figures with set faces appallingly grim in the thin moonlight pressed close to Prather.

"My God! No!" he pleaded, throatily. "We fought together, I tell you! We drew lots to see which one should take the risk of riding through danger to save the other!"

"Lying again!"

"Here's the rope! All we've got to do is to slip a noose over his head!"

"It's a clean piece of rope, isn't it?" said the Doge, in his mellow voice. "I don't think it's worth while soiling a clean piece of rope. Come! Taking his life is no way to save Jack's. Come, we are losing time!"

"Right, Doge!" said the man with the rope. "But it is some satisfaction to give him a scare."

"And take care of P.D.!" called another.

"Yes, if you founder Jack's pony you'll hear from us a-plenty!"

This was their adieu to John Prather, who was left to pursue his way in safety to his kingdom, while they rode on, following a hard path at the base of the range. Those with the best horses took the lead, while the heavier men, including the Doge, whose weight was telling on their mounts, fell to the rear. Mary was at the head, between Dr. Patterson and Jim Galway.

The stars flickered out; the moon grew pale, and for a while the horsemen rode into a wall of blackness, conscious of progress only by the sound of hoof-beats which they were relentlessly urging forward. Then dawn flashed up over the chaos of rocks, pursuing night with the sweep of its broadening, translucent wings across the valley to the other range. The tops of the cotton-woods rose out of the sparkling sea, floating free of any visible support of trunks, and the rescuers saw that they were near the end of their journey.

There was a faint sound of a shot; then of another shot and another. After that, the radiant, baffling silence of daybreak on uninhabited wastes, when the very active glory of the spreading, intensifying light ought, one feels, to bring paeans of orchestral splendor. It set desperation in the hearts of the riders, which was communicated to weary ponies driven to a last effort of speed. And still no more shots. The silence spoke the end of some tragedy with the first streaks from the rising sun clearing a target to a waiting marksman's eye.

Around the cotton-woods was no sign of human movement; nothing but inanimate, dark spots which developed into prostrate human forms, in pantomimic expression of the story of that night's work done in the moonlight and finished with the first flush of morning. Two of the outstretched figures were lying head to head a few yards apart on either side of the water-hole. The one on the side toward the ridge was recognized as Jack, still as death. Another a short distance behind him, at the sound of hoof-beats looked up with face blanched despite its dark skin, the parched lips stretched over the teeth; but in Firio's eyes there was still fire, as he whispered, "All right!" before he sank back unconscious. A wound in his shoulder had been bandaged, but the wrist of his gun hand lay beside a fresh red spot on the earth.

Jack had a bullet hole in the upper left arm plugged with a bit of cotton; and a deep furrow across the temple, which was bleeding. His rigid fingers were still gripping his six-shooter. He lay partly on his side, facing Leddy, who had rolled over on his back dead.

Mary and Dr. Patterson dropped from their horses simultaneously. The doctor pressed his hand over Jack's heart, to find it still beating.

"Jack!" they whispered. "Jack!" they called aloud.

He roused slightly, lifting his weary eyelids and gazing at them as if they were uncertain shadows who wanted some kind of an explanation from him which he had not the strength to give.

"We must drink--blaze away, Leddy," he murmured. "I'm coming down after the stars go out--close--close as you like--we must drink!"

"No vital hit!" said the doctor; while Mary bringing water assisted him to bathe the wounds before he dressed them. "No, not from a bullet!" he added, after the dressing was finished and he had one hand on Jack's hot brow and the other on his pulse.

Then he attended to Firio, who was talking incoherently:

"Take water-hole--boil coffee in the morning--quail for dinner, Señor Jack--_sí, sí_!"

When they had moved Jack and Firio into the shadow of the cotton-woods and forced water down their throats, Firio revived enough to recognize those around him and to cry out an inquiry about Jack; but Jack himself continued in a stupor, apparently unconscious of his surroundings and scarcely alive except for breathing. Yet, when litters of blankets and rifles tied together had been fashioned and attached to the pack-saddles of tandem burros, as he was lifted into place for the return he seemed to understand that he was starting on a journey; for he said, disjointedly:

"Don't forget Wrath of God--and Jag Ear is thirsty--and bury Wrath of God fittingly--give him an epitaph! He was gloomy, but it was a good gloom, a kind of kingly gloom, and he liked the prospect when at last he stuck his head through the blue blanket of the horizon."

Those of the party who remained behind for the last duty to the dead counted its most solemn moment, perhaps, the one that gave Wrath of God the honorable due of a soldier who had fallen face to the enemy. Bob Worther wrote the epitaph with a pencil on a bit of wood: "Here lies the gloomiest pony that ever was. The gloomier he was the better he went and the better Jack Wingfield liked him;" which was Bob's way of interpreting Jack's instructions.

Then Worther and his detail rode as fast as they might to overtake the slow-marching group in trail of the litters with the question that all Little Rivers had been asking ever since, "How is he?" A ghastly, painfully tedious journey this homeward one, made mostly in the night, with the men going thirsty in the final stretches in order that wet bandages might be kept on Jack's feverish head; while Dr. Patterson was frequently thrusting his little thermometer between Jack's hot, cracking lips.

"If he were free of this jouncing! It is a terrible strain on him, but the only thing is to go on!" the doctor kept repeating.

But when Jack lay white and still in his bedroom and Firio was rapidly convalescing, the fever refused to abate. It seemed bound to burn out the life that remained after the hemorrhage from his wounds had ceased. Men found it hard to work in the fields while they waited on the crisis. John Wingfield, Sr. sat for hours under Dr. Patterson's umbrella-tree in moody absorption. He talked to all who would talk to him. Always he was asking about the duel in the _arroyo_ which was fought in Jack's way. He could not hear enough of it; and later he almost attached himself to the one eye-witness of the final duel, which had been fought in Leddy's way.

When Firio was well enough to walk out he was to be found in a long chair on Jack's porch, ever raising a warning finger for silence to anyone who approached and looking out across the yard to Jag Ear, who was winning back the fat he had lost in a constitutional crisis, and P.D., who, after bearing himself first and last in a manner characteristic of a pony who was P.D. but never Q., seemed already none the worse for the hardships he had endured. The master of twenty millions would sit on the steps, while Firio occupied the chair and regarded him much as if he were a blank wall. But at times Firio would humor the persistent inquirer with a few abbreviated sentences. It was out of such fragments as this that John Wingfield, Sr. had to piece the story of the fight for the water-hole.

"Señor Jack and Mister Prather, they no look alike," said Firio one day, evidently bound to make an end of the father's company. "Anybody say that got bad eyes. Mister Prather"--and Firio smiled peculiarly--"I call him the mole! He burrow in the sand, so! His hand tremble, so! He act like a man believe himself the only god in the world when he in no danger, but when he get in danger he act like he afraid he got to meet some other god!"

"But Jack? Now, after Prather had gone?" persisted the father greedily.

"We glad the mole go. It sort of hurt inside to think a man like him. He make you wonder what for he born."

John Wingfield, Sr. half rose in a sudden movement, as if he were about to go, but remained in response to another emotion that was stronger than the impulse.

"And Jack? He kept his head! He figured out his chances coolly! Now, that trick he played by going up on the ridge under cover of darkness?"

"No trick!" said Firio resentfully, in instinctive defence. "That the place to fight! Señor Jack he see it."

"And all through the night you kept firing?"

"_Sí,_ after moon very bright and over our shoulders in their faces! _Sí_, at the little lumps that lie so still. When they move quick like they stung, we know we hit!"

"Ah, that was it! You hit! You hit! And the other fellows couldn't. You had the light with you--everything! Jack had seen to that! He used his head! He--he was strong, strong!"

Quite unconsciously, John Wingfield, Sr. rubbed his palms together.

"When you pleased you always rub your hands same as Mister Prather," observed Firio.

"Oh! Do I? I--" John Wingfield, Sr. clasped his fingers together tightly. "Yes, and the finish of the fight--how was that?"

"Sometimes, when there no firing, Señor Jack and Leddy call out to each other. Leddy he swear hard, like he fight. Señor Jack he sing back his answers cheerful, like he fight. Toward morning we both wounded and only Leddy and one other man alive on his side. When a cloud slip over the moon and the big darkness before morning come, we creep down from the ridge and with first light we bang-bang quick--and I no remember any more."

"Forced the fighting--forced it right at the end!" cried John Wingfield, Sr. in the flush of a great pride.

"The aggressive, that is it--that is the way to win, always!"

"But Señor Jack no fight just to win!" said Firio. "He no want to fight. In the big darkness, before we crawl down to the water-hole, he call out to Leddy to make quits. He almost beg Leddy. But Leddy, he say: 'I never quit and I get you!' 'Sorry,' says Señor Jack, with the devil out again, 'sorry--and we'll see!' No, Señor Jack no like to fight till you make him fight and the devil is out. He fight for water; he fight for peace. He no want just to win and kill, but--but--" bringing his story to an end, Firio looked hard at the father, his velvety eyes shot with a comprehending gleam as he shrugged his shoulders--"but you no understand, you and the mole!"

John Wingfield, Sr. shifted his gaze hurriedly from the little Indian. His face went ashen and it was working convulsively as he assisted himself to rise by gripping the veranda post.

"Why do you think that?" he asked.

"I know!" said Firio.

His lips closed firmly. That was all he had to say. John Wingfield, Sr. turned away with the unsteady step of a man who is afraid of slipping or stumbling, though the path was hard and even.

Out in the street he met the cold nods of the people of a town where his son had a dominion founded on something that was lacking in his own. And one of those who nodded to him ever so politely was a new citizen, who had once been a unit of his own city within a city.

Peter Mortimer had arrived in Little Rivers only two days after his late employer. Peter had been like some old tree that everybody thinks has seen its last winter. But now he waited only on the good word from the sick-room for the sap of renewed youth to rise in his veins and his shriveled branches to break into leaf at the call of spring.

And the good word did come thrilling through the community. The physical crisis had passed. The fever was burning itself out. But a mental crisis developed, and with it a new cause for apprehension. Even after Jack's temperature was normal and he should have been well on the road to convalescence, there was a veil over his eyes which would not allow him to recognize anybody. When he spoke it was in delirium, living over some incident of the past or of sheer imagination.

Now he was the ancestor, fitting out his ship:

"No, you can't come! A man who is a malingerer on the London docks would be a malingerer on the Spanish Main. I don't want bullies and boasters. Let them stay at home to pick quarrels in the alleys and cheer the Lord Mayor's procession!"

Now his frigate was under full sail, sighting the enemy:

"Suppose they have two guns to our one! That makes it about even! We'll get the windward side, as we have before! Who cares about their guns once we start to board!"

Another time he was on the trail:

"I'll grow so strong, so strong that he can never call me a weakling again! He will be proud of me. That is my only way to make good."

Then he was apprenticed to the millions:

"All this detail makes me feel as if my brains were a tangled spool of thread. But I will master it--I will!"

Again, he was happily telling stories to the children; or tragically pleading with Leddy that there had been slaughter enough around the water-hole; or serenely planning the future which he foresaw for himself when the phantoms were laid:

"I may not know how to run the store, but I do seem to fit in here. We can find the capital! We will build the dam ourselves!"

His body grew stronger, with little appreciable change otherwise. For an instant he would seem to know the person who was speaking to him; then he was away on the winds of delirium.

"His mind is too strong for him not to come out of this all right. It is only a question of time, isn't it?" insisted the father.

"There was a far greater capacity in him for suffering in that hellish fight than there was in Pete Leddy," said Dr. Patterson. "He had sensitiveness to impressions which was born in him, at the same time that a will of steel was born in him--the sensitiveness of the mother, perhaps, and the will of the ancestor. His life hung by a thread when we found him and his nerves had been twisted and tortured by the ordeal of that night. And that isn't all. There was more than fighting. Something that preceded the fight was even harder on him. I knew from his look when he set out for Agua Fria that he was under a terrible strain; a strain worse than that of a few hours' battle--the kind that had been weighing day after day on the will that grimly sustained its weight. And that wound in the head was very close, very, and it came at the moment when he collapsed in reaction after that last telling shot. Something snapped then. There was a fracture of the kind that only nature can set. Will he come out of this delirium, you ask? I don't know. Much depends upon whether that strain is over for good or if it is still pressing on his mind. When he rises from his bed he may be himself or he may ride away madly into the face of the sun. I don't know. Nobody on earth can know."

"Yes, yes!" said John Wingfield, Sr. slowly.

In Jack's wildest moments it was Mary's voice that had the most telling effect. However low she spoke he seemed always to recognize the tone and would greet it with a smile and frequently break into verses and scraps of remembered conversations of his boyhood exile in villa gardens. One morning, when she and Dr. Patterson had entered the room together, Jack called out miserably:

"Just killing, killing, killing! What will Mary say to me, now?"

He raised his hands, fingers spread, and stared at them with a ghastly look. She sprang to the bedside and seized them fast in hers, and bending very close to him, as if she would impart conviction with every quivering particle of her being, she said:

"She thinks you splendid! She is glad, glad! It is just what she wanted you to do. She wished every bullet that you fired luck--luck for your sake, to speed it straight to the mark!"

He seemed to understand what she was saying, as one understands that shade is cool after the broiling torment of the sun.

"Luck will always come at your command, Mary!" he whispered, repeating his last words when he left the Ewold garden to go to the wars.

"And she wants you to rest--just rest--and not worry!"

This had the effect of a soothing draught. Smilingly he fell back on the pillow and slept.

"You put some spirit into that!" said the doctor, after he and Mary had tiptoed out of the room; "a little of the spirit in keeping with a dark-eyed girl who lives in the land of the Eternal Painter."

"All I had!" answered Mary, with simple earnestness.

At noon Jack was still sleeping. He slept on through the last hours of the day.

"The first long stretch he has had," ran the bulletin, from tongue to tongue, "and real sleep, too--the kind that counts!"

In the late afternoon, when the coolness and the shadows of evening were creeping in at the doors and windows, the doctor, Peter Mortimer, the father, and Firio were on the veranda, while Mrs. Galway was on watch by the bedside.

"He's waking!" she came out to whisper.

The doctor hastened past her into the sick-room. As he entered, Jack looked up with a bright, puzzled light in his eyes.

"Just what does this mean?" he asked. "Just how does it happen that I am here? I thought that I--"

"We brought you in some days ago," the doctor explained. "And since you took the water-hole your mind has been enjoying a little vacation, while we moved your body about as we pleased."

"I took the water-hole, then! And Firio? Firio? He--"

"He is just waiting outside to congratulate you on the re-establishment of the old cordial relations between mind and body," the doctor returned; and slipped out to call Firio and to announce: "He is right as rain, right as rain!" news that Mrs. Galway set forth immediately to herald through the community.

As for Firio, he strode into Jack's presence with the air of conqueror, sage, and prophet in one.

"Is it really you, Firio? Come here, so that I can feel of you and make sure, you son of the sun!"

Jack put out his thin, white hand to Firio, and the velvet of Firio's eyes was very soft, indeed.

"Did you know when they brought you in?" Jack asked.

"When burro stumble I feel ouch and see desert and then I drift away up to sky again," answered Firio. "All right now, eh? Pretty soon you so strong I have to broil five--six--seven quail a day and still you hungry!"

The doctor who had been looking on from the doorway felt a vigorous touch on the arm and turned to hear John Wingfield, Sr. asking him to make way. With a grimace approaching a scowl he drew back free of Jack's sight and held up his hand in protest. "You had better not excite him!" he whispered.

"But I am his father!" said John Wingfield, Sr. with something of his old, masterful manner in a moment of irritation, as he pushed by the doctor. He paused rather abruptly when his eyes met Jack's. A faint flush, appearing in Jack's cheeks, only emphasized his wanness and the whiteness of his neck and chin and forehead.

"Well, Jack, right as rain, they say! I knew you would come out all right! It was in the blood that--" and the rest of John Wingfield, Sr.'s speech fell away into inarticulateness.

It was a weak, emaciated son, this son whom he saw in contrast to the one who had entered his office unannounced one morning; and yet the father now felt that same indefinable radiation of calm strength closing his throat that he had felt then. Jack was looking steadily in his father's direction, but through him as through a thin shadow and into the distance. He smiled, but very faintly and very meaningly.

"Father, you will keep the bargain I have made," he said, as if this were a thing admitting of no dispute. "It is fair to the other one, isn't it? Yes, we have found the truth at last, haven't we? And the truth makes it all clear for him and for you and for me."

"You mean--it is all over--you stay out here for good--you--" said John Wingfield, Sr. gropingly.

Then another figure appeared in the doorway and Jack's eyes returned from the distances to rest on it fondly. In response to an impulse that he could not control, Peter Mortimer was peering timidly into the sick-room.

"Why, Peter!" exclaimed Jack, happily. "Come farther in, so I can see more of you than the tip of your nose."

After a glance of inquiry at the doctor, which received an affirmative nod, Peter ventured another step.

"So it's salads and roses, is it, Peter?" Jack continued. "Well, I think you may telegraph any time, now, that the others can come as soon as they are ready and their places are filled."

Thus John Wingfield, Sr. had his answer; thus the processes of fate that Dr. Bennington had said were in the younger man had worked out their end. Under the spur of a sudden, powerful resolution, the father withdrew. In the living-room he met Jasper Ewold. The two men paused, facing each other. They were alone with the frank, daring features from Velasquez's brush and with the "I give! I give!" of the Sargent, both reflecting the afterglow of sunset; while the features of the living--John Wingfield, Sr.'s, in stony anger, and Jasper Ewold's, serene in philosophy--told their story without the touch of a painter's genius.

"You have stolen my son, Jasper Ewold!" declared John Wingfield, Sr. with the bitterness of one whose personal edict excluded defeat from his lexicon, only to find it writ broad across the page. "I suppose you think you have won, damn you, Jasper Ewold!"

The Doge flushed. He seemed on the point of an outburst. Then he looked significantly from the portrait of the ancestor to the portrait of the mother.

"He was never yours to lose!" was the answer, without passion.

John Wingfield, Sr. recoiled, avoiding a glance at the walls where the pictures hung. The Doge stepped to one side to leave the way clear. John Wingfield, Sr. went out unsteadily, with head bowed. But he had not gone far before his head went up with a jerk and he struck fist into palm decisively. Rigidly, ignoring everyone he passed and looking straight ahead, he walked rapidly toward the station, as if every step meant welcome freedom, from the earth that it touched.

His private car was attached to the evening express, and while it started homeward with the king and the determinedly filial heir-apparent to the citadel of the push-buttons, through all the gardens of Little Rivers ran the joyous news that Jack was "right as rain." It was a thing to start a continual exchange of visits and to keep the lights burning in the houses unusually late.

But all was dark and silent out at Bill Lang's store. After their return from Agua Fria, the rescuing party, Jim Galway leading, had attended to another matter. The remnants of Pete Leddy's gang, far from offering any resistance, explained that they had business elsewhere which admitted of no delay. There was peace in the valley of Little Rivers. Its phantoms had been laid at the same time as Jack's.

XXXVIII

THEIR SIDE OF THE PASS

"Persiflage! Persiflage!" cried the Doge.

He and Jack were in the full tilt of controversy, Jack pressing an advantage as they came around the corner of the Ewold house. It was like the old times and better than the old times. For now there was understanding where then there had been mystery. The stream of their comradeship ran smoothly in an open country, with no unsounded depths.

"But I notice that you always say persiflage just as I am getting the better of the argument!" Jack whipped back.

"Has it taken you all this time to find that out? For what purpose is the word in the English vocabulary? But I'll take the other side, which is the easy one, next time, and then we'll see! Boom! boom!" The Doge pursed out his lips in mock terrorization of his opponent. "You are pretty near yourself again, young sir," he added, as he paused at the opening in the hedge.

"Yes, strength has been fairly flooding back the last two or three days. I can feel it travelling in my veins and making the tissues expand. It is glorious to be alive, O Doge!"

"Now, do you want me to take the other side on that question so you can have another unearned victory? I refuse to humor the invalid any longer and I agree. The proposition that it is glorious to live on such an afternoon as this is carried unanimously. But I will never agree that you can grow dates the equal of mine."

"Not until my first crop is ripe; then there will be no dispute!"

"That is real persiflage!" the Doge called after Jack.

Jack had made his first visit to the Doge's garden since he had left it to meet Prather and Leddy rather brief when he found that Mary was not at home. She had ridden out to the pass. Her trips to the pass had been so frequent of late that he had seen little of her during his convalescence. Yet he had eaten her jelly exclusively. He had eaten it with his bread, his porridge, his dessert, and with the quail that Firio had broiled. He had even intimated his willingness to mix it with his soup. She advised him to stir it into his coffee, instead.

When he was seated in the long chair on the porch and she called to ask how he was, they had kept to the domain of nonsense, with never a reference to sombre memories; but she was a little constrained, a little shy, and he never gave her cause to raise the barrier, even if she had been of the mind in face of a possible recurrence of former provocations while he was weak and easily tired. It was enough for him to hear her talk; enough to look out restfully toward the gray masses of the range; enough to know that the desert had brought him oblivion to the past; enough to see his future as clear as the V of Galeria against the sky, sharing the life of the same community with her.

And what else? He was almost in fear of the very question that was never out of his mind. She might wish him luck in the wars, but he knew her too well to have any illusions that this meant the giving of the great thing she had to give, unless in the full spontaneity of spirit. This afternoon, with the flood of returning strength, the question suddenly became commanding in a fresh-born suspense.

As he walked back to the house he met Belvy Smith and some of the children. Of course they asked for a story, and he continued one about a battered knight and his Heart's Desire, which he had begun some days previously.

"He wasn't a particularly handsome knight or particularly good--inclined to mischief, I think, when he forgot himself--but he was mightily in earnest. He didn't know how to take no. Say 'No!' to him and push him off the mountain top and there he was, starting for the peak again! And he was not so foolish as he might seem. When he reached the top he was happy just to get a smile from his Heart's Desire before he was tossed back again. His fingers were worn clear down to the first joint and his feet off up to the knees, so he could not hold on to the seams of canyons as well as before. He would have been a ridiculous spectacle if he weren't so pitiful. And that wasn't the worst of it. He was pretty well shot to pieces by the brigands whom he had met on his travels. With every ascent there was less of him to climb, you see. In fact, he was being worn down so fast that pretty soon there wouldn't be much left of him except his wishbone. That was indestructible. He would always wish. And after the hardest climb of all, here he is very near the top again, and--"

"And--and--"

"I'll have to finish this story later," said Jack, sending the youngsters on their way, while he went his own to call to Firio, as he entered the yard: "Son of the sun, I feel so strong that I am going for a ride!"

"You wear the big spurs and the grand chaps?" Firio asked.

Jack hesitated thoughtfully.

"No, just plain togs," he answered. "I think we will hang up that circus costume as a souvenir. We are past that stage of our career. My devil is dead."

It was Firio's turn to be thoughtful.

"_Sí_! We had enough fight! We get old and sober! _Sí_, I know! We settle down. I am going to begin to shave!" he concluded, stroking the black down on his boyish lip.

With the town behind him and the sinking sun over his shoulder, the battered knight rode toward the foothills and on up the winding path, oblivious of the Eternal Painter's magic and conscious only that every step brought him nearer his Heart's Desire. Here was the rock where she was seated when he had first seen her. What ages had passed since then! And there, around the escarpment, he saw her pony on the shelf! Dropping P.D.'s reins, he hurried on impetuously. With the final turn he found Mary seated on the rock where she had been the day that he had come to say farewell before he went to battle with the millions. Now as then, she was gazing far out over that sea of singing, quivering light, and the crunch of his footsteps awakened her from her revery.

But how differently she looked around! Her breaths were coming in a happy storm, her face crimsoning, her nostrils playing in trembling dilation. In her eyes he saw open gates and a long vista of a fair highway in a glorious land; and the splendor of her was something near and yielding. He sank down beside her. Her hands stole into his; her head dropped on his shoulder; and he felt a warm and palpitating union with the very breath of her life.

"What do I see!" cried the Eternal Painter. "Two human beings who have climbed up as near heaven as they could and seem as happy as if they had reached it!"

"We have reached it!" Jack called back. "And we like it, you hoary-bearded, Olympian impersonality!"

Thus they watched the sun go down, gilding the foliage of their Little Rivers, seeing their future in the fulness and richness of the life of their choice, which should spread the oasis the length of that valley, and knowing that any excursions to the world over the pass would only sink their roots deeper in the soil of the valley that had given them life.

"Jack, oh, Jack! How I did fight against the thing that was born in me that morning in the _arroyo_! I was in fear of it and of myself. In fear of it I ran from you that day you climbed down to the pine. But I shan't run again--not so far but that I can be sure you can catch me. Jack, oh, Jack! And this is the hand that saved you from Leddy--the right hand! I think I shall always like it better than the left hand! And, Jack, there is a little touch of gray on the temples"--Mary was running her fingers very, very gently over the wound--"which I like. But we shall be so happy that it will be centuries before the rest of your hair is gray! Jack, oh, Jack!"