Austin, Mary | A Shepherd of the Sierras and other stories

A Shepherd of the Sierras & other texts Mary Austin

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CONTENTS A Shepherd of the Sierras [1900] Agua Dulce [1909] An Appreciation of H. G. Wells, novelist Art Influence in the West [1915] Bitterness of Women Frustrate [1912] Mahala Joe [1904] Spring o’ the year [1908] The Conversion of Ah Lew Sing [1897] The Hoodoo of the Minnietta [1907] The last Antilope [1903] The Little Coyote [1902] The Little Town of the Grape Vines [1903] The Mother of Felipe [1892] The Pot of Gold [1901] The Return of Mr. Wills [1907] The Search of Jean Baptiste [1903] The Song-Makers [1911] The Walking Woman [1907] The Woman at Eighteen-Mile [1909] The Wooing of the Señorita [1897]

A Shepherd of the Sierras [1900] THE two ends of this story belong, one to Pierre Jullien, and the other to the lame coyote in the pack of the Ceriso. Pierre will have it that the Virgin is at the bottom of the whole affair. However that may be, it is known that Pierre Jullien has not lost so much as a lamb of the flocks since the burning of Black Mountain.

Black Mountain stands up eastward against the Ceriso, its broken ridges spiked with clumps of pine, and its canons dark with tamarack reaches and forests of silver fir. And in the meadows of Black Mountain Pierre Jullien feeds his flocks from year's end to year's end; a little excursion down to the Ceriso when the snows are heavy and the rains tearing at its foundations, and another to the east slope for the shearing, but never out of sight or shadow of it.

Certainly the Virgin had something to do with Pierre's having a flock in the first place; a hired shepherd, he, who between good will and the wine cup could never get away from a shearing with more than enough to clothe him for the year to come.

And finally, by misadventure and unwise

counsel, it fell out that Pierre was not hired to go with the sheep for all of one year.

It is said that when Pierre heard of this, and heard it in no friendly manner from Lebecque who had got the place for himself, that he called for another bottle.

He pledged his friends and his luck, he whistled merrily to his dogs; he was for the hills. For what has a man bred to the hills to do with the town? The airs of it made him sick. The sights and sounds of it, good enough to gape at once in a year's wanderings, were a vexation and a confusion. So he made back to Black Mountain with his dogs, to live by the knowledge of it that had taken so many years to the gathering. He built him a hut, he cut him firewood, he tracked the wild bee to the hiving rocks and the bear to the thickets of thimbleberries. He set him traps and snares, for such of the wild creatures as are not fit for food have pelts that may be sold. Once in a month or so he fared forth to town across the Ceriso for a cup of wine and a taste of gossip, a bit of sugar and a morsel of flour. Altogether Pierre Jullien was well content.

There blows a great wind in the west

before the rains; a nerve-racking, eddying wind that gathers small dust and sand and goes roaring with it across the open places. It was about the time of high wind when Pierre went down to the town, and he fought up across the Ceriso in the teeth of it. By all counts he should have stayed safe with his dogs until the wind was done, but withal Pierre had a tender heart. He thought of his traps. Doubtless it would have been better if wild creatures could do without being trapped, but since it was not so, it is best to trap them as gently as possible. So because he had not visited his traps for two days Pierre must needs be fighting the high wind across the Ceriso.

He made better work of it than the dogs who whimpered and slunk, knowing very well it was no sort of a day for an honest beast to be abroad in. The wind bit them, it beat and battered them, and scoured them with fine sand. There was no looking in such a wind; only feeling the ground underfoot and knowing the way by the rise of it. And in the midst of their labor a plaintive cry broke and scattered against the dead wall of the wind. The dogs whined to hear it; clearly, to travel such a day was rank folly, but lost sheep--that was another matter.

"Nay, nay, 'tis none of your minding," said Pierre. "Well, then, if you must, be off!" Not one of the three but knew what had happened. A flock caught in the open must be well shepherded to hold in such a wind; once scattered it may take days to bring them together again. The dogs found the ewe and brought it to Pierre, and were off again as he gave the word, wriggling, yelping, and panting with delight. This was old times indeed! They had great work of it, the man and the dogs, wrestling in the smother of the wind rocking up and down the hollow of the crater. But they brought the stragglers together, a score or more of them, and held them under the lee of a hill until the wind was laid. About midafternoon its spent wings trailed the dust, its breath shook the tops of the sage, and no more. The air was warm; it was clear and smelt of the earth. Pierre and his sheep went forth to look for the master of the flock. They worked up the south slope whence all the Ceriso lay open as the hollow of a hand, and saw the hill-folk beginning to stir about their business, but no sheep. Pierre was an honest man, and shepherd who knew how serious a thing it might be to lose twenty sheep of the flock

in a single wind. He stayed that night in the Ceriso and until the middle of the morning, holding the sheep well toward the middle of the valley. By that time a good shepherd should have picked them up again, but none came. The brand was strange. Many flocks passed the Ceriso at that season, going hastily, because of scant pasturage, to winter in the South. Pierre drove the sheep to Black Mountain, and no question was ever raised. As for the sheep they were very well content, and the dogs were happy to be at their work again.

So Pierre Jullien became a shepherd in his own right, and in the glacier meadows of Black Mountain the flock increased beyond expectation. Who shall say that the Virgin did not have a hand in it? Not Pierre Jullien, at any rate; he was careful to return thanks as often as he went to church, which was at least once in the year. But Pierre kept his traps going. Sheep, according to the law of the beasts, were to be eaten, and beasts, according to Pierre Jullien, to be caught. He trapped a bear cub, wildcats, a fox now and then, and a wolverine, but not often a coyote. A coyote is a thief and the son of a thief. He will spring a trap and eat the bait. He will gnaw

a rope and let a staked horse go free; steal thejerke drying on the trees, and the bacon hanging against the wall; nose into a still camp and steal anything he can lay jaws upon. Ettienne Picquard will have it that he will steal the frying pan off the fire if there is a smell of meat about it. These are the things that Pierre Jullien believed about the coyotes; and first and last they stole a good many of Pierre's lambs.

Nevertheless, his flock increased until it had become two bands, and Pierre, going down to the shearing, brought Ettienne Picquard to help him tend them.

Ettienne had gone afar with his portion, foraging into the pastures claimed by the flocks of the C+ brand. For Ettienne dearly loved a wrangle, and would as lieve fight for the pasture of Pierre Jullien's sheep as anything else. And one morning Pierre woke with the smell of smoke in his nostrils. It was a smell of green wood, not the thin blue ghost of a smoke that quavered up from his own well-banked fire, but the rank, acrid smell of a forest burning. Pierre should know that smell.

From what dropped coals of a hunter's pipe, from what slothful shepherd's camp, the fire broke, or what woodman's stupid

greed lit the close-locked ranks of living pines only the wood creatures knew, and could not tell. Pierre thought of Ettienne and the sheep and wished them well. The wind set well away from him; the fire would drive out many pests, and the burnt districts made better feed in a year or so.

Without doubt everything fell out for the best.

The fire began in a tamarack canon and spread upward all one week slowly. The smoke rose from it a white, heavenpointing spire, a wraith, a warning; and fanned out at last a wan, fluttering beacon.

It tiptoed, it swayed, and genuflected, and shook itself in an agony of entreatment.

But no one came to put out the fire.

Quenching a forest fire is a difficult matter; and then it is always some one else's business. Only the mountain knew how long it had been growing, those pines that went out in a flare and a little crackling, and nobody cared. At the end of a week a wind rose and drove the fire straight across the mountain toward Pierre Jullien's meadow.

Pierre's hut stood in a little island of pines on a knoll swept about by a strip of meadow and a running stream. Thence he fed out with the home flock as far as he

might to the gentian hollows deep set among the rifted hills.

When the pillar of smoke cast up by the burning forest grew red by night Pierre went cautiously, keeping the flocks close and watching every turn of the wind. It dropped a little and the fire with it. Then Pierre, to save the home pasture, moved the flock across the ridge away from the fire. He made all safe in his house, and trusted to his luck and the chances of the wind. If the fire would come, it would come; it was not to be stayed for all Pierre's stopping at home. The new meadow was deep set and fenced about with barrenness, so that Pierre and his dogs could lie in the sun and watch the portentous smoke above the mountains.

That the fire was heavy and coming his way he had known by the wild wood creatures that pushed by his meadow with an incessant panting and padding of feet.

Seven deer drank at his brook in the gray of the morning, wings whirred steadily, and at all hours hoofed creatures broke through the thickets of ceanothus, all with incredible haste, but dumbly, heralded by the noise of their going. And in the night the wind whipped the fire along the steep,

and about the meadow where Pierre was lying with his sheep. It rioted in the resindripping pines, sung as it wrestled with them, and grew merry as it raged.

The sound of its singing woke Pierre and the sheep in the middle hours. But the dogs, mindful of the blethering flocks, held them faithfully, huddling toward Pierre, who wept with his face upon his hands. "Oh, my house," he whimpered, "my dear house!"

He had built it of the soil and what grew therein; it was part of the mountain, and part of him; and it was all his home.

With the fire, cattle broke into the meadow from the roaring wood, and an antlered stag, snorting with fear, thrust into the midst of them. Quail and small fourfooted things fled, mad and blind with terror, past the haven into the wood and fire again, and when the morning cut the smoke that overhung, Pierre was aware of a wild-cat that licked a dead kitten between him and the flame.

Lastly out of the blaze limped a coyote, dragging a crushed foot, and deeply burned across the flank. Eight hours the fire panted about the meadow, tugged and

strained toward them from the pines, and Pierre, trampling blazing brands, smothering sparks, heartening and helping, knew himself a brother to beasts, and yet more a man. For, ever as he moved, the dumb shouldering cattle shifted their place a little, not to lose the sense of his presence, the sheep pressed to his knees, the dogs came whimpering and went back to their stations comforted. The coyote, dressing his burn with his tongue, laid nose to the ground as Pierre went by, and cried with the pain of his hurt as a child might.

The fire ripped and tore at the heart of the wood and poured the bitter smoke above them thick and hot, and through all Pierre could hear the water hissing among burning logs, and the breathy whine of the cat above her dead. Pierre thought how she must have come from hunting to her lair and found the fire before her. It was written in her singed and cinder-blackened coat how she had won her way far and slowly, heat driven, carrying her dead by turns, her mother's grief having way even in the dreadful hollow of the singing flames.

"Mother of God," said the simple heart of Pierre Jullien, "but I set me no more traps for the mothers of wild things."

The danger passed with the day, and the stream, cut off in mid-morning by the falling timbers, came back to the meadow. Pierre divided his jerke with the cat and the coyote, and woke in the night, at the crash of falling trees, to catch the glow of their unwinking, regardful eyes.

The stag left at the dawn, going down the canon with wide fearful leaps amid the burning, and after him the cattle picked out a way along the water courses. From where the wood had been rose up the ghost of a forest; for every tree an uptrailing, wavering smoke-spirit, topped by umbrageous clouds, and flame-flowers broke and blossomed in dissolving embers.

The wild-cat, putting as much space as possible between her and the dogs, grown fearful with the passing of the fire, essayed the smoke forest by one and another of the trails she had known, breaking away at last by well-considered bounds, and looking back to the trampled meadow and the sheep huddling between Pierre and the lame coyote.

The coyote, made unhappy by the broadening day, drew up to the meadow's

edge, but having put foot among the hot ashes, set up his drawling whine looking back toward Pierre. "Stay where thou art, friend," said the shepherd. "It will be long before you can abide the smell of fire."

Pierre fed him that day with the offal of a sheep he had killed for his own eating, and ever as he busied himself about the flock the coyote came and smelled of all the places where he had been. "Thou wilt know me again by that token," said Pierre, "and I you by that burnt flank, should you fall into any trap of mine." And being in a merry mood Pierre upbraided him with the evil ways of his kind, until the coyote slunk abashed from the sound of his voice to the edge of the clearing.

It was the third day, and a blessed rain was falling, before Pierre could make way with his flock across the burned district, looking back from the top of the ridge to see the lame coyote getting himself clumsily down to the lower levels, looking back also at Pierre. Now, by good fortune which fell little short of a miracle, Pierre found his house unhurt, only the outer ring of pines heat shriveled past any spring's redeeming. And as for Ettienne, the fire had not been near him.

The burned coyote eschewed a forest country thereafter, and going down to the sagebrush levels joined the pack on the east side of the Ceriso. Pierre saw him there the first time he came thither feeding with his flocks, and knew him by his rocking, three-legged gait, and the long scar, newly healed, upon his flank. That the coyote knew him Pierre affirms, for, seeing him, the howler dropped upon his haunches dog fashion and waited until the flock had gone by. And this is true, that Pierre has given up his traps and yet has not lost by beasts so much as a weanling.

And the shepherds of Black Mountain and the Ceriso, and as far north as the hills of Augustora, are divided between the opinion of Pierre, who will protest that it is the work of the Virgin, and the opinion of Ettienne Picquard, who says that Pierre has lived like a wild creature so long that the beasts mistake him for one of themselves. But for myself, I think, as I said at the beginning, this end of the story belongs to the lame coyote.

Agua Dulce [1909] THE Los Angeles special got in so late that day that if the driver of the Mojave stage had not, from having once gone to school to me, acquired the habit of minding what I said, I should never have made it. I hailed it from the station, and he swung the four about in the wide street as the wind swept me toward the racked old coach in a blinding whirl of dust.

It wrapped my skirts about the iron gear of the coach as I climbed to the seat beside the driver, and, as we dropped the town behind us, lifted my hat and searched out my hairpins. But it was the desert wind[illustration omitted] and the smell it carried was the smell of marrow-fat weed and gilias after the sun goes down; so, because I had been very unhappy away from it, and was now drunk with the joy of renewal, and as in my case there would be no time for a toilet proper to the road until we came to the Eighteen-Mile House, I was satisfied merely to cling to the pitching front of the coach and let the wind do what it would. The sky was alight and saffrontinted, the mountains bloomed with violet shadows; as we came whirling by the point

of Dead-Man we saw the wickiups of the Paiutes, and the little hearth fires all awink among the sage. They had a look of home.

"There's some," said the driver to the desert at large, "that thinks Indians ain't properly folks, but just a kind of cattle;" then, as we jolted forward in a chuck, he swore deeply and brought the team about, putting back my instinctive motion to steady the lurching stage with a gesture so sharp and repellent that I sat up suddenly in offence.

"Don't you go for to mind me," he said, only half mindful himself of what he had done, and went on staring after the hearth fires of the Paiutes. By which I knew there was a story there that had something to do with the twilight fires and the homey look of the little huts. Hours later, when we came out on the mesa above Red Rock, white star-froth flecking the black vault over us and the road white between the miles of low black sage before, we had got to this point in it.

"It was out there," he said, waving his whip toward the gulf of blackness, "when I was doin' assessment work for McKenna, nigh

to the end of nowhere, I . . . took up with an Indian woman." He hurried past this admission with intent to cover it from possible reproach, telling how McKenna had dumped him with three months' grub by a water-hole called Agua Dulce, distant a mile or two from the claims he was expected to work.

"Because," he said, "it was cheaper than packin' water, me bein' alone, and McKenna, for some reason I never rightly guessed, keen to keep the business on the quiet. McKenna would be visitin' me once a month or so, and I 'lowed I wouldn't be lonesome much," he laughed, "and I didn't after I . . . took up with Catameneda.

"Seems like white women can't get to understand why a man takes up with a mahala. They think it's just badness and so they're down on it . . . maybe it is with some. . . . but not when they are like . . . like me . . . and Catameneda. . . . There's something away down in a man that his own womenfolks never understand . . . an' you spend all your life trying to keep them from understanding . . . though when there's one that does she plays hell with you. . . . It ain't badness. . . . I don't know

rightly what, only it ain't all bad . . . but Catameneda . . . she understood . . . and I was glad to have her."

The wind died along the sage and there was no sound under heaven louder than the grind of the wheels and the clink of the harness chains. Presently he returned upon his track to say that he had been a month at Agua Dulce, going and returning from the mines each day to his little camp kit, laid under a square of canvas with stones upon it to keep it from the wind. He had cached the bulk of his supplies behind the spring and congratulated himself on it when at the close of one day he found a camp of Indians at Agua Dulce.

"You know how it is with these desert tribes," said the stage- driver, "every camp looks as if it might have been there for a hundred years, and when they go there's no more left than a last year's bird-nest.

They just scramble up out of nothing and melt away in the sand like a horned toad.

But they was friendly . . . sort of . . . when you got to know them . . . and the men talked English considerable. . . . Evenings, when a kind of creepy chill comes on, they get around their little fires and crack their

jokes . . . good jokes, too . . . there was one old buck real comical . . . he used to explain them in English afterward. And when they sang their songs . . . when the fires were lit and the voices came out of the dark, and you couldn't see the dirt nor the color of their skins, you would sort of forget they wasn't your own folks.

"And so," he said after a longer silence, "when the camp went on anotherpasear . . . Catameneda . . . she stayed." That was all I was ever to know of that phase of it. "Catameneda . . stayed."

That and the flicker in his voice cast up from the things in him that only the Indian woman could understand, that lit the situation through his scanty speech like the glow of those vanished fires. . . . "It was a sort of pretty place at Agua Dulce," said he. "The spring came out from the black rock into a basin with a gurgly sound. There was a pink flowering bush behind it and a smitch of green where it ran over into the sand . . . and the rest was sage- brush, little and low; and crumply, colored hills. There were doves came and built in the flowering shrubs, for they hadn't no fear of man . . . and 'Maneda, she fed

them."

He was silent, letting his whip-lash trail outside in the sand, and I had a long time in which to consider how young he was, and how much younger he must have been when he drank sweet water out there at Agua Dulce, before he began again.

"She was mighty lovin'," he said, and suddenly I saw the whole tale, as I had constructed it ahead of his halting speech, fall apart and rebuild itself to a larger plan as he went on to say how, when he came from the mine at night and had no caress for her, she would begin to droop and to grieve, to flood with tears and heavy sobbing like a hurt child, which he could still in a moment with a hand upon her hair.

And how he would pretend a harshness at times, to see her flash and glow with the assurance of tenderness renewed, which he laughed at her for never learning. Sweet water indeed, at Agua Dulce!

By this time I knew the story had come to some uncommon end that lifted it beyond the vulgar adventure of satiety and desertion, for there was no yellowness in the boy that he should blab upon the

tenderness of women. There was a good hour yet until we came to Coyote Holes, and I meant to have it all out of him by then. The end had come very quickly. It began in their growing careless through happiness and neglecting the cache. Then one day when he was at the mine, and Catameneda setting snares for quail in the black rock, a thieving prospector rifled it and left them wofully short of food. Five days of desertness lay between them and any possible base of supplies, and McKenna was not due until the twentyninth. They took stock and decided to hold out on short rations until he came. They were very merry about it, being so young, and Catameneda knew the way to piece out their fare with roots and herbs. She promised him he should learn to eat lizards yet, as Indians do. And then suddenly the boy fell sick of a dysentery, which he thought might have come from some mistaken economy of Catameneda's in the matter of canned food. And while he was prostrated with that, came the sand-storm.

The girl had sensed it, Indian fashion, days before it came, but he was loggy with weakness and the want of proper care, and let her warning pass. Then came a night of gusty flaws; the morning showed a wall of

yellow cloud advancing on them from the south.

All that country around Agua Dulce is solid rock, and fluctuant sand that moves before the wind with a small shrill rustle, and no trail can lie in it when the wind blows more than twenty-four hours. On this occasion it blew for three days.

"Time was," said the driver, "I'd lie awake nights to mill it over and over. Times I'd think I could have done better, times again I didn't know as I could. I was too sick to think much and 'Maneda was mighty uneasy, all for gettin' forward on the trail to meet McKenna who would be comin' toward us. She calculated he would stop at Beeman's till the storm was past, not knowin' we were short. And the wind would blow three days. I don't know how she knew, but she knew. She kept holding up her fingers to show me how many days, and forgetting what English I had taught her; and between that and me being fair locoed with sickness, I gave in. I don't know if we wouldn't have done better to stick it out at Agua Dulce. And again I don't know as we would."

They took the canteen and such food as they had and set out for the next waterhole; by noon the sand-storm overtook them. The push of the wind was steady and they tacked along the edge of it without too much discomfort. The boy was pitifully weak, and Catameneda laughed as she braced him with her firm young body.

The dark fell early, the wind increased and roared against them, the boy chilled in the night, grew feverish, and Catameneda was reduced to hiding the canteen to save their scanty drink. By all counts they should have reached the first water-hole that day, but did not until the next noon. And the storm had been before them. The sand lay clean white and drifted smooth over all that place. Come another winter, the spring would work its way to the surface perhaps, but now they could not so much as guess where to dig for it. They walked on and on, Catameneda leading with his hand in hers.

This day they faced the wind. The girl's hair blew back and he held it to his eyes to shield them from the tormenting sting of the sand. The water and food held out better than he expected.

He said that he thought Catameneda must have waked him in the night when there

was a lull in the wind, for he seemed to remember crawling long distances on hands and knees, and other times he leaned upon her body and heard her voice, but did not seem to see her. Always they travelled in a fury of wind and a biting smother of sand.

"I don't know how 'Maneda pulled me through," he said, "but she did. All I remember was the beginning of the basalt wall at the root of Black Mountain, and right away after that the drip of the spring, though it's two mile from where the rock begins. I was long past bein' hungry, but I jest naturally swallowed in that water; and it ain't any great water neither, not like the water at Agua Dulce. But Catameneda she didn't seem to care for none."

He paused so long here that if I had not known his kind very well I should have thought it all the story he meant to let me have, but at last: "I reckon I was light-headed," he said, "else I should have sensed what was the matter, but I don't know but it was best as it was. I couldn't have done nothin'. We lay on the sand far spent and sick, the wind

was going down and we could breathe better under the wall. I heard her kind of choke up every little, and by and by she was talking quiet-like, in her own language, and I made out she wanted her mother . . . she wasn't more than seventeen, I should think. . . . It was cold, too, and I'd lost my blanket somewhere back on the trail, not bein' able to say where. . . . I snuggled her up in my arms, kind of shivery-like . . . and by and by . . . she knew me, puttin' her hand up to my face a way she had . . . and sayin' in English, as I had taught her . . .

'Vera good boy, mucha like.' . . . And it didn't seem no time at all after that when it was broad morning and the wind was down . . . her hair on my face . . . and she was heavy on my arm. . . .

"I sat up and laid her on the sand. . . . It was too much for her . . . all she had been through . . . bein' so young . . . and she had given me all the food and all the water . . . though I hadn't felt to know it before. I knew it as soon as I looked at her. . . . I reckon she had a hemorrhage or something . . . there was blood on her face and sleeves like she wiped it from her mouth."

Out in the blackness toward Agua Dulce a coyote howled, and night freshened for a sign of morning.

"McKenna came through by noon and we buried her," he finished, simply, "under a pink flowering bush because she loved it. I worked on a ranch in the valley for two years after that. . . . I couldn't[illustration omitted] seem to abide the desert for a spell . . . nor the little fires . . . but I got over that . . . you know how that is."

"Yes, I know how that is."

"But I don't suppose anybody knows," he went on, reflectively, "how it is that I don't think of her dead any more, nor any of that hard time we had . . . only sometimes when it's spring like this and I smell sagebrush burning . . . it reminds me . . . of some loving way she had out there . . . at Agua Dulce."

A man's story like that is always so much more satisfactory because he tells you all the story there is, what happened to him and how he felt about it, supposing his feelings are any part of the facts in the case, but with a woman it is not so. She

never knows much about her feelings unless they are pertinent to the story, and then she leaves them out.

An Appreciation of H. G. Wells, Novelist THE very ancient conception of a genius as one seized upon by the waiting Powers for the purpose of rendering themselves intelligible to men has its most modern exemplar in the person of Herbert George Wells, a maker of amazing books. It is impossible to call Mr. Wells a novelist, for up to this time the bulk of his work has not been novels; and scarcely accurate to call him a sociologist, since most of his social science is delivered in the form of fiction.

There are people who call him a Socialist, and that, with some definition, is what Mr. Wells calls himself; there are others who call him a revolutionist; but, under whatever caption, he is distinguishedly a maker of books, informing vitalizing, indispensable books; and when one attempts to account for the range and variety of Mr. Wells' product, the first inescapable inference is that behind them is a man of broad and specific learning.

It is not possible, by naming the schools where he has been educated, to give any notion to an American audience of the quality of Mr. Wells' scholarship. He is not,

as we understand it, a University man, but so far as his learning relates him to his time, better educated than most University men dare profess to be--a scholar of human conditions. Chiefly, besides finding out how the things that are came to be, Mr. Wells' preparation for his work consists in living.

He has lived, not episodically nor by proxy, as so many literary men tend to do, but consciously and actively, for forty odd years. How many American men one knows who let their wives and children do half their living for them! But Mr. Wells has done his own living, which probably accounts for his having done so much of his own thinking. At any rate he has never clouded his genius with the obscurations of an "Art Atmosphere."

All the time I knew Mr. Wells in London I never persuaded him to speak but once of Art. "An artist," said he, "has nothing to do with success; neither must he concern himself whether he is read by one or one million; he must just do his work." And Mr. Wells has demonstrated that, if an artist does

that sincerely, success will have much to do with him.

The first book of Mr. Wells to attract attention in America, though it was not his first writing, was "The War of the Worlds," published in 1898, the first of a group of singular but irresistible romances in which Mr. Wells, by anticipating the bent of scientific discovery, or by deflecting it slightly from its present course, created an original background against which he worked out the socialistic remedy for the economic disorder.

It was just here that the Powers seized upon Mr. Wells. The pressure of economic discontent in England, so much greater than the home-bred American can realize, the chafing of regenerative forces against the social superstitions (conservatism is the stately word for it, but really there is a lot of it on a par with the objection to sitting down with thirteen at table) produced the electrical conditions which demanded a man as the medium of discharge. No doubt Mr. Wells was primarily a novelist, but then and for a long time the social forces were too much for him. All through his earlier work the artist can be seen shaken in the

teeth of the Social Consciousness. Even in his latest work, "The New Machiavelli," it runs neck and neck with the story until the reader is left a little in doubt which of the two had the better of it. But in 1900 Mr. Wells wrote "Love and Mr. Lewisham," and gave the first intimation of what his work might become when he had subordinated the reforming impulse to the simple mastery of human life. "Love and Mr. Lewisham" is the story of a very usual young man and the struggle of his ambitions and egoisms with the mating instinct. It is so satisfying as a story that it is not until a long while after reading it you discover that what Mr. Wells has been saying all the time is that it is only our disordered social system that sets the mating instinct at war with a man's personal development. The real trouble with Mr. Lewisham was not that he was in love or ambitious, but that he found it difficult to make a living. That, in one way or another, is the crying difficulty of Young England, and none sees more clearly than Mr. Wells the relation of all our so-called immoralities to the economic condition and the impossibilities of remedying one without correcting the other.

Socialism is Mr. Wells' remedy, but it must be understood that his particular brand of it is not so much a system as a state of mind; a kind of awareness, a realization of the pain of social maladjustment in the farthest, least little toe of the social organization. Earlier in his career Mr. Wells was active in the society of Fabians, and the various tentative measures by which the growing pains of social discontent manifested. But of the theory of Socialism as it exists now in England he says, "It has gone up into the clouds and the practice of it into the drains." Those who are interested can find the best explication of Socialism as it appeals to Mr. Wells as a "plain human enterprise" in "The Misery of Boots," first published as a Fabian tract. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion, on reading it, that you are some kind of a Socialist yourself.

Mr. Wells is the most contemporaneous of writers. He has more and more sensitive tentacles laid along the lines of growth of Modern England than any other writer, and they outreach the budding tendency by so much as makes his work hopeful. When Mr. Wells writes about a no more striking person than a draper's clerk bicycling for a

holiday, you perceive not only how he came to be just there in the social order, but also how he might have been bettered in the making. In this Mr. Wells differs from his contemporaries, Mr. Galsworthy, who leaves the reader under the impression that things are so bad that something ought really to be done about it if anybody only knew how, and Mr. Bennett, who sets you wondering if it ever occurred to him that anything could be done.

In nothing is this contemporaneous character of Mr. Wells' work so notable as in his acceptance of the machine. Gears and coherers, radioactivities and the powers are as much a factor of Mr. Wells' world as pounds, shillings and pence. They are part of the communicating medium.

That is, perhaps, why he is able to make them pass current in his tales as no other, not excepting Mr. Kipling, has done. Mr. Kipling's feeling for machinery is the feeling of a poet, it comes alive for him, presents itself as personality; but Mr. Wells' feeling is of a man stretching himself and realizing to the full his extended capacities and powers.

His motors and aeroplanes are the swift

feet and the wings of a man, and somehow Mr. Wells convinces you that it is not in the least surprising for a man to be possessed of such conveniences, or even of others much more remarkable.

The quality of Mr. Wells' work is uneven, which is perhaps natural to the earlier stages of an artist's development, but it is of increasing humanness. In "Tono Bungay," his most successful novel, the story of the rise and decline of a patentmedicine millionaire, it is possible to forget for whole chapters that the author is writing in England of Englishmen.

The locale of the story is never actively a protagonist except in the presence of the ladies. Barring the accent and a difference in taste in neckties, it is possible to find most of Mr. Wells' men in Indiana, but his women are all Englishwomen. There is sometimes a touch of the method of Balzac in the sense Mr. Wells gives of having got to the bottom of his male characters; there is nothing left in the crucible. But it is conceivable that of his women the best of them might have known the novelist better than he knew them. But Mr. Wells is an avowed feminist, and has been active in

the dramatic struggle now going on in England for the enfranchisement of women, and this failure of the world-touch in the delineation of femininity might very well be due to the fact that women themselves are not yet molded to the world type, but retain longer than men the stamp of their particular environment. It is the possibility that Mr. Wells may be able to pass even this limitation that gives the fillip of interest to his forthcoming novel, "Marriage," which is to begin in the November AMERICAN MAGAZINE. If he can lift the subject out of little London, into the universality achieved in "Tono Bungay," he will at the same time raise himself to a citizenship in the world of human understanding not attained by any Englishman since Mr. Dickens, and by few before him.

It is because Mr. Wells exhibits possibilities of doing just this thing that he is so well worth watching. There is no writer to-day who gives his readers such a satisfying sense, by the mere delight of attending to him, of having participated in a social solution.

Art Influence in the West [1915] WHOEVER undertakes to discuss art influence brings up sooner or later at the Greeks. I prefer to begin there, and to begin with that one of its sources which is not peculiarly Greek, but eternal: I mean with Greece. Whatever a people may make will resemble the thing that people look on most; so that the first guess as to what is likely to come out of any quarter is a knowledge of the land itself, its keen peaks, round-breasted hills, and bloomy valleys. Greek polity had never so much to do with the surpassingness of Hellenic art as the one thing the Hellenes had nothing whatever to do with--the extraordinary beauty of the land in which they lived.

However much it is possible to derive the varied and intimate art of Italy from Greek influence, it is impossible to ignore the variations that mark just the differences between the topographies--mass, contour and color--of the two peninsulas. In attempting to forecast the probable shapes of art in any quarter of America, it becomes of prime importance to know whether the contours of that region are austere, dramatic, or slow and gracious, and, above

all, whether it is colorful. Given to all quarters an equal chance at man, the richest in color will bring the quickest reactions. And of all America the most strikingly colored is the strip lying along the south Pacific coast "nearest to the terrestrial paradise," as the old Spanish romance puts it, "called Californias."

In the early days, when all the West was full of a belt-loosening, breath-easing sound as men accommodated themselves to its largeness, the color of California was a thing to make one gasp. It affronted the puritan temperament with its too abundant charm; gold it was, and blue and amber, over miles and miles of up-flung foot-hill slopes and indolent mesa. Beyond that it melted, between green and blueness, to peaks of opalescent white. It was a country of which one of the wittiest of its writers said, "You couldn't tell the truth about it without lying," and got into the blood of the Iowans and New-Englanders within a generation. It charged not only their hopes, but their speech; made it rich in figures, full of warmth and amplitude. It had even more obvious and commercial results.

On one of those frequent cross-continent

trips growing out of an inability to reconcile a desire to enjoy the charm of the West with the necessity of doing business in New York, I met a buyer of women's garments for a large Los Angeles house. In the course of the acquaintance she explained why it was that my clothes, which seemed quite all right on South Occidental Boulevard, had the effect on Fifth Avenue of being noisily out of place.

They were perfectly good clothes and appropriately expensive, they bunched up in the right places or displayed a modish slimness; but they put me decidedly out of the picture. The distinction was too subtle for me to grasp, but knowing nice distinctions of that kind was the buyer's business. She said it was a question of color; not so much of intensity, but of expert arrangements by which the dress of the Westerner is made to reflect the total effect of bright sun, rich-toned landscapes, and a life spent largely in the open air. The buyer expressed it more crudely than that, but she knew to a dollar in buying for Los Angeles how far she could carry the instinctive feeling of human kind for harmony with its environment.

It comes out; this lurking preference of the

land for color, in that latest toy of the West, a world exposition. Whether or not they succeed in making it a bigger or a better or more interesting exposition, in one thing the West has satisfied the secret desire of its heart: it has made this exposition the richest dyed, the patterned splendor of all their acres of poppies, of lupines, of amber wheat, of rosy orchard, and of jade-tinted lakes. Beside a sea which runs from lion color to chrysoprase and sapphire blueness, they have laid down a building scheme which is as bright as an Indian blanket. This is the first communal expression of the kind on a scale large enough to take account of. Probably one would have to hark back to the days of Pompeii and the Greco-Roman splendor to find its like, and be safe in prophesying from it a more vivid burst of decorative art.

That is to say, if there is anything in comparative influences, for the color of California is to the color of Italy as a rose is to its pressed remembrance in a book.

Taking that good look at the West which is the first requisite to knowing what is to come from it, one is struck at once with the extraordinary definition of form in the landscape. The high mountain-edges

deserve their specific name, Sierras-toothed, cutting edges. The foothills, even under thick chaparral, never lose their bold outlines; the pines upon the farthest ridges preserve their perfect spires; and the low, round-headed oaks, both the roble and the encina, have all been put into the landscape with the same brush. Farther south and east the buttes, squared to the sky-line, repeat the flat note of the mesas with insistence. One has, however, to turn square about, face to the Old World for a moment, to understand just what this may mean in the final product of the West. One must recall that the glory of Gothic architecture comes of its being a sublimated memory of a forest, its clustered trunks, its crossing boughs, leafstained light and rare chiaroscuro, and that the Egyptian expressed the massiveness of natural stony outcrops and the relief of shadowy caves from the glare of the sun.

Lands which have strongly accented features from the hands of the World Builder are those which produce the lasting types of architecture, not only by the superior degree to which they stamp themselves upon the memory, but in the demands which they make for special ways of being lived in. Here in the West the

suggestion made by the soil and the wild growth has already been accepted by the aboriginal. The castellated mesas have produced the flat-roofed pueblo types of dwelling, which, mixed with the elements happily introduced by the Spanish missionaries, has become one of our most characteristic styles of domestic architecture. But the peculiar gift of the Southwest to a genuine American form is the one which takes its name from the Indian bungalow on which it is remotely based. In fact, it is very little like anything in India, and has much more kinship with the American Indian wickiup both in its form and its adaptation to the exigencies of living. In other words, it is derived from the forms of life native to the land. Go up beyond Pasadena some day when the chaparral is in full leaf, and you will discover that the preferred type of dwelling repeats the characteristics of the encinal, with low, slightly pitched roofs and pillared entrances. You dive into one out of the heat and glare of the day as the rabbit into its tunnel. Southern California runs to encinal and bungalows as naturally as the North runs to sharp, sloping roofs and pointed firs. It is written in the Baedekers that the form of Milan's marble miracle was

suggested by the springing stalks of marsh grasses; but it is not said anywhere often enough that if a man with the soul of an architect were brought up in the California Tulares, amid all those miles and miles of thin, graceful reeds, breaking at the top into arching, airy inflorescence, he might easily touch the inspirational sources of Milan. It is all a question of looking four hundred years forward or four hundred years back.

These two, then, must be thought of as affecting the final form of Western art-color and high simplicity of form combined with great intricacy of detail.

It is inevitable that the first response of a people to the shaping hand of beauty would be expressed in that which meets the eye, but there is another factor in life in California likely to have a profound effect on the kinds and qualities of its art product, one which brings us a little nearer to the influence of ancient Greece and Italy: I mean the element of pageantry in life as it is lived there.

Variations in the artistic product of any nation can be scaled very nicely to the

degree to which the people live with their land rather than off it. There is much in the difference between Greek and Italian art which can be directly traced to such obvious circumstance as that the Greeks, when they were not conquering, talked philosophy, and the Romans returned to their farms to raise turnips. It is only critics of art, and not artists, who maintain that art and turnips have nothing to do with each other. For the Romans did not only plant turnips and harvest them; they understood that there is a god of turnips, an essential essence of plowed fields and dung-heaps and steaming oxen, which must all be brought into harmony by prayer and sacrifice before turnips could come forth properly to feed and comfort the nations.

Just how it works is not easy to say,--it is in part perhaps a matter of feeding,--but the great art-producing peoples have also been great agriculturists, much given to the joyous expression of their relation to the land they live in by green-corn dances, cherry-blossom fêtes, and processions to Pomona. Any one familiar with the West must see in the tendency toward rose tournaments, apple fairs, and festivals of Raisina Regina, a return to this instinctive

method of dramatizing the working partnership between man and the forces of nature.

No doubt it is in part the effect of topography. Everything, even the daily alternation of night and morning, tends to appear more dramatic in a mountain country; mile-long shadows move as dials across the valleys, cloud masses do not sail an open sky, but wheel and enfilade between the ranges; storms are not obscured in a flat horizon, but are seen to gather and break, and suns come out as in an amphitheater. When I first knew that country which is watered by the Merced, Tuolumne, Kings, and Kern rivers, a country now producing food enough to support a small kingdom of Europe, it was overrun by little, long-armed Basque and French herders and their wandering flocks.

It embraces in Hetch-Hetchy, Yosemite, and Kings River Cañon the most stupendous scenic panorama of America, but the herders read it as a dog reads the face of its master. I remember how in May and June they would go peering along the edge of the down-pouring rivers for the floating yellow scum, pollen drift from the forests hundreds of miles away on the

uplifted flanks of the Sierras. By the date of the first appearance of the floating pollen, and the quantity, they judged whether the summer feed would be full or scanty, and on indications as slight as these they bargained with the dealers who came out from San Francisco for their spring lambs.

Intimacies such as these between the land and the people breed poets faster, and much better ones, than do universities.

Undoubtedly, the development of the creative spirit in the West is affected by the sense of sustained vitality in nature. A blossoming almond-orchard is not only a beautiful thing; it is also an inescapable thing: it scents the air for almost as many miles as its delicate, roseate cloud takes the eye along the foot-hill slopes. Swarms of fallen petals drift in the roadways like snow. And the long rows of the lowtrimmed muscats, reaching out from vine to vine with advancing summer as though to take hands against the weight of the harvest--how they assault us with the visible process of earth and sun and air made into wine and food for man! At every turn the consciousness of something doing, something vitally connected with the large process of nature and our own

means of subsistence, raises the plane of expectation. Thereis something doing every minute in a country of such varied topography, as the procession of harvest follows the season. Orange-picking begins in December and overlaps the pruning of the deciduous orchards. The smoke of the last burning has scarcely passed from the shorn trees of the highest, most northerly valleys when the flowering of almonds and apricots opens the honey harvest. The berry-pickers move in solid phalanxes from the cherry lands of Napa and Santa Clara to the river bottoms, and from that on to the August hop-picking and the raisin-drying; all labor is in flux. It passes up and down the great Twin Valleys in "free companies," working, eating, and as often as not sleeping in the open. During the brief season of the rains it is housed in packingsheds and preserve factories, but for the greater part of the year the human laborer is as much a part of the great outdoor pageant as the woodpecker or the ant.

All this makes for a kind of understanding of nature that is as different from the afternoon-walk kind of nature-loving as marrying a woman and having children by her is different from writing a sonnet to

one's mistress's eyebrow. The mastery of rivers and snows and granite mountains and their conversion into crops and light and mechanical power raises the average plane of human activity all through.

It should mean that in California we shall have not necessarily poems written to a redwood and pictures of snow-capped ranges, but that whatever is written or painted should evince breadth and power.

The final achievement of the people among whom this takes place ought to be a newer and more consoling expression of man's relation to the invisible, to the trend and purpose of things. In other words, one would expect the art of the West to be strongly religious in its implications.

Already one sees indications of this tendency in that most native of institutions, the outdoor theater. There are enough of these delightful places of entertainment in California to be able to speak of their development as a feature of Western community life, and their evidence as to the trend of community thought is singular and convincing.

One instance of the earliest and most notable of these, the theater of the

Bohemian Grove, serves our purpose better for being the best known and most unconscious. The grove, a stately recess in the redwood forest north of the bay, is the summer playground of a group of San Franciscans who are supposed to have distinguished themselves either in the creative arts or in the more personal art of living. Outside of this summer precinct they are preëminently of that stripe for whom the whole of American literature is supposed to be keyed down to the compass of a grown-up nursery-tale, the t.b.m.'s who hang around the neck of American drama like the traditional millstone to prevent its soaring to its possible and predestined heights. And every summer these tired business men, on an occasion denominated "High Jinks," produce a play which by popular deduction ought to be the concentrated extract of all the Broadway atrocities ever perpetrated in the name of entertainment. Only it isn't. It is usually poetic in form,--excellent poetry, too on more than one occasion,--it is symbolic in character, and distinctly religious in tone. That is to say that it tends to choose for its theme some aspect of man's relation to the invisible, inescapable forces of life. A year ago it was the

conquest of fear in that dark region of the heart of man which once found its expression in the gargoyles of our most Christian cathedrals, the spawn of cowardice and imagination. And if the conquest of fear isn't an effort in the direction of true religion, what is it? As nearly as can be made out by report, for no woman can know any thing of them except by report, the Bohemian performances approach more nearly the Eleusinian mysteries than any modern occasion. All without conscious imitation and by the simple process of giving the Bohemians exactly what they want. It is true, however, that there are many things one can not even want in the presence of trees that might remember the drouth in the time of King Ahab, when the ravens fed Elijah.

It is not so easy to discern this native tendency behind so stupendously mechanical a thing as a world exposition.

You have to see it not as the final expression, but as a pageant of things, the procession around the Sabine farm in honor of the god of the turnips which Lucullus ate; the joyous recognition that there is a god of seed-time and harvest, of bridges and rivers and dams, and that we

are on very good terms with him.

Another determining force in shaping the art of a country, which it is impossible to overlook, is the prepossession which its citizens bring to it. The Argonauts of fortynine brought the spirit of romance, and left us with that joyous disregard of artistry which is the best ground for a new art to spring from. The Franciscan fathers contributed one of our two predominating types of architecture and a style of furniture which gains favor steadily.

TheConquistadores bequeathed a little of the romantic manner and a poetizing tendency in names of places. The Japanese and Chinese have done much in their wares to satisfy and foster the Western love of color in decoration, but the artistic consciousness of the Oriental is worn too smooth by centuries to make a dent in the robustious West. They have glanced off at contact, to fall outside the area of immediate production. It has remained for the rejected and downtrodden aboriginal to leave a determining mark. In color, in decoration, and in design the Indian note has struck upward like the thorn through the foot which treads the thorn-bush. It is very noticeable in the

Exposition of San Diego; it is shaping by slower and less sensible degrees the forms of verse and drama, it sounds not as an alien strain through the music of the West, but as the plaintive, intimate note of the land itself, the earth cry below the song of the harvest. What one observes at present is a resemblance growing out of something like the aboriginal surrender to the environment rather than any deliberate appropriation of aboriginal motives. Not until this vanishing race attains the full dignity of extinction will its musical themes and decorative units pass into the artistic currency of the West.

But when you reflect that the Greeks began with just these things, great natural beauty, an adventuring, colonizing people such as settled the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, and with a legendary and dramatic representation of man's relation to vast invisible forces, it is possible to believe that people beginning there and on a scale so much more magnificent will be justified in any expectation. Any one going west to look for it must find the index of what the art of the West is to be not in the art palace, but in life as it is lived there, in the mastery of modes of living in which the

West suggests its as yet unutterable things.

Bitterness of Women LOUIS CHABOT was sitting under the fig tree in her father's garden at Tres Pinos when he told Marguerita Dupré that he could not love her. This sort of thing happened so often to Louis that he did it very well and rather enjoyed it, for he was one of those before whom women bloomed instinctively and preened themselves, and that Marguerita loved him very much was known not only to Louis, but to all Tres Pinos.

It was bright mid-afternoon and there was no sound in Dupré's garden louder than the dropping of ripe figs and the drip of the hydrant under the Castilian roses. A mile out of town Chabot's flock dozed on their feet with their heads under one another's bellies, and his herders dozed on the ground with their heads under the plaited tops of the sage. Old Dupré sat out in front of his own front yard, with a handkerchief over his face, and slept very soundly.

Chabot finished his claret to the last drop-it was excellent claret, this of Dupré's-turned the tumbler upside down, sat back in his chair, and explained to Marguerita

point by point why he did not love her.

Marguerita leaned her fat arms on the table, wrapped in her blue reboza; it was light blue and she was too dark for it, but it was such a pretty color; she leaned forward, looking steadily and quietly at Louis, because she was afraid if she so much as let her lids droop the tears would come and if she smiled her lips would quiver. Marguerita felt that she had not invited this, neither had she known how to avoid it.

She would have given anything to have told Louis to his face that he need not concern himself so much on her account, as she was not the least interested in him; she had called on all her pride to that end, but nothing came.

She was a good girl, Louis told her, such as, if she had pleased him, he would gladly have married. She was a very good girl and she understood about sheep. Très bien! Old Dupré had taught her that; but she lacked a trifle--a nuance--but everything where love is concerned,l'art d'être désiré , explained the little Frenchman; for, though he was only a

sheep-herder of Lost Borders, if he had been a boulevardier he could not have been more of a Frenchman or less of a cad. He leaned back in his chair with the air of having delivered himself very well.

"Salty Bill loves me," ventured Marguerita.

"Eh, Bill!" Louis looked hurt; for, though he frequently disposed of his ladies in this negligent fashion, he did not care to have them snapped up so quickly. Marguerita felt convicted of lèse-majesté by the look and hastened to reassure him that she cared nothing whatever for Salty Bill. It was a false move and she knew it as soon as it was done, but she could not bear to have Louis look at her like that and Marguerita had never in her life learned the good of pretending. Chabot poured him another glass of claret and returned to his point.

There was Suzon Moynier, he explained.

Such an eye as Suzon had! There was a spark for you! And an ankle! More lovers than few had been won by an ankle.

Marguerita, under cover of the table, drew her feet together beneath her skirts. Her ankles were thick and there was no disguising it.

"So it is Suzon you love?"

"Eh," said the herder, "that is as may be. I have loved many women." Then perhaps because the particular woman did not matter so much as that there should be womanhood, and perhaps because he could no more help it than she could help being wondrously flooded by it, he threw her a look from the tail of his eye and such a smile as drew all the blood from her heart, bent above her, brushing her hair with his lips in such a lingering tenderness of farewell that, though he had just told her she was not to be loved, the poor girl was not sure but he was beginning to love her.

Women suffered things like that from Louis Chabot, each being perfectly sure she was the only one, and perhaps, like Marguerita, finding it worth while to be made to suffer if it could be done so exquisitely.

Marguerita was only half French herself, old Dupré having married her mother, Señorita Carrasco, who was only half a señorita, since, in fact, most people in Tres Pinos were a little this or that, with no chance for name calling. Dupré had been a herder of sheep risen to an owner whom

the desert had bitten. The natural consequence was that when he was old, instead of returning to France, he had married Marguerita's mother and settled down in Tres Pinos to live on the interest of his money.

It was a fact that his daughter had at heart all the fire and tenderness that promised in Suzon's glance; but of what use to Louis Chabot that she had a soul warm and alight if no glow of it suffused her cheek and no spark of it drew him in her eye?

She was swarthy and heavy of face; she had no figure, which means she had a great deal too much of it, and there was a light shadow like a finger smudge on her upper lip. Not that the girl did not have her good points. She could cook--that was the French strain in her father; she could dance--that was Castilian from her mother; and such as she was Salty Bill wanted her.

Bill drove an eighteen-mule team for the borax works and was seven times a better man than Chabot, but she would have no more of him than Louis would have of her.

She continued to say her prayers regularly and told Tia Juna, who reproached her with losing a good marriage, that she believed yet the saints would give her the desire of

her heart, whereat Tia Juna pitied her.

Chabot brought his sheep up from the spring shearing at Bakersfield each year and made three loops about Tres Pinos, so that it brought him to the town about once in three months to replenish his supplies; and the only reason there was not a new object of his attentions each time was that there were not girls enough, for Chabot's taste required them young, pretty, and possessed of the difficult art of being desired. Therefore, he had time to keep hope alive in Marguerita with the glint of his flattering eyes and the trick of his flattering lips, which was such very common coin with him that he did not quite know himself how free he was with it. And after old Dupré died and his daughter inherited his house and the interest on his money she was enough of a figure in Tres Pinos to make a little attention worth while, even though she had a smudge of black on her upper lip and no art but that of being faithful. She lived in the house under the fig tree with old Tia Juna for a companion and was much respected; she was said to have more clothes than anybody, though they never became her.

Marguerita kept a candle burning before the saints and another in her heart for the handsome little herder, who went on making love to ladies and being loved by them for three years. Then the saints took a hand in his affairs, though, of course, it did not look that way to Louis.

He was sleeping out on Black Mountain in the spring of the year with his flock. The herder whose business it was to have done that was at Tres Pinos on a two days' leave, confessing himself and getting a nice, jolly little claret drunk. Somewhere up in the blown lava holes of Black Mountain there was a bear with two cubs, who had said to them, bear fashion: "Come down to the flock with me to-night and I will show you how killing is done. There will be dogs there, and men, but do not be afraid; I will see to it that they do not hurt you."

Along about the time Orion's sword sloped down the west Chabot heard their gruntled noises and the scurry of the flock. Chabot was not a coward, perhaps because he knew that in general bears are; he got up and laid about him with his staff. This he never would have done if he had known about the cubs; he trod on the foot of one

in the dark and the bear mother heard it.

She came lumbering up in the soft blackness and took Chabot in her arms.

Toward four of the next afternoon the herder coming back, still very merry and very comfortable in his mind, found a maimed bleeding thing by the water-hole that moaned and babbled. One of its arms was gone to the elbow, its face was laid open, and long red gashes lay along its sides and down one thigh. After a while, when he had washed away the blood and dust, he discovered that this thing was Chabot. The herder laid it as tenderly as he could on the campo burro and took it to Tres Pinos. If there was any question of the propriety of the care of Chabot falling to Marguerita Dupré it counted for nothing against the fact that nobody was found willing to do it in her stead, and Marguerita was very discreet. Tia Juna was put in charge of the sick-room and Marguerita gave her whole soul to the cooking.

And if any question had arisen later, when Chabot began to hobble about with a crutch under his good arm and his sleeve pinned up where the other had been, he put an end to it by marrying her. He was

thought to have done very well in this, since he could get no more good of himself; and since Marguerita wanted him, it was a handsome way of paying her, but there had something gone before that. Tia Juna had been careful there should be no scrap of a mirror about when Chabot began to slip his bandages, and perhaps he had not had the courage to ask for it; certainly there had been no change in Marguerita's face for any change she saw in him. And the day that he knew the thing he was he asked her to marry him. He had slipped out into the street for the first time, wearying a little of the solicitations of the two women, and come upon children playing in the open way. They broke and scuttled like young quail at sight of him; and he sat down suddenly, for he was not so strong as he had thought, and tried to be clear in his mind what this might mean.

And in a little while he was quite clear; he heard the rustle and whisper behind him that advised him of shoulders hunched and fingers laid on lips over irrepressible giggles of excitement and knew that they dared each other to come on through the black sage and peek at a fearsome thing.

It was that afternoon when she came in

with the soup and claret that he asked Marguerita. The poor girl put down the bowl and came and knelt by him very humble and gentle.

"Are you quite sure, Louis?" she asked, with her cheek upon his hand.

"I am sure of nothing," said he, "except that I cannot live without you."

It was very curious that no sooner had he said that than he began to discover it would be very hard to live with her, for to lose an ear and an eye and to have one's mouth drawn twisty by a scar does not make a kiss relish better if it falls not in with the natural desire.

Marguerita did not grow any prettier after she was married, but showed a tendency to take on fat; and she did not dress quite so well, because she could not afford it; though there are times, as, for instance, when he has gone out in company and seen the young married women hustled out of sight of him, that her plain face looks almost good to him. Marguerita insists on their going out a great deal to cock-fights and tobailes , where he sits in the corner

with his good side carefully disposed toward the guests; and his wife has given up dancing, though she is very fond of it, to sit beside him and keep him company; though, to tell the truth, Chabot could bear very well to do without that if only he could find himself surrounded by the lightness, the laughter, the half-revealing draperies, the delicious disputed moves of the game he loves. As he will not any more, for he knows now that such as these are not given save when there is something to be got by them, and, though he is only thirtyfour, poor Louis is no longer possessed ofl'art être désiré .

For the rest of his life he will have to make the best of knowing that his wife carries his name with credit and does not cost him anything. They are not without their comfortable hours. Marguerita takes excellent care of him and she understands about sheep. If she sees the dust of a flock arising, can tuck up her skirts and away to the edge of the town, getting back with as much news of where they go, whence they came, and the conditions of the wethers as Chabot could have brought himself, and not even her husband knows the extent of her devices for keeping him surrounded

with the sense and stir of life. For it was not long after his marriage that Chabot made the discovery that all the quick desire of him toward lovely women warmed in his wife's spirit toward the maimed and twisted thing that he is and, thwarted of the subtle play of lip and limb and eye, spends itself in offices of homely comfort.

And this is the bitterness of women, that it matters not so much that they should have passion as the power to provoke it, and, lacking the spark of a glance, the turn of an ankle, the treasures of tenderness in them wither unfulfilled. Shut behind his wife's fat commonplace exterior lies the pulse of music, the delight of motion, the swimming sense, the quick white burning fenced within his scars. Times like this he remembers what has passed between him and many women and finds his complacency sicken and die in him.

Knowing what he does of the state of her heart and not being quite a cad, he does not make her an altogether bad husband; and if sometimes, looking at her with abhorring eyes--the shaking bosom, the arms enormous, the shade of her upper lip no longer to be mistaken for a smudge-resenting her lack of power to move him,

he gives her a bad quarter of an hour, even though she has the best of him. For however unhappy he makes her, with one kiss of his crooked mouth he can set it all right again. But for Louis the lift, the exultation, the exquisite unmatched wonder of the world will not happen any more; never any more.

Frustrate [1912] I KNOW that I am a disappointed woman and that nobody cares at all about it, not even Henry; and if anybody thought of it, it would only be to think it ridiculous. It is ridiculous, too, with my waist, and not knowing how to do my hair or anything. I look at Henry sometimes of evenings, when he has his feet on the fender, and wonder if he has the least idea how disappointed I am. I even have days of wondering if Henry isn't disappointed, too.

He might be disappointed in himself, which would be even more dreadful; but I don't suppose we shall ever find out about each other. It is part of my disappointment that Henry has never seemed to want to find out.

There are people who think it is somehow discreditable to be disappointed; and whatever comes, you must pretend to like it, and just keep on pretending. I don't know why. It must be that some things are right in life and some others are not, and unless somebody has the courage to speak up about it, I don't know how we are ever to find it out. I don't see, if nobody

else is hurt by it, why we shouldn't have what we like out of life; and if there's a way of getting or not getting it, people have a right to know. Sometimes I think if I'd known a little more, just a very little . . . !

It all began, I suppose, in the kind of people I was brought up among. They'd none of them had the kind of things I wanted, so of course they couldn't tell me anything about the way to get them. There was my mother. She had to work hard, and had never been anywhere but to a Methodist conference and once to the capital when father was a delegate or something, and her black silk had been turned twice; but she didn't seem the least disappointed. I think it must have been the way things were between her and my father. Father died when I was sixteen, so I couldn't tell much about it, but I know mother never so much as thought of marrying again. She was like a person who has had a full meal, but I--I am just kind of hungry . . .always . My mother never talked to me about her relations to my father.

Mothers didn't; it wasn't thought suitable. I think sometimes, if she had, it might have made a difference about my marrying Henry.

The trouble was in the beginning, that though I knew the world was all full of exciting, interesting things, I thought they came to you just by living. I had no idea there was a particular way you had to go to work to get them. I think my people weren't the kind to make very nice discriminations about experiences or anything. They wouldn't have thought one way of being in love, for instance, was much better or different from another. They had everything sort of ticketed off and done with: such as that all church-members were happier than unbelievers, and all men naturally more competent and intelligent than their women. They must have known, some of them, that things didn't always work out that way; but they never let on about it-anyway, not to us young people. And if married couples weren't happy together, it wasn't considered decent to speak of it.

I suppose that was what got me to thinking that all the deep and high and shining things that I had a kind of instinct went with being married, belonged to it naturally, and, when you had found a suitable man, came along in their proper place without much thinking. And that was about all I

knew when Henry proposed to me at the Odd Fellows' Festival. We were both on the decoration committee, and drove out to the old Lawson place that afternoon for roses. I remember the feel of them against my cheek, hot and sweet, and the smell of the syringa, and a great gold-and- black butterfly that fled and flitted down the green country road, mottled black and gold with shadows. Things like that gave me a strange kind of excitement, and yet a kind of lonesomeness, too, so I didn't mind Henry holding my hand between us in the buggy. I thought he must be feeling something of the same sort, and it didn't seem friendly to take my hand away. But I did take it away a moment later when he proposed. It turned me kind of cold. Of course I meant to accept him after a while.

I liked him, and he was what my folks called suitable; but I seemed to want a little time to think about it.

Henry didn't want me to think. He kept hinting, and that evening under the grapearbor at the minister's, where we had gone to get the sewing society's ice-cream freezer, he kissed me. I'd heard about engaged kisses, but this wasn't anything but just a kiss--like when you have been

playing drop the handkerchief. I'd always had a feeling that when you had an engaged kiss something beautiful happened. There were times afterward when it almost seemed about to, and I would want to be kissed again to see if the next time . . . Henry said he was glad I had turned out to have an affectionate disposition.

My family thought I was doing well to marry Henry. He had no bad habits, and his people were well-to-do; and then I wasn't particularly pretty or rich or anything. I had never been very popular with young men; I was too eager. Not for them, you understand; but just living and doing things seemed to me such a good game. I suppose it is difficult for some folks to understand how you can be excited by the way a shadow falls, or a bird singing on a wet bough; and somehow young men seemed to get the idea that the excitement had something to do with them. It made them feel as if something was expected of them; and you know how it is with young men: they sort of pull back from the thing that is expected of them just because it is expected. I always thought it rather small, but I suppose they can't help it. There was

a woman I met at Fairshore who explained how that was; but I didn't know it then, and I was rather sensitive about it. Anyway, it came about that I hadn't many beaux, and my mother was a good deal relieved when I settled down to Henry. And we hadn't any more than got the furniture as we wanted it when I discovered that there hadn't anything happened at all! Instead of living with my mother, I was just living with Henry; I've never done anything else.

There are things nobody ever tells young girls about marriage. Sometimes I think it is because, if they knew how to estimate their experience in the beginning, there is such a lot they wouldn't go on with; and when I was married, nobody ever thought of anything but that you had to go on with it.

There were times when it seemed as if all it needed was just going on: there was a dizzying point just about to be reached from which Henry and I should really set out for somewhere.

It took me fifteen years to realize that we hadn't set out for anything, and would never get anywhere in particular.

I know I tried. Times I would explain to

Henry what I wanted until he seemed to want it as much as I did; and then we would begin whatever we had to do,--at least I would begin,--and then I would find out that Henry had forgotten what we were doing it for-- like the time we saved to set out the south lot in apricots, and Henry bought water-shares with the money. He said it would be cheaper to own the water for the apricots; but then we hadn't anything left to pay for the planting, and the man who had sold Henry the shares turned out not to own them. After a while I gave up saving.

The trouble was, Henry said, I was too kind of simple. It always seemed to me, if you wanted things, you picked out the one nearest to you, and made a mark so you could keep tab on whether you were getting it or not; and then you picked out the next nearest, and went for that, and after a while you had all of them. But Henry said when it came to business it was a good deal more complicated, and you had to look on all sides of a thing. Henry was strong on looking on all sides; anybody that had any kind of reasonableness could always get over him, like that man with the water-shares. That was when I was trying

to make myself believe that if we could get a little money together, we might be in things. I had been reading the magazines, and I knew that there were big, live things with feelers out all over creation, and if I could just get the least little tip of one. . . .

But I knew it wasn't money. When I wasn't too sick and overworked and worn out trying to keep track of Henry's reasons, I knew that the thing I was aching for was close beside me . . . when I heard the wind walk on the roof at night, . . . or heard music playing . . . and I would be irritated with Henry because he couldn't help me lay hold of it. It is ridiculous, I know, but there were times when it seemed to me if Henry had been fatter, it would have helped some. I don't mean to say that I had wanted to marry a fat man, but Henry hadn't filled out any, not like it seems men ought to: he just got dry and thinner. It used to make me kind of exasperated.

Henry was always patient with me; he thought it was because I hadn't any children. He would have liked children. So would I when I thought I was to have one, but I was doing my own housework, and I was never strong. I cried about it a good deal at the time; but I don't suppose I really wanted it very much or I would have

adopted one. I will tell you--there are women that want children just for the sake of having them, but the most of them want them because there is a man-- And the man they want gets to hear of it, and whenever a woman is any way unhappy, they think all she needs is a baby. But there's something else ought to happen first, and I never gave up thinking it was going to happen; all the time I kept looking out, like Sister Anne in the fairy-tale, and it seemed to me a great many times I saw dust moving. I never understood why we couldn't do things right here at home--big things. There were those people I'd read about in Germany--just plain carpenters and butchers and their wives--giving passion-plays. They didn't know anything about plays; they just felt grateful, and they did something like they felt. I spoke to the minister's wife about it once--not about a passion-play, of course, that wouldn't have done; but about our just taking hold of something as if we thought we were as good as those Germans,--but she didn't seem to think we could. She kind of pursed up her mouth and said, "Well, we must remember that they had the advantage of having lived abroad." It was always like that. You had to have lived somewhere or

been taught or had things different; you couldn't just start right off from where you were. It was all of a piece with Henry's notion of business; there was always some kind of queer mixed-up-ness about it that I couldn't understand. But still I didn't give up thinking that somehow I was going to pull the right string at last, and then things would begin to happen. Not knowing what it was I wanted to happen, I couldn't be expected to realize that it couldn't happen now on account of my being married to Henry. It was at Fairshore that I found out.

It was when we had been married eighteen years that Aunt Lucy died and left me all her property. It wasn't very much, but it was more than Henry would ever have, and I just made up my mind that I was going to have the good of it. Henry didn't make any objection, and the first thing I did was to go down to Fairshore for the summer. I chose Fairshore because I had heard about all the authors and painters being there. You see, when you never have any real life except what you get from reading, you have a kind of feeling that writers are the only realown folks you've got. You even get to thinking sometimes that maybe, if you had known

how to go about it, you could have written yourself, though perhaps you'd feel that way about bridge-building or soldiering, if it was the only real kind of work you saw much of. Not that I ever thought I could write; but I had so many ideas that were exactly like what I'd read that I thought if I could only just get somebody to write them for me-- But you can't; they've all got things of their own. Still, you would think the way they get inside the people they write about that they would be able to see what is going on inside of you, and be a little kind.

You see, it had come over me that away deep inside of me there was a really beautiful kind of life, singing, and burning blue and red and gold as it sang, and there were days when I couldn't bear to think of it wasting there and nobody to know.

Not that Henry didn't take an interest in me,--his kind of interest,--if I was sick or hurt, or seeing that I had a comfortable chair. But if I should say to Henry to lean upon my heart and listen to the singing there, he would have sent for the doctor.

Nobody talks like that here in Castroville: only in books I thought I had heard the people calling to one another quietly and

apart over all the world, like birds waking in a wood. I've wondered since I came back from Fairshore if people put things in books because they would like to have them that way.

It is difficult to tell what happened to me at Fairshore. It didn't really happen--just the truth of things coming over me in a slow, acrid dribble. Sometimes in the night I can feel the recollection of it all awash at the bottom of my heart, cold and stale. But nothing happened. Nobody took any notice of me but one woman. She was about my age, plain-looking and rather sad. I'd be proud to mention her name; but I've talked about her a great deal, and, with all my being so disappointed, it isn't so bad but it might be worse if everybody got to find out about it. She was really a much greater writer than the rest of them; but, I am ashamed to say it, just at first, perhaps because she was so little different from me on the outside, and perhaps just because she was a woman, I didn't seem to care much about her. I don't know why I shouldn't say it, but I did want to have something to do with interesting men.

People seem to think that when a woman is married she has got all that's coming to

her; but we're not very different from men, andthey have to have things. There are days sometimes when it seems to me that never to have known any kind of men but Henry and the minister and old man Truett, who does our milking, would be more than I could bear. I thought if I could get to know a man who was big enough so I couldn't walk all around him, so to speak,-somebody that I could reach and reach and not find the end of,--I shouldn't feel so--so frustrated. There was a man there who wrote things that made you feel like that,--as if you could take hands with him and go out and rescue shipwrecked men and head rebellions. And when I tried to talk to him, I found him looking at me the way young men used to before I married Henry--as if he thought I wanted something, and it was rather clever of him not to give it to me. It was after that that I took to sitting with the writer woman. I'd noticed that though the men seemed to respect her, and you saw them in corners sometimes reading manuscripts to her, they never took her to walk, or to see the moon rise, or the boats come in. They spent all that on the pretty women, young and kind of empty-headed. I'd heard them talk when they thought I wasn't listening.

And the writer woman sat about with the other women, and didn't seem to mind it.

I hoped when people saw me with her, they'd think it was because she was so famous, and not guess how terrible it was to find yourself all at once a middle-aged woman sitting on a bench, and all the world going by as if it was just what they expected. It came over me that here were all the things I had dreamed about,--the great sea roaring landward, music, quick and gay; looks, little incidents,--and I wasn't in it; I wasn't in it at all.

I suppose the writer woman must have seen how it was with me, but I thought at first she was talking of herself.

"It's all very wonderful out there, isn't it?" she said, looking toward the blue water and the beach shining like a shell, with the other writers and painters walking up and down and making it into world stuff. "Very wonderful--when you have the price to pay for it!"

"Itis expensive." I was thinking of the hotel, but I saw in a minute she meant something else.

"The price you pay," she said, "it isn't being fit to be in the Great World or being able to appreciate it when you're in; it is what you contribute to keep other people in, I suppose."

I must have said something about not being able to see what the kind of women who were in contributed--just girls and flirty kind of married women.

"It's a kind of game, keeping other people in," said the writer woman. "They don't know much else, but they know the game.

We are, most of us," she said, "like those matches that will not light unless they are struck upon the box: there is a particular sort of person that sets us off. It's a business, being that sort of person."

"If anybody could only learn it--" I tried to seem only polite.

"It is the whole art," she said, "of putting yourself into your appearance." She laughed. "I have too much waist for that sort of thing. I have my own game."

I seemed suddenly to want to get away to

my room and think about it. I know it is absurd at my age, but I lay on the bed and cried as I hadn't since they told me my baby hadn't lived. For I knew now that all that beautiful life inside me couldn't be born either, for I was one who had to have help to be worth anything to myself, and I didn't know the game. I had never known it.

All the time I had been thinking that all I needed was to find the right person; and now I understood that, so far as anybody could guess, I wasn't the right person myself. I hadn't the art of putting myself into my appearance. I'm shy about talk, and my arms are too fat, and my skirts have a way of hanging short in front.

I've thought about it a great deal since. It doesn't seem fair. Nobody told me about it when I was a girl; I think nobody tells girls.

They just have to sort of find it out; and if they don't, nobody cares. All they did tell me was about being good, and you will be happy; but it isn't so. There is a great deal more to it than that, and it seems as if people ought to know. I think we are mostly like that in Castroville: we've got powers and capacities 'way down in us, but we

don't know anything about getting them out. We think it is living when we have got upholstered furniture and a top buggy. I know people who think it is worth while never to have lived in a house without a cupola. But all the time we are not in the game. We do not even know there is a game.

Sometimes I think, if it would do me any good, I could turn in and learn it now. I watched them at Fairshore, and it seemed to me it could be learned. I have wild thoughts sometimes,--such thoughts as men have when they go out and snatch things,--but it wouldn't do me any good.

Henry's folks were always long-lived, and there are days when I am so down that I am glad to have even Henry. As long as people see us going about together they can't know-- I'm rather looking forward to getting old now. I think perhaps I sha'n't ache so. But Ishould like to know how much Henry understands.

Mahala Joe [1904] IN the campoodie of Three Pines, which you probably know better by its Spanish name of Tres Pinos, there is an Indian, well thought of among his own people, who goes about wearing a woman's dress, and is known as Mahala Joe. He should be about fifty years old by this time, and has a quiet, kindly face. Sometimes he tucks up the skirt of his woman's dress over a pair of blue overalls when he has a man's work to do, but at feasts and dances he wears a ribbon around his waist and a handkerchief on his head as the other mahalas do. He is much looked to because of his knowledge of white people and their ways, and if it were not for the lines of deep sadness that fall in his face when at rest, one might forget that the woman's gear is the badge of an all but intolerable shame. At least it was so used by the Paiutes, but when you have read this full and true account of how it was first put on, you may not think it so.

Fifty years ago the valley about Tres Pinos was all one sea of moving grass and dusky, greenish sage, cropped over by deer and antelope, north as far as

Togobah, and south to the Bitter Lake.

Beside every considerable stream which flowed into it from the Sierras was a Paiute campoodie, and all they knew of white people was by hearsay from the tribes across the mountains. But soon enough cattlemen began to push their herds through the Sierra passes to the Paiutes' feeding-ground. The Indians saw them come, and though they were not very well pleased, they held still by the counsel of their old men; night and day they made medicine and prayed that the white men might go away.

Among the first of the cattlemen in the valley about Tres Pinos was Joe Baker, who brought a young wife, and built his house not far from the campoodie. The Indian women watched her curiously from afar because of a whisper that ran among the wattled huts. When the year was far gone, and the sun-cured grasses curled whitish brown, a doctor came riding hard from the fort at Edawick, forty miles to the south, and though they watched they did not see him ride away. It was the third day at evening when Joe Baker came walking toward the campoodie, and his face was set and sad. He carried something rolled in

a blanket, and looked anxiously at the women as he went between the huts. It was about the hour of the evening meal, and the mahalas sat about the fires watching the cooking pots. He came at last opposite a young woman who sat nursing her child. She had a bright, pleasant face, and her little one seemed about six months old. Her husband stood near and watched them with great pride. Joe Baker knelt down in front of the mahala, and opened the roll of blankets. He showed her a dayold baby that wrinkled up its small face and cried.

"Its mother is dead," said the cattleman.

The young Indian mother did not know English, but she did not need speech to know what had happened. She looked pitifully at the child, and at her husband timidly. Joe Baker went and laid his rifle and cartridge belt at the Paiute's feet. The Indian picked up the gun and fingered it; his wife smiled. She put down her own child, and lifted the little white stranger to her breast. It nozzled against her and hushed its crying; the young mother laughed.

"See how greedy it is," she said; "it is truly

white." She drew up the blanket around the child and comforted it.

The cattleman called to him one of the Indians who could speak a little English.

"Tell her," he said, "that I wish her to care for the child. His name is Walter. Tell her that she is to come to my house for everything he needs, and for every month that he keeps fat and well she shall have a fat steer from my herd." So it was agreed.

As soon as Walter was old enough he came to sleep at his father's house, but the Indian woman whom he called Ebia came every day to tend him. Her son was his brother, and Walter learned to speak Paiute before he learned English. The two boys were always together, but as yet the little Indian had no name. It is not the custom among Paiutes to give names to those who have not done anything worth naming.

"But I have a name," said Walter, "and so shall he. I will call him Joe. That is my father's name, and it is a good name, too."

When Mr. Baker was away with the cattle

Walter slept at the campoodie, and Joe's mother made him a buckskin shirt. At that time he was so brown with the sun and the wind that only by his eyes could you tell that he was white; he was also very happy.

But as this is to be the story of how Joe came to the wearing of a woman's dress I cannot tell you all the plays they had, how they went on their first hunting, nor what they found in the creek of Tres Pinos.

The beginning of the whole affair of Mahala Joe must be laid to the arrowmaker. The arrow-maker had a stiff knee from a wound in a long gone battle, and for that reason he sat in the shade of his wickiup, and chipped arrow points from flakes of obsidian that the young men brought him from Togobah, fitting them to shafts of reeds from the river marsh. He used to coax the boys to wade in the brown water and cut the reeds, for the dampness made his knee ache. They drove bargains with him for arrows for their own hunting, or for the sake of the stories he could tell. For an armful of reeds he would make three arrows, and for a double armful he would tell tales. These were mostly of great huntings and old wars, but when it was winter, and no snakes in the

long grass to overhear, he would tell Wonder-stories. The boys would lie with their toes in the warm ashes, and the arrow-maker would begin.

"You can see," said the arrow-maker, "on the top of Waban the tall boulder looking on the valleys east and west. That is the very boundary between the Paiute country and Shoshone land. The boulder is a hundred times taller than the tallest man, and thicker through than six horses standing nose to tail; the shadow of it falls all down the slope. At mornings it falls toward the Paiute peoples, and evening it falls on Shoshone land. Now on this side of the valley, beginning at the campoodie, you will see a row of pine trees standing all upstream one behind another. See, the long branches grow on the side toward the hill, and some may tell you it is because of the way the wind blows, but I say it is because they reach out in a hurry to get up the mountain. Now I will tell you how these things came about.

"Very long ago all the Paiutes of this valley were ruled by two brothers, a chief and a medicine man, Winnedumah and Tinnemaha. They were both very wise, and

one of them never did anything without the other. They taught the tribes not to war upon each other, but to stand fast as brothers, and so they brought peace into the land. At that time there were no white people heard of, and game was plenty.

The young honored the old, and nothing was as it is now."

When the arrow-maker came to this point, the boys fidgeted with their toes, and made believe to steal the old man's arrows to distract his attention. They did not care to hear about the falling off of the Paiutes; they wished to have the tale. Then the arrow-maker would hurry on to the time when there arose a war between the Paiutes and the Shoshones. Then Winnedumah put on his war bonnet, and Tinnemaha made medicine. Word went around among the braves that if they stood together man to man as brothers, then they should have this war.

"And so they might," said the arrowmaker, "but at last their hearts turned to water. The tribes came together on the top of Waban. Yes; where the boulder now stands, for that is the boundary of our lands, for no brave would fight off his own

ground for fear of the other's medicine. So they fought. The eagles heard the twang of the bowstring, and swung down from White Mountain. The vultures smelled the smell of battle, and came in from Shoshone land.

Their wings were dark like a cloud, and underneath the arrows flew like hail. The Paiutes were the better bowmen, and they caught the Shoshone arrows where they struck in the earth and shot them back again. Then the Shoshones were ashamed, and about the time of the sun going down they called upon their Medicine Men, and one let fly a magic arrow,--for none other would touch him,-- and it struck in the throat of Tinnemaha.

"Now when that befell," went on the arrowmaker, "the braves forgot the word that had gone before the battle, for they turned their backs to the Medicine Man, all but Winnedumah, his brother, and fled this way from Waban. Then stood Winnedumah by Tinnemaha, for that was the way of those two, whatever happened, one would not leave the other. There was none left to carry on the fight, and yet since he was so great a chief the Shoshones were afraid to take him, and the sun went down. In the dusk they saw a bulk, and they said, 'He is

still standing,' but when it was morning light they saw only a great rock, so you see it to this day. As for the braves who ran away, they were changed to pine trees, but in their hearts they are cowards yet, therefore they stretch out their arms and strive toward the mountain. And that," said the arrow-maker, "is how the tall stones came to be on the top of Waban. But it was not in my day nor my father's." Then the boys would look up at Winnedumah, and were half afraid, and as for the tale, they quite believed it.

The arrow-maker was growing old. His knee hurt him in cold weather, and he could not make arrow points fast enough to satisfy the boys, who lost a great many in the winter season shooting at ducks in the tulares. Walter's father promised him a rifle when he was fifteen, but that was years away. There was a rock in the canon behind Tres Pinos with a great crack in the top. When the young men rode to the hunting they shot each an arrow at it, and if it stuck it was a promise of good luck. The boys scaled the rock by means of a grapevine ladder, and pried out the old points. This gave them an idea.

"Upon Waban where the fighting was, there must be a great many arrow points," said Walter.

"So there must be," said Joe. "Let us go after them," said the white boy; but the other dared not, for no Paiute would go within a bowshot of Winnedumah; nevertheless, they talked the matter over.

"How near would you go?" asked Walter.

"As near as a strong man might shoot an arrow," said Joe. "If you will go so far," said Walter, "I will go the rest of the way."

"It is a two days' journey," said the Paiute, but he did not make any other objection.

It was a warm day of spring when they set out. The cattleman was off to the river meadow, and Joe's mother was out with the other mahalas gathering taboose.

"If I were fifteen, and had my rifle, I would not be afraid of anything," said Walter.

"But in that case we would not need to go after arrow points," said the Indian boy.

They climbed all day in a bewildering waste of boulders and scrubby trees. They could see Winnedumah shining whitely on the ridge ahead, but when they had gone down into the gully with great labor, and up the other side, there it stood whitely just another ridge away.

"It is like the false water in the desert," said Walter. "It goes farther from you, and when you get to it there is no water there."

"It is magic medicine," said Indian Joe. "No good comes of going against medicine."

"If you are afraid," said Walter, "why do you not say so. You may go back if you like, and I will go on by myself."

Joe would not make any answer to that.

They were hot and tired, and awed by the stillness of the hills. They kept on after that, angry and apart; sometimes they lost sight of each other among the boulders and underbrush. But it seemed that it must

really have been as one or the other of them had said, for when they came out on a high mesa presently there was no Winnedumah anywhere in sight. They would have stopped then and taken counsel, but they were too angry for that, so they walked on in silence, and the day failed rapidly, as it will do in high places.

They began to draw near together and to be afraid. At last the Indian boy stopped and gathered the tops of bushes together, and began to weave a shelter for the night, and when Walter saw that he made it large enough for two he spoke to him.

"Are we lost?" he said.

"We are lost for to-night," said Joe, "but in the morning we will find ourselves."

They ate dried venison and drank from the wicker bottle, and huddled together because of the dark and the chill.

"Why do we not see the stone any more?" asked Walter in a whisper.

"I do not know," said Joe. "I think it has gone away."

"Will he come after us?"

"I do not know. I have on my elk's tooth," said Joe, and he clasped the charm that hung about his neck. They started and shivered, hearing a stone crash far away as it rolled down the mountain side, and the wind began to move among the pines.

"Joe," said Walter, "I am sorry I said that you were afraid."

"It is nothing," said the Paiute. "Besides, I am afraid."

"So am I," whispered the other. "Joe," he said again after a long silence, "if he comes after us what shall we do?"

"We will stay by each other."

"Like the two brothers, whatever happens," said the white boy, "forever and ever."

"We are two brothers," said Joe. "Will you swear it?"

"On my elk's tooth."

Then they each took the elk's tooth in his hand and made a vow that whether Winnedumah came down from his rock, or whether the Shoshones found them, come what would, they would stand together.

Then they were comforted, and lay down holding each other's hands.

"I hear some one walking," said Walter.

"It is the wind among the pines," said Joe. A twig snapped. "What is that?" said the one boy.

"It is a fox or a coyote passing," said the other, but he knew better. They lay still, scarcely breathing, and throbbed with fear.

They felt a sense of a presence approaching in the night, the whisper of a moccasin on the gravelly soil, the swish of displaced bushes springing back to place.

They saw a bulk shape itself out of the dark; it came and stood over them, and they saw that it was an Indian looking larger in the gloom. He spoke to them, and whether he spoke in a strange tongue, or they were too frightened to understand, they could not tell.

"Do not kill us!" cried Walter, but the Indian boy made no sound. The man took Walter by the shoulders and lifted him up.

"White," said he.

"We are brothers," said Joe; "we have sworn it."

"So," said the man, and it seemed as if he smiled.

"Until we die," said both the boys. The Indian gave a grunt.

"A white man," he said, "is--White." It did not seem as if that was what he meant to say.

"Come, I will take you to your people.

They search for you about the foot of Waban. These three hours I have watched you and them." The boys clutched at each other in the dark. They were sure now who spoke to them, and between fear and fatigue and the cramp of cold they staggered and stumbled as they walked.

The Indian stopped and considered them.

"I cannot carry both," he said.

"I am the older," said Joe; "I can walk."

Without any more words the man picked up Walter, who trembled, and walked off down the slope. They went a long way through the scrub and under the tamarack pines. The man was naked to the waist, and had a quiver full of arrows on his shoulder. The buckthorn branches whipped and scraped against his skin, but he did not seem to mind. At last they came to a place where they could see a dull red spark across an open flat.

"That," said the Indian, "is the fire of your people. They missed you at afternoon, and have been looking for you. From my station on the hill I saw." Then he took the boy by the shoulders.

"Look you," he said, "no good comes of mixing white and brown, but now that the vow is made, see to the keeping of it."

Then he stepped back from them and seemed to melt into the dark. Ahead of them the boys saw the light of the fire flare up with new fuel, and shadows moved between them and the flame, which they knew for the figures of their friends. Swiftly

as two scared rabbits they ran on toward the glow.

When Walter and Joe had told them the story at the campoodie, the Paiutes made a great deal of it, especially the arrowmaker.

"Without a doubt," he said, "it was Winnedumah who came to you, and not, as some think, a Shoshone who was spying on our land. It is a great mystery.

But since you have made a vow of brothers, you should keep it after the ancient use." Then he took a knife of obsidian and cut their arms, and rubbed a little of the blood of each upon the other.

"Now," he said, "you are one fellowship and one blood, and that is as it should be, for you were both nursed at one breast.

See that you keep the vow."

"We will," said the boys solemnly, and they went out into the sunlight very proud of the blood upon their bared arms, holding by each other's hands.

II

When Walter was fifteen his father gave him a rifle, as he had promised, and a word of advice with it.

"Learn to shoot quickly and well," he said, "and never ride out from home without it.

No one can tell what this trouble with the Indians may come to in the end."

Walter rode straight to the campoodie. He was never happy in any of his gifts until he had showed them to Joe. There was a group of older men at the camp, quartering a deer which they had brought in. One of them, called Scar-Face, looked at Walter with a leering frown.

"See," he said, "they're arming the very children with guns."

"My father promised it to me many years ago," said Walter. "It is my birthday gift."

He could not explain why, and he grew angry at the man's accusing tone, but after it he did not like showing his presents to the Indians.

He called Joe, and they went over to a cave in the black rock where they had kept

their boyish treasures, and planned their plays since they were children. Joe thought the rifle a beauty, and turned it over admiringly in the shadow of the cave. They tried shooting at a mark, and then decided to go up Oak Creek for a shot at the gray squirrels. There they sighted a band of antelope that led them over a tongue of hills into Little Round Valley, where they found themselves at noon twelve miles from home and very hungry. They had no antelope, but four squirrels and a grouse.

The two boys made a fire for cooking in a quiet place by a spring of sweet water.

"You may have my rifle to use as often as you like," said Walter, "but you must not lend it to any one in the campoodie, especially to Scar-Face. My father says he is the one who is stirring up all this trouble with the whites."

"The white men do not need any one to help them get into trouble," said Joe. "They can do that for themselves."

"It is the fault of the Indians," said Walter.

"If they did not shoot the cattle the white men would leave them alone."

"But if the white men come first to our lands with noise and trampling and scare away the game, what then will they shoot?" asked the Paiute.

Walter did not make any answer to that.

He had often gone hunting with Joe and his father, and he knew what it meant to walk far, and fasting, after game made shy by the rifles of cattlemen, and at last to return empty to the campoodie, where there were women and children with hungry eyes.

"Is it true," he said after a while, "that Scar-Face is stirring up all the Indians in the valley?"

"How should I know," said Joe; "I am only a boy, and have not killed big game. I am not admitted to the counsels of the old men. What does it matter to us whether of old feuds or new? Are we not brothers sworn?"

Then, as the dinner was done, they ate each of the other's kill, for it was the custom of the Paiutes at that time that no youth should eat game of his own killing until he was fully grown. As they walked

homeward the boys planned to get permission to go up on Waban, for a week, after mountain sheep, before the snows began.

Mr. Baker looked grave when Walter spoke to him.

"My boy," he said, "I wish you would not plan long trips like this without first speaking to me. It is hardly safe in the present state of feeling among the Indians to let you go with them in this fashion. A whole week, too. But as you have already spoken of it, and it has probably been talked over in the campoodie, for me to refuse now would look as if I suspected something, and might bring about the thing I most fear."

"You should not be afraid for me with Joe, father, for we are brothers sworn," said Walter, and he told his father how they had mixed the blood of their arms in the arrowmaker's hut after they had come back from their first journey on Waban.

"Well," said Mr. Baker, who had not heard of this before, "I know that they set a great store by these superstitious customs, but I

have not much faith in the word of a Paiute when he is dealing with a white man.

However, you had better go on with this hunting trip. Take Hank with you and Joe's father, and do not be gone more than five days at the outside."

Hank was one of Mr. Baker's vaqueros, and very glad to get off for a few days hunting on the blunt top of Waban. On the Monday following they left the Baker ranch for the mountain. As the two boys rode up the boulder-strewn slope it set them talking of the first time they had gone that way on their fruitless hunt for arrow points about the foot of Winnedumah, and of all that happened to them at that time. The valley lay below them full of purple mist, and away by the creek of Tres Pinos the brown, wattled huts of the campoodie like great wasps' nests stuck in the sage. Hank and Joe's father, with the pack horses, were ahead of them far up the trail; Joe and Walter let their own ponies lag, and the nose of one touched the flank of the other, as they climbed slowly up the steep, and the boys turned their faces to each other, as if they had some vague warning that they would not ride so and talk familiarly again, as if the boiling anger of the tribes in

the valley had brewed a sort of mist that rose up and gloomed the pleasant air on the slope of Waban.

"Joe," said Walter, "my father says if it came to a fight between the white settlers and the Paiutes, that you would not hold by the word we have passed."

"That is the speech of a white man," said Joe. "But would you?" the other insisted.

"I am a Paiute," said Joe; "I will hold by my people, also by my word; I will not fight against you."

"Nor I against you, but I would not like to have my father think you had broken your word."

"Have no care," said the Indian, "I will not break it."

Mr. Baker looked anxiously after his son as he rode to the hunting on Waban; he looked anxiously up that trail every hour until the boy came again, and that, as it turned out, was at the end of three days.

For the trouble among the Indians had come to something at last,--the wasps were all out of nest by the brown creeks, and with them a flight of stinging arrows.

The trouble began at Cottonwood, and the hunting party on Waban the second day out saw a tall, pale column of smoke that rose up from the notch of the hill behind the settlement, and fanned out slowly into the pale blueness of the sky.

It went on evenly, neither more nor less, thick smoke from a fire of green wood steadily tended. Before noon another rose from the mouth of Oak Creek, and a third from Tunawai. They waved and beckoned to one another, calling to counsel.

"Signal fires," said Hank; "that means mischief."

And from that on he went with his rifle half cocked, and walked always so that he might keep Joe's father in full view. By night that same day there were seven smoke trees growing up in the long valley, and spreading thin, pale branches to the sky. Then was no zest left in the hunt, and on the morning they owned it. Walter was worried by what he knew his father's

anxiety must be. Then the party began to ride down again, and always Hank made the Indian go before. Away by the foot of Oppapago rose a black volume of smoke, thick, and lighted underneath by flames. It might be the reek of a burning ranchhouse. The boys were excited and afraid.

They talked softly and crowded their ponies together on the trail.

"Joe," said Walter whisperingly, "if there is battle you will have to go to it."

"Yes," said Joe." "And you will fight; otherwise they will call you a coward, and if you run away they will kill you."

"So I suppose," said Joe. "Or they will make you wear a woman's dress like To-go-na-tee, the man who got up too late." This was a reminder from one of the arrow-maker's tales. "But you have promised not to fight."

"Look you," said the Indian boy; "if a white man came to kill me I would kill him. That is right. But I will not fight you nor your

father's house. That is my vow."

The white boy put out his hand, and laid it on the flank of the foremost pony. The Indian boy's fingers came behind him, and crept along the pony's back until they reached the other hand. They rode forward without talking.

Toward noon they made out horsemen riding on the trail below them. As it wound in and out around the blind gullies they saw and lost sight of them a dozen times. At last, where the fringe of the tall trees began, they came face to face. It was Mr. Baker and a party of five men; they carried rifles and had set and anxious looks.

"What will you have?" said Indian Joe's father as they drew up before him under a tamarack pine.

"My son," said the cattleman.

"Is there war?" said the Indian.

"There is war. Come, Walter."

The boys were still and scared. Slowly Hank and Walter drew their horses out of

the path and joined the men. Indian Joe and his father passed forward on the trail.

"Do them no harm," said Joe Baker to those that were with him.

"Good-by, Joe," said Walter half aloud.

The other did not turn his head, but as he went they noticed that he had bared his right arm from the hunting shirt, and an inch above the elbow showed a thin, white scar. Walter had the twin of that mark under his flannels.

Mr. Baker did not mind fighting Indians; he thought it a good thing to have their troubles settled all at once in this way, but he did not want his son mixed up in it. The first thing he did when he got home was to send him off secretly by night to the fort, and from there he passed over the mountains with other of the settlers' families under strong escort, and finally went to his mother's people in the East, and was put to school. As it turned out he never came back to Tres Pinos; he does not come into this story any more.

When the first smoke rose up that showed

where the fierce hate of the Paiutes had broken into flame, the Indians took their women and children away from the pleasant open slopes, and hid them in deep canons in secret places of the rocks.

There they feathered arrows, and twisted bowstrings of the sinew of deer. And because there were so many grave things done, and it was not the custom for boys to question their elders, Joe never heard how Walter had been sent away. He thought him still at the ranch with his father, and it is because of this mistake that there is any more story at all.

You may be sure that, of those two boys, Joe's was the deeper loving for, besides having grown up together, Walter was white, therefore thinking himself, and making the other believe it, the better of the two. But for this Walter made no difference in his behavior; had Joe to eat at his table, and would have him sleep in his bed, but Joe laughed, and lay on the floor.

All this was counted a kindness and a great honor in the campoodie. Walter could find out things by looking in a book, which was sheer magic, and had taught Joe to write a little, so that he could send word by means of a piece of paper, which was

cleverer than the tricks Joe had taught him, of reading the signs of antelope and elk and deer. The white boy was to the Indian a little of all the heroes and bright ones of the arrow-maker's tales come alive again.

Therefore he quaked in his heart when he heard the rumors that ran about the camp.

The war began about Cottonwood, and ran like wildfire that licked up all the ranches in its course. Then the whites came strongly against the Paiutes at the Stone Corral, and made an end of the best of their fighting men. Then the Indians broke out in the north, and at last it came to such a pass that the very boys must do fighting, and the women make bowstrings.

The cattlemen turned in to Baker's ranch as a centre, and all the northern campoodies gathered together to attack them. They had not much to hope for, only to do as much killing as possible before the winter set in with the hunger and the deep snows.

By this time Joe's father was dead; and his mother had brought the boy a quiver full of arrows and a new bowstring, and sent him down to the battle.

And Joe went hotly enough to join the men of the other village, nursing his bow with great care, remembering his father, but when he came to counsel and found where the fight must be, his heart turned again, for he remembered his friend. The braves camped by Little Round Valley, and he thought of the talk he and Walter had there; the war party went over the tongue of hills, and Joe saw Winnedumah shining whitely on Waban, and remembered his boyish errand, the mystery of the tall, strange warrior that came upon them in the night, their talk in the hut of the arrowmaker, and the vow that came afterward.

The Indians came down a ravine to- ward Tres Pinos, and there met a band of horses which some of their party had run in from the ranches; among them was a pinto pony which Walter had used to ride, and it came to Joe's hand when he called. Then the boy wondered if Walter might be dead, and leaned his head against the pony's mane; it turned its head and nickered softly at his ear.

The war party stayed in the ravine until it grew dark, and Joe watched how Winnedumah swam in a mist above the

hills long after the sun had gone quite down, as if in his faithfulness he would outwatch the dark; and then the boy's heart was lifted up to the great chief standing still

by Tinnemaha. "I will not forget," he said.

"I, too, will be faithful." Perhaps at this moment he expected a miracle to help him in his vow as it had helped Winnedumah.

In the dusk the mounted Indians rode down by the Creek of Tres Pinos. When they came by the ruined hut where his father had lived, Joe's heart grew hot again, and when he passed the arrowmaker's he remembered his vow. Suddenly he wheeled his pony in the trail, hardly knowing what he would do. The man next to him laid an arrow across his bow and pointed it at the boy's breast.

"Coward," he whispered, but an older Indian laid his hand on the man's arm.

"Save your arrows," he said. Then the ponies swept forward in the charge, but Joe knew in an instant how it would be with him. He would be called false and a coward, killed for it, driven from the tribe, but he would not fight against his sworn brother. He would keep his vow.

A sudden rain of arrows flew from the advancing Paiutes; Joe fumbled his and dropped it on the ground. He was wondering if one of the many aimed would find his brother. Bullets answered the arrow flight. He saw the braves pitch forward, and heard the scream of wounded ponies.

He hoped he would be shot; he would not have minded that; it would be better than being called a coward. And then it occurred to him, if Walter and his father came out and found him when the fight was done, they would think that he had broken his word. The Paiutes began to seek cover, but Joe drove out wildly from them, and rode back in the friendly dark, and past the ruined campoodie, to the black rocks.

There he crept into the cave which only he and Walter knew, and lay on his face and cried, for though he was an Indian he was only a boy, and he had seen his first fight.

He was sick with the thoughts of his vow.

He lay in the black rocks all the night and the day, and watched the cattlemen and the soldiers ranging all that county for the stragglers of his people, and guessed that the Paiute had made the last stand. Then

in the second night he began to work back by secret paths to the mountain camp. It never occurred to him not to go. He had the courage to meet what waited for him there, but he had not the heart to go to it in the full light of day. He came in by his mother's place, and she spat upon him, for she had heard how he had carried himself in the fight.

"No son of mine," said she.

He went by the women and children and heard their jeers. His heart was very sick.

He went apart and sat down and waited what the men would say. There were few of them left about the dying fire. They had washed off their war paint, and their bows were broken. When they spoke at last it was with mocking and sad scorn.

"We have enough of killing," said the one called Scar-Face. "Let him have a woman's dress and stay to mend the fire."

So it was done in the presence of all the camp; and because he was a boy, and because he was an Indian, he said nothing of his vow, nor opened his mouth in his defense, though his heart quaked and his

knees shook. He had the courage to wear the badge of being afraid all his life. They brought him a woman's dress, though they were all too sad for much laughter, and in the morning he set to bringing the wood for the fire.

Afterward there was a treaty made between the Paiutes and the settlers, and the remnant went back to the campoodie of Tres Pinos, and Joe learned how Walter had been sent out of the valley in the beginning of the war, but that did not make any difference about the woman's dress.

He and Walter never met again. He continued to go about in dresses, though in time he was allowed to do a man's work, and his knowledge of English helped to restore a friendly footing with the cattlemen. The valley filled very rapidly with settlers after that, and under the slack usage of the tribe, Mahala Joe, as he came to be known, might have thrown aside his woman's gear without offense, but he had the courage to wear it to his life's end. He kept his sentence as he kept his vow, and yet it is certain that Walter never knew.

Spring o' the Year [1908] WHEN Don Pedro Ruiz, owner of five hundred fat wethers and two hundred ewes, was a little bowed in the back and a little frosty about the temples, a sickness got abroad among his sheep and took a good half of them. The next year a bear stampeded the flock toward a forty-foot barranca over which two hundred pitched to destruction. After that Don Pedro went down to La Liebre and hired out as a herder. The superintendent thereupon gave him a lamb band, flock-wise, seasoned ewes, mostly with twin lambs; and because there was old kindness between him and the superintendent of La Liebre, and because he had by long usage established a right to much good pasture in the neighborhood of Wild Rose, Don Pedro was allowed to take the flock out in his own charge, with a couple of dogs, and no companion herder except to set him on his way.

Being master of his movements, he was able to spend much more time with his family than falls to the lot of the hired herder. This was important, for Don Pedro

had at that time, besides the Sen~ora Ruiz, who was fat and comfortable, a daughter grown up as tall and slim as a moonbeam, with saint's eyes and a mouth as soft and scarlet as a crumpled pomegranate flower. She was of marriageable age and needed a father's care.

It was ten flock journeys from La Liebre to the meadow of Wild Rose, below Tres Pin~os, where Don Pedro had his house, theramada of vines, a long, low two-walled hut, the fig-tree, the pomegranates, and the scarlet strings of chilis drying in the sun. That is, it was ten journeys, taken leisurely, when the grass was rank and the chili-cojote in bloom. It was barely seven in the fall of the year, with the feed scant and only one water-hole between the ranchhouse and Wild Rose. Don Pedro would bring up the flock from the shearing, by which time the grazing would be in its prime; here he could feed for six weeks within sight of his own hearth smoke and candle.

Then he swung out desertward to little green oases and can~on floors that caught the run-off of the quick winter rains for

other six weeks, by which time the meadow of Wild Rose would be grown again. Thus the old man had the more leisure for adoring his daughter of the saint's eyes.

He was not so good at that business, however, as Ruy Garcia, who had, besides a perfect rosary of adoring names for her, a most remarkably fine voice for singing them, and a very good guitar, which he brought out from Tres Pin~os twice in the week to strum in the ramada. He might have come oftener but that the old Don looked so sourly upon him, and the eyes of Felicita, misty and tender with music, had, so Ruy Garcia, who had expressive eyes himself and knew how to use them, assured himself, no spark in them for Ruy Garcia.

When matters were at this pass there came a winter of extraordinary rains, and Don Pedro contracted rheumatism. Then, since it would have been a blasphemy, as Heaven had sent him a daughter, to wish for a son, he thanked God that, being a daughter, Felicita was such as she was.

She had been brought up with the sheep, of course; she had brought up the dogs

herself by hand. If they served Don Pedro and the flock willingly, judge how they ran their feet off at the bidding of this tall, slim girl who went at the rounding-up as if it were a new and merry play invented expressly to give herd dogs an occasion for being proud of themselves. She would be out in the blue-ringed dawn before the flock had begun to feed, having covered the two or three miles between them and the house light-footed and laughing. She set the flock in motion where the feed was tallest, and by the time old Pedro crawled aching from his blankets, she would be blowing the coals under his coffee-pot. Don Pedro called her Santissima, Daughter of Saints, Prop of his House, and other names not less fervent and glowing than those of Ruy Garcia, who had got beyond name-calling and adored her dumbly, awed and absurdly happy to sit with her in the idle noons when the flock panted, each with its head under its neighbor's belly, while old Ruiz slept under the bitter-brush and the sun marched solemnly like the Host in the clean, high heaven. And for his forbearance in the matter of perfervid declarations, Felicita rewarded him by sending him out with the dogs to the evening round-up. Days of wind and

lowering cloud she had the flock all under her hand while the old Don's wife nursed his pains with hot drinks and flannels.

It was reported that Ruy Garcia, when he was told that the Ruiz girl had turned herdgirl to her father's sheep, spending whole days in the open a flock journey from home, set spurs to his horse and never left off galloping until he had found her. But he could never win her consent to so much as being seen in her neighborhood unless Don Pedro was about. He succeeded so far in seeing her that when the rain came drumming on the broad leaves of the mallow, he sent the girl and the old man to the house, and he, Ruy Garcia, who despised sheep and thought a whole day out of the saddle misspent, kept the flock alone. Which proves that he was a very astute young man or that he really loved her. Don Pedro softened much toward young Garcia in those days, and the Sen~ora Ruiz made him toothsome enchiladas andchile relleno .

But there were times, and you may be sure the young man never heard of them, for Felicita was a modest girl and the pride of Pedro Ruiz was great, when she slept

with the flock and warded them through the night. She would lie out there on the shadeless, turtle-backed hills sweeping girdlewise about Wild Rose, and bed the flock so as always to point the star of her mother's candle in the window of her home. Three times when the twilight-fire was lighted she made it to wink with the flare of burning greasewood, and in the morning sent smoke, tall and thin, of green sage. Then Pedro and his wife would understand that it was well with the flock, and bless the saints accordingly. The girl would put on her father's clothes for the work,--she was full as tall as he, though as slender and swaying as a stalk of mariposa,--and when she had strapped on an old horse-pistol, had a very pretty swagger that made her parents laugh with a choke in the throat and a "Santa Maria, was there ever such a child as ours!" No, never, Ruy Garcia could have told them.

The girl came to no harm; indeed, there was none she could come to in the open wilderness. But she got a most glowing color, and her hair blew every way, like tendrils of the megarrhiza.

Don Pedro's ailment did not mend with the winter, and what with medicines, and the

herder's wage being no more than a dollar a day, with food and tobacco, it seemed less than ever expedient to hire another man in his place. Besides, if the flock went down to the shearing at La Liebre without Ruiz, it was doubtful if ever he got another to tend. It was kindness only that won him this-- kindness and a reputation for skill with lambs; for the band numbered less than a thousand, and it was cheaper to run three thousand in a bunch, with two men to handle them. So when the haze of spring began to brood over the land, and Pedro Ruiz had taken to his bed, it began to be also an anxious matter how the flock could be brought to the shearing. It would be two weeks going, for Ruiz was permitted to keep the flock at Wild Rose for lambing, and the lambs were tender, and ten days returning. All the way lay through open desert until the last, when it turned into the pass between the broad-headed oaks that kept the contours of the hills.

Pedro Ruiz and his wife lay awake in their bed far into the night discussing what was to be done about it; but Felicita on the hillslope with the flock, had never but one opinion. She would go with the flock herself.

"Felicitamia ," said her father, "you are the best of daughters, but the thing is impossible. Even if you were a boy, impossible; it is too hard for you."

"I will go as a boy," said Felicita. "Who is there to guess?" There was that in her father's eyes when he looked at her that said it would not be hard guessing.

"I am as tall as a boy," she said, merrily, "and I think I have a beard coming," presenting the minute velvet down of her cheek for inspection. Then she got down on her knees by his bed and had her arms around him. After that old Pedro blessed God for the gift of a child, and surrendered.

When it became necessary to take Ruy Garcia into confidence, he was scandalized.

"It is too hard for you. It is man's work," he said.

Felicita tossed her head. "But where is the man?"

"Felicita!"

The girl relented, seeing tears in his eyes.

"I know you would do it, Ruy; but we cannot afford to hire you, and cannot take it as a gift."

"But let me go with you, to make sure no harm comes to you," he pleaded.

"What harm could come? Would you rob me of my good name?"

"Garcia is a good name," said the boy, stoutly, though he blushed hotly all over to say it. "I would give it to you if I might go with you."

"No, no, Ruy. You are kind, but the best you can do is to get me some clothes. I cannot go into La Liebre with my father's things. Get me some clothes that will look as if they belonged to me. I am only a little smaller than you."

A very pretty boy she looked when she was properly dressed for it, but Ruy Garcia had another shock when he found all her lovely hair must come off. And with Felicita laughing, Sen~ora Ruiz snuffing, and old

Pedro wiping his eyes in the bed, he dared not so much as hint at a wish for one of those thick, wavy locks.

"Why have you your blankets tied on your saddle, Ruy?" asked the girl. The boy kept his eyes on the ground.

"I go on a journey--to Posada. I have some work there. I shall be gone a month or six weeks."

"By which time," said Felicita, "I shall be back from La Liebre. Come and hear my adventures."

The boy looked at her very earnestly and tender-eyed, but with never a word.

A great many unpleasant things might have happened to Felicita going south with the flock along the foot of the Sierra wall; no rain fell to distress her, no wind arose to scatter the flock. Coyotes ringed her sheep with demoniac noises, but got none of the lambs, and the deadly milkweed did not spring about her trail. She saw no dust of other flocks; they had all gone south for the lambing two months before. Here and there about the washes were pleasant

splashes of spring. One would say they had spilled over the mountain rim from the fulgent San Joaquin.

Rising at dawn, when the flock began to feed, Felicita made her breakfast of coffee and great lumps of bread. By mid-morning, when the sheep lay down or dozed upon their feet, huddled in an open space, she cooked a meal, and took her noon siesta under the sage. Then the flock fed, traveling south until moonrise, when the dogs bedded them, and the girl crept into her blankets with a lump of bread which she was often too tired to eat; and slept till the dogs waked her.

It was remarkable that the first night out Felicita had been nervous and wakeful and the dogs had barked; but by the second night she felt the friendly presence of the wilderness: it pervaded all her sleep.

Felicita had never heard of any supernatural being but the saints and the blessed Personages; therefore she acknowledged their protection in her prayers, like the good girl she was.

At the eighteen-mile house she had dinner with teamsters who called her "bub," to her

great satisfaction. The next day a prospector, passing, asked her for the makings of a cigarette. Ruy Garcia had provided her for that contingency. So by no greater hardship than the responsibility of the lambs involved, and with growing assurance of her boy's disguise, she came to the ranch- house of La Liebre, among the oaks. What she should do there had been agreed upon at home.

"Sen~or?"

The superintendent of La Liebre looked up from his tally-books to see a wondrously slim lad, Raphael-eyed, with a face burned as dusky red as a pomegranate in the sun, wearing a shepherd's dress, with two herd dogs at his knees.

"I am Pedro Ruiz, son of Pedro Ruiz, whom you know. I have brought my father's flock, also a letter." He took it forthwith out of his hat, showing a lovely head of rough-cropped, wavy hair. The letter was a most wordy and moving appeal to the Sen~or Superintendente to have regard for his past faithfulness and the excellent condition of the flock, and to return them in the charge of this, his most

dutiful son; and in the meantime to keep the lad as much as possible under his eye, as he was somewhat ill furnished for the riot of shearings.

"I should think so," thought the superintendent, eying the lad all over.

Young Pedro blushed the darker, and hung his head. A modest lad.

"And you brought the flock from Wild Rose yourself? You are young for the work."

"If you will but look," said the boy. "They are in good condition. One new lamb for every ewe, and over two hundred of those that had twins." All this being exactly as the letter had said, the superintendent approved the lad, had his blankets spread in the patio, kept him to run between the ranch-house and the shearing-pens. By this means young Pedro was able to avoid much that would have been difficult for a girl to bear; for the shearing is holiday-time, and wine goes freely about.

Pedro Ruiz had not been long a hired herder, and only one of those who drew in at La Liebre knew much of his affairs. That was Jules Giraud, as quizzing and gossipy

an old rascal as ever wagged an unshaven chin. He came in late from the Sierra pastures, and was put to help at the sacking-frame. Here he had a glimpse of the slender lad who ran at the superintendent's word.

"A likely lad," said old Jules, "born to be a breaker of hearts; Pedro Ruiz, is he," he said, when he had asked, and been answered, "son of Don Pedro? Well, I have known the old man these ten years back, but I have heard of no son. A daughter he had who should have been about the age of this one--" Giraud broke off to look long and keenly after the boy. In the course of a day or two he made an opportunity to ask after Don Pedro's health, "and the rest of your brothers and sisters," said Jules.

"I am my father's only child," said the boy, carelessly, and then suddenly blushed a deep, painful red.

"Ho, ho!" said old Jules, under his breath.

He kept what he thought to himself, for next day the parting of the flocks began, and Jules had already purposed going up along the desert at the foot of the Sierra wall.

Felicita was beyond everything glad to be upon the trail again. The hazardous week of the shearing past, the feed abundant, spring in the air, under foot, in the heart, every day shining as a jewel, she sang as she walked in the dust of the flock. The first day's travel lay through the shallow can~on of oaks, the evening wound up at the edge of the chaparral. Other fires winked at night in the tender twilight-haze; bells of the flocks carried far in the night. Felicita had no means of knowing that the nearest of the fires was of Jules Giraud, and slept, a sense of friendly presence all about her, as mindlessly as her own sheep.

The next day at the noon halt old Jules came up with her. The girl scented danger at once, became nervous and anxiouseyed. The horse-pistol was in the saddlebag on the pack-burro that fed forward with the flock. She had forgotten there was such a thing as danger in the world. Jules was complimentary and insinuating and sentimental. He drew close, growing more assured, and enjoying her torment. He said of shepherding that it was a lonely life. One needed a companion now--for the lovely days, and the nights. Ah, the nights with

the stars like fires! The knuckles of the girl's hand grasping the herder's staff were stretched white.

"For the trail one needs a companion, assuredly," said Jules, coming nearer; "for choice, a lovely maid, about your size.

Curse me, but you have glorious eyes, boy; they go quite through me. Almost they might be a girl's. Do you know, if you were a girl, now, what I would do to you?" This!"

He was about to snatch a kiss. Felicita struck at him fiercely with her staff, and burst into tears--and by the act stood confessed a girl. Jules Giraud was rubbing his bruised head, the girl's hands were at her eyes, therefore neither of them saw quite what happened. There was a hurry and scramble of feet, a jet of soft, hissing, hot Spanish curses, and something whirling through the air that knocked old Jules flat, and stood over him, flashing and threatening.

"Dog of a herder," it said, "shall I send you to the devil at once or save you to be hanged?" Jules, though he was halfstunned with astonishment, thought himself no fool. A personable and infuriated young man springing out upon you at the mere

snatching of a kiss from a pretty girl in boy's clothes meant but one thing to Jules.

He winked feebly as he lay supinely between Ruy Garcia's feet.

"My good fellow, I had no idea the girl was yours. 'Twas no more than a kiss I wanted."

Ruy Garcia left him, and went over to where the girl stood sobbing.

"Are you hurt, Felicita?" he faltered, not so much as daring to touch her. Jules sat up and regarded them.

"Go ahead, young man," he leered. "She'll not crack you with her staff, I'll warrant."

"If you say another word, I shall crack your head open," said Ruy, stoutly. "I am going to marry her."

He looked at Felicita anxiously, to see how she would take this. Felicita dried her eyes; whereupon Ruy Garcia put his arm around her. He turned to the herder.

"She did not know I had come," he said.

"She came because her father was ill, and

I followed to see that she met with no harm. It is the business of men to protect women, not to molest them."

Giraud was a Frenchman, therefore a sentimentalist. He gave them a very pretty blessing as he got upon his feet, and took himself to his own flock, but the young people did not hear him. There had occurred a miracle. Felicita trembled; the shock of her trembling passed to Ruy Garcia; his head swam. What shining of the saint's eyes, what glow along the burnt splendor of her cheek assured him, what tingling of the soft young palms that clung together, I know not. Quivering lip strayed to lip. Ah, a miracle!

Felicita spoke first, withdrawing with gentle dignity.

"Ruy, you have done wrongly."

"What, to knock over old Jules?" said the boy, aghast. Felicita's eyes swam with tears.

"For that I thank you, and my father will thank you better when I am home; but in following me you did wrong. It might have

got me much mistaken."

"Did you think I would have let you go alone? Besides, what does it matter, if we are going to be married?" It was impossible for Felicita to be more rosy and dewy-eyed than she was, but she held him off gravely.

"For that there is the more reason nobody should breathe upon my name." It is the surpassing miracle of love that it rises superior to loving. Ruy Garcia was made to see that so long as the girl wandered abroad in boy's guise he must drop back into the silent, the unrewarded guardian of the trail; and adoring her as being no lower than the saints save perhaps in the matter of being kissable, content to have it so.

They went up, then, a week's journey toward Wild Rose. By day they sighted each other moving dimly in the mist of spring. By twilight their fires signaled in the dusk. By night, lying miles apart on the sentient earth, they thrilled to each other under the starry spaces. Gilias and lupins ran purple under foot; miles of burnt gold of poppies spread about the knees of the mountain. The new-shorn flock went whitely in the midst of rank pasture; bloom

of the sky-blue larkspurs muffled the bells.

They passed the eighteen-mile house, passed Red Butte, swung out to avoid the gulches about Coyote Holes, scrambled up the gorge of Black Rock, sighted the lazy, low-backed hills about Wild Rose. Day by day the horse of Ruy Garcia, obeying the heart of his master rather than the rein, edged toward the flock of Pedro Ruiz. The last day but one the two solemn young things went voiceless within hail. The last day saw them draw together at the meadow of Wild Rose.

There was an excellent excuse of a bunch of surpassing lilies which Ruy Garcia would give to Felicita. Such flowers bloom on the desert in wet years only. Felicita took them gravely, with dropped eyes. Ruy Garcia walked with his bridle on his arm. They broke through the thicket of wild almonds, droning with bees and heavy with perfume.

There was a foot-deep gully here that Felicita must be helped over. She had been ten flock journeys to La Liebre and back, but Ruy Garcia must needs give her his hand over the gully.

They went on thus, hand in hand, until they sighted the roof under the fig-tree.

"Confess," said Ruy Garcia, "that you are glad I came."

"For the sake of what happened to Jules Giraud, yes," said Felicita.

"For nothing else?"

"What else?"

"This." Ruy Garcia's horse started as if it had heard an order to move on.

"Tell me," said Ruy, with his arm around her--"in all that two weeks going, did you not feel me near you, not once?"

"Better than that--I knew it."

"Knew it? But how?"

"I guessed it in the beginning, when I saw your blankets tied behind the saddle, and the woman at the eighteen-mile house told me you had passed that day. Besides, I knew--you would not leave me-- " "Oh, adorable one! Felicitamia! " said Ruy Garcia.

The flock, scenting the home pastures, jangled on hurriedly, the dogs upon their heels. The light fell low and struck sidelong through the hills. Little white gilias, musky and sweet, came out underfoot, and white stars overhead. The flock blethered at the home corral, and old Pedro Ruiz, hobbling out to let them in, stood a long time at the bars wondering what had become of Felicita.

The Conversion of Ah Lew Sing [1897] AH LEW SING was the proprietor of a vegetable garden between the stock yard and the rail-road bridge, on the farther side of the Summerfield canal. He was the lankest, obliquest-eyed celestial that ever combined an expression of childlike innocence with the appearance of having fallen into a state of permanent disrepair, an outward seeming that much belied the inner man.

Previous to his conversion, his ideas, if he had any, in regard to the Deity, were hazy in the extreme; but his convictions on the subject of devils were concise and dogmatic. There were about three hundred, according to Lew Sing's computation; all of the most malevolent type.

If the potatoes rotted, if the celery rusted, if the cabbages failed to head, or the blight got his early peas, Lew Sing was at no loss where to lay the blame. All of these things frequently happened, notwithstanding that he burned punk at the four corners of his fields, and at all the foot-bridges that crossed his irregular ditches, which were

so narrow and low that no sort of a devil could cross without wetting his feet,--a thing to which Chinese devils are very much averse.

But in spite of the devils and a brisk competition in the vegetable trade, Lew Sing was able to put by a moiety of his earnings, which he further increased by judicious speculation with his friends Chock Sin, Sam Kee, and Foo Chou, choice spirits all. Chock Sin was more ignorant and cunning than Lew Sing; Sam Kee was worse than Chock Sin, and Foo Chou was the epitome of highbinderism.

When Foo Chou could dupe his friends, he did so; when he could not, he consoled himself that none of them would ever be able to fleece him. But in this he reckoned without Lew Sing.

The speculations of Foo Chou were various, including by preference anything sufficiently lawless and dangerous to make other people afraid of doing it. One of these chances of fortune put him in possession of the person of Li Choi, whose father had previously sold her for a sixteenth interest in a tea store on Dupont street. Li Choi had very small feet and very

large ear-rings, and smooth glistening bands of hair with an astonishing number of jade ornaments stuck in them. Foo Chou expected to make as much as three hundred dollars on her, and Foo Chou was a judge of marketable women. But the cunningest of speculators comes to grief now and then, and Foo Chou made the mistake of his life when he brought his three friends to the close red-curtained room where his property was sequestered, and permitted them to gaze through the hole he had cut in the door to display the charms of Li Choi.

The eyes of Lew Sing had no sooner beheld her than the heart of Lew Sing was consumed by love. Forthwith he began to suffer the pangs of disappointed affection, for his potato crop, owing perhaps to the devils, perhaps to a superfluity of water, was a failure, and the purse of Lew Sing did not contain an equivalent for so much loveliness. While he debated the possibility of inducing that hardened piece of rascality to abate the price for friendship's sake, Foo Chou was growing morose. No purchaser was forthcoming for the lovely Li Choi, and she was costing him dear for her keep, besides wasting her loveliness with secret

tears.

It was not because of any lack of appreciation of her charms that Foo Chou did not espouse her himself.

In the gambling dens of Summerfield's Chinatown, Foo Chou was known as the most inveterate and unluckiest gambler of them all, and no profitable villanies being at hand, nothing but a cash price for Li Choi could replenish his failing fortunes.

What maiden fears and childish terrors and dread of outraged womanhood were endured in that little red-curtained room no one knew. No one, unless, perhaps Ah Foo, who was grandfather at large to all the little pig-tailed celestials in Chinatown.

He might have heard her crying as he squatted under her window while his shaved and sandaled little charges made a skipping rope of his grizzled queue, which was pieced out an extra length for that especial accommodation.

The pretty face of Li Choi looked out between the curtains at the wrinkled, kindly visage of Ah Foo and took heart of hope.

Foo Chou, coming one morning to take

stock of his property, found a strange key in the door and the room empty. Great was the wrath of Foo Chou, and such the questioning and gesticulating and running to and fro that grandfather Foo had to move his charges quite two blocks away to escape being trodden upon. Later, word came to Foo Chou that his property had taken refuge at the mission, whose gray walls towered at least a story and a half above the shabby roofs that sheltered Chinatown.

Foo Chou and his kind looked with marked disfavor on the mission and its mistress, whose success in luring profitable females from their rightful masters was looked upon as an unwarrantable interference in trade.

The friends of Foo Chou advised an appeal to the law for the recovery of his property.

Not of course that the law of this enlightened country recognized the lovely Li Choi as a legal chattel, but any number of respectable merchants in Chinatown were ready to swear to being the husband, father, brother, or otherwise legal guardian, praying her restoration on his loving protection. The thing had been done before, but Foo Chou deemed it inadvisable for several reasons, chief of

which was the recollection of a recent encounter with the law on his own account in a little operation connected with the opium trade in which Foo Chou had come hardly off.

For the present until some better plan could be devised Li Choi must remain where she was. True, she might be converted to Christianity, but she was safe against any other chance and cost him nothing. As for Christianity, Foo Chou had never seen a case of it so bad it could not be cured with two or three judicious beatings, nevertheless, he must keep as close a watch as circumstances permitted over the recreant Li Choi. Obviously this must be done by deputy, since the villanous face of Foo Chou, if recognized, would bring about the very thing he feared,--namely: the removal of Li Choi to a mission in another part of the State, where she might be hopelessly lost to the proprietor.

In his perplexity he bethought himself of the guileless front of his friend Lew Sing.

Then it was that Lew Sing congratulated himself that he had never confessed his tender attachment to Foo Chou, and his

smile was blank enough to have deceived the Father of mischief himself, as he purchased a primer and joined the night class at the mission. Faithfully for a week he poured over the intricacies of c-a-t and d-o-g, but never once did he catch a glimpse of the bright eyes of Li Choi nor hear the pat-pat of her entrancing little feet.

Now the mission school is but a trap to catch converts, and that the shrewd celestial knows as well as anybody, and is wary to avoid its pitfalls,--but the conversion of Ah Lew Sing dated from the day when he discovered that the converts of both sexes participated in the religious exercises.

From that time on his growth in grace was astonishing. Within a week it carried him from a back seat near the door to the front row of shining examples beside Li Choi, who in the grateful promptings of her simple heart believed whatever she thought would please the matron of the mission, Miss Campbell.

When they stood around the organ and sang, "O how I love Jesus!" Li Choi looked at Miss Campbell and Lew Sing looked at Li Choi.

"Me velly happy," was Lew Sing's unfailing testimony.

So Ah Sing kept watch over Li Choi while Foo Chou perfected his plans. If the law, he reasoned, did not recognize his proprietary interest in the person of Li Choi, it could not deny his right to the jade ornaments which had been no inconsiderable item of the purchase price.

Foo Chou meant to swear out a warrant for the arrest of Li Choi for the theft of certain earrings, hair ornaments, and armlets, which she did feloniously abstract from the residence of Foo Chou. While the arrest was in progress the friends of Foo Chou would rush to the rescue of the distressed Li Choi and bear her away from the cruel arms of the law. Foo Chou thought for a sufficient sum the constable might even permit himself to be knocked down in defense of his prisoner. Foo Chou, for reasons before mentioned, being averse to appearing on the scene in person, it was agreed that the rescue should be conducted by Chock Sin and Sam Kee, and that Lew Sing should convey the prisoner to the safe place in the country to which the wily Foo Chou should retire after

arranging for the arrest.

It must be said to Foo Chou's credit that he left the management of an affair of such importance in the hands of his friends with reluctance; however, there was no help for it and he trusted to his well known reputation for blood-thirstiness to ensure the fidelity of Chock Sin, Sam Kee, and Lew Sing. He meant to stay quietly in the country until the affair had had time to blow over, and then he hoped to get safely off to Sacramento, where the traffic in small feet and bright eyes was flourishing.

The arrest took place exactly as prescribed. At an hour when all Chinatown smoked its pipe and the charges of Father Foo napped in the shade, the constable rapped at the door and presented his warrant for Li Choi. Miss Campbell demurred, hesitated, and was lost; for while she suspected the design of Foo Chou, still the thing might have been contrived to lure her away from other charges, more than one of whom was the alleged property of some enterprising celestial. While she debated, the tearful Li Choi was hurried out of reach.

The rescue was the most successful affair of the kind ever carried on in Chinatown.

When Chock Sin and Sam Kee crept out of the cellar in which they had lain quiet during the perfunctory search carried on by the profane but not over-zealous officer, they glowed with honest pride to find nothing else talked of in the tea shops and laundries. Lew Sing was not molested by the officers, for nobody testified to the bundle of quilted petticoat which was hurried under the canvas cover of his vegetable wagon waiting innocently around the corner.

What happened in the interim between the rescue and the return of Foo Chou on the third day, exceedingly wroth at what he supposed to be the total failure of his plans, can never be accurately known; whether the heart of Lew Sing, meditating long and tenderly on the charms of Li Choi, had yielded to an overwhelming temptation, or whether his childlike countenance covered more duplicity than even Foo Chou gave him credit for, is open to debate. Perhaps the demure Li Choi did not greatly resist the manifest destiny of her sex. It is not to be supposed that she was unaware of all these devoted glances

when they stood up in Sunday School and shared the same Gospel Hymn book.

Certainly Li Choi did not want to be handed over to Foo Chou, neither did she want to go to jail, and although a Chinaman in a vegetable wagon is not exactly an ideal knight errant, rescuing a distressed maiden, it might have appeared so to Li Choi. At any rate he carried her away to his own domicile with a serene disregard of consequences that did credit to his courage. But the courage paled visibly before the information brought by the friendly Ah Foo that Foo Chou had learned the real state of affairs and was coming with a very big knife to kill Lew Sing and cut off his queue, and carry Li Choi away.

All of which might have come to pass, had not Lew Sing consulted with his friend, the flagman at the railroad crossing.

"What you want to do to keep anybody from touching your wife is to get married, alle samee white man. Sabee?"

Lew Sing reflected: to get married "alle samee white man" might make Li Choi secure, but it might also make it difficult if he should ever wish to get rid of her. But then Lew Sing did not believe that he

should ever want to get rid of Li Choi. Such is the reckless enthusiasm of love.

Besides, Foo Chou was coming with his knife.

The flagman scribbled a line on the back of an old letter. "You takee this to the City Hall, give him to Mr. McGee, he fix him all right."

Half an hour later, while Foo Chou was furiously searching the premises of Ah Lew Sing, that worthy was helping his pretty bride up the steps of the City Hall, her parasol awry and her embroidered sandals sadly the worse for their hasty flight across lots.

Ah Sing in the swelling of commendable pride, at having outwitted the most notorious highbinder in Chinatown, built him a house that was quite large enough to swing a cat in, and as gorgeous inside as a joss house, and quite as dingy without, with the wisdom of Confucius done in very large characters on very red paper pasted all about the front door. He has returned to his old occupation of fighting devils. A three hundred dollar wife must be supported in a style to correspond with her

worth,--besides there is a little Lew Sing who is expected to grow up and become a mandarin with a green button on his hat and must be looked after accordingly.

Ah Lew Sing never went back to the mission, although Miss Campbell visited him as soon as she heard of the wedding and exhorted him to hold fast to the faith that he had. His wife goes sometimes and sits in her old seat but it is only an act of grateful remembrance like the nice stale duck eggs and packages of roasted watermelon seeds that find their way occasionally to Grandfather Foo. As for Foo Chou he departed for regions unknown. He might have devised new rascalities to compensate for the loss of his property, but to be overreached by a mere vegetable gardener, a man who worked for a living! After that no self-respecting highbinder could hold up his head.

The Hoodoo of the Minnietta [1907] SOUTH by east from the leprous shore of Owens Lake, untangling the network of trails that lead toward the lava flanks of Coso, one comes at last to the Minnietta, a crumbling tunnel, a ruined smelter, and a row of sun-warped dwellings in a narrow gully faced by tall, skeleton-white cliffs.

It lies so secretly in the cut of the country rock, and has so somber a tone in the stark, wide light, that you perceive it at once to be one of those places that contribute to the fixed belief of mining countries that the hot essences of greed and hate and lust are absorbed, as it were, by the means that provoke them, and inhere in houses, lands, or stones, to work mischief to the possessor. This is common in new and untamed lands, where destinies are worked out in plain sight. Manuel de Borba could not persuade the sheriff to accept as a gift the knife with which he killed Mariana, and no miner acquainted with its hoodoo will have anything to do with the Minnietta.

Antone discovered it in a forgotten year.

No one knew his other name: at Panamint

he was called Dutchy, after the use of mining camps, from which you gather that he might have been a German, Swede, Norwegian, Dane, or even a Dutchman. He was a foreigner, very sick when he came to the hills, sicker when he left them; and he discovered the ledge in a three-weeks prospecting trip, from which he returned to Jake Hogan's cabin with his pockets full of ore, elate, penniless, and utterly worn.

He talked it all out with Hogan, on into the night, with the candle guttering in a bottle and the winking specimens spread out on the table between them. The ore was heavy and dull, and had the greasy feel of richness. Between the pains of a racking cough, Antone promised himself great things. He talked on afterward in his bunk, maunderingly, as his fever rose, to which succeeded the stupor of exhaustion. That was why, three days later, not being able to attend to it himself, he asked Hogan to have the ore assayed and to bring him the report. And the report was so little in the eye of his expectation that a week later, loathing the filthy cabin and the ill-cooked food, feeling death in his throat, all his thought set toward home, Antone accepted the two hundred dollars which Hogan

offered him for all right and interest in his claim. Hogan considerately saw him off on the Mojave stage, and immediately gathered his pack to set out for a certain gully faced by tall white cliffs, where the outcrop was heavy and dull, with a greasy feel.

Long afterward, when rage had made him drunk, Hogan--his wickedness, as it were, an added poison to his curse--explained how, when it was full dark, when the one street was barred with blocks of light from dance-houses full of roaring song, he had gone down to the assay office, the light of the furnace glowing low and evilly along the ground, with other specimens than Antone's, but so like them in all but richness that Dutchy, turning in his blanket and shaken terribly with coughing, never knew. That, said Hogan, when he cursed the men who had done him out of the Minnietta, was the sort of man he was; as much as to say, being a toad, he spat venom, and was not to be trod upon. But at the time he must have thought more cheerfully of his offense.

Within a month it was known in all the Panamint and Coso camps, and as far

north as Cerro Gordo, that Jake Hogan had made a good strike at the Minnietta.

Hogan organized a stock company to open the mine and build a smelter, and began to grow rich amazingly. Jigging burro trains went up and down with water; eighteen-mule freighters trailed in with supplies in a wake of tawny dust.

Beflounced and fluttered women, last indubitable evidence of a prosperous camp, preened themselves in the cabins set askew under the white cliffs.

It is not given to every man to deal successfully with mining- stock companies.

Hogan prospecting a grub-stake and Hogan owner of the Minnietta, putting out its thousands a week, were much the same person. Because he was ignorant, Hogan did not understand his stock company when he had organized it; and because he had come into his property by stealth, feared to lose it by conspiracy. Before the end of the second year, Hogan and the Minnietta Mining and Milling Company were taking away each other's characters openly in court.

Hogan got a judgment that gave him little

less than half what he asked; contumaciously he carried it to a higher court, and got a reversal of judgment that gave him nothing at all. So at the last he went out of Minnietta with little more than he had brought into it,--folly and shame, you understand, peering with painted faces from the little cabins under the cliff, had had their pickings of him,--and going, cursed it with fluency and all his might.

Tunnel and shaft and winze, he cursed it; sheave and cross- cut; pulley and belt; and blast and fall-rope under the hoist. As he had made it, he cursed it in every part.

Those who heard him maintain that in the cursing of Hogan was wrought the hoodoo of the Minnietta; but, in fact, it began in the fake assay which Hogan carried to Antone in his bed, a villainy of which he despoiled himself in his cursing, with the wantonness by which a man, checked in an evil, reveals the iniquity in which he shaped it.

After that the Minnietta Mining and Milling Company was not uniformly prosperous; the price of silver went down or the quality of the ore fell off, and there were months at a time when the mine was shut down while the directors settled their private squabbles. Now and then, and always at

inopportune moments, the company had streaks of economy.

In one of these they happened upon McKenna for superintendent, whose particular qualification was that he was cheap, and being no spender at the best of times, was not always careful to draw his salary at the end of the month. This was very bad business for a mining country, as McKenna came to know when the next shut-down found him with a salary some fifteen months in arrears. He said uncomplimentary things about the management, but did not unnecessarily harass the directors, because he held his job on half-pay until work began again--all of which was still unpaid when the mine reopened with a small force in April.

By this time, you understand, the Minnietta Mining and Milling Company was in a bad way. When the ore was of high grade or the price of silver went up a few points, they could work the mine at a profit; when neither of these things happened, it ran at a loss, and McKenna was their chief creditor. All this time the flux of mining life slacked throughout that district--slacked and dribbled away down the trails of

desolate gulches; poured off quick, as it had come, like the sudden rains that burst over those ranges, leaving it scarred with dump and shaft and track. Houses, full of the cheap, garish furniture of the camps, warped apart in the sun; rabbits ran in and out of the sagging sills. Five days' desolation lay between the world and the Minnietta.

During the shut-down McKenna stayed and looked after the mine, because, as he said, it owed him so much that he could not afford to neglect it; but really because the desert had him, catlike, between her paws.

So he stayed on, and tinkered about repairs for the mill and the smelter. After one such session he was observed to go about in the tumultuous silence of a man with a doubtful project; also he ceased to vex the management greatly about his arrears of salary. That was about a year before the Minnietta was shut down altogether.

In the course of time McKenna, as the chief creditor, brought suit, attached the property of the company, and got a judgment by default.

At that time he could have had the whole district on the same terms, for something had happened or was about to happen in some other quarter which made the value of silver to the ton about half the cost of working it. The first thing McKenna did when he came into possession was to rip up the smelter.

This was before the cyanide process was discovered, and the smelter was of the rudest description, and McKenna had repaired it. Four great bars of virgin silver, half the length of a man's body and of incredible thickness, he took out of it in the way of leakings. McKenna used it to put the property in working order. The thing which was about to happen in Germany or Argentina or wherever, had not happened, or, if it had, not with the anticipated effect.

Silver went up. McKenna looked to the management himself, grew sleek, and married a wife. But the hoodoo worked.

In the second year Mrs. McKenna had a child, and it died. Did I say somewhere that women mostly hate the desert? Women, unless they have very large and simple souls, need cover--clothes, you know, and furniture, social observances to screen

them, conventions to get behind. Life, when it leaps upon them large and naked, shocks their souls into disorder. Mrs. McKenna at the Minnietta had the arm-long grave under the skeleton cliffs, and McKenna, with no screen to his commonness. Her mind traveled back and forth from these and down the gulch to a vista of treeless, discolored hills. Finally, for very emptiness, it fixed upon McKenna's assistant. The assistant was also common, but he had a little veil of unfamiliarity, and Mrs. McKenna was the only woman within three days. I do not say that, given the conditions, the thing that happened would not have happened without the hoodoo, but it served to take McKenna's mind off the mine, and the hoodoo cut in between. After a while the two went out of the story by way of the Mojave stage, and McKenna, leaving the mine in charge of Jordan, whom he had promoted from his foreman's job to be superintendent, was supposed to have gone in search of his wife. Whether he found her, or if the hoodoo stayed by him in the place where he had gone, nobody ever heard. I think myself that it inheres where it was bred, in the hollow of the comfortless, thick hills. He was, however,

bound to lose the mine in some such case as he had got it.

Jordan was the man McKenna had to help him when he ripped up the smelter; he knew exactly how the Minnietta came into his employer's hands, and thought well of it. In every mining-camp there are men incurably unable to be taught by the logic of events. McKenna was certain not to come near the mine again; might reasonably wish to be quit of it. This he might have done profitably, except for the hoodoo, for the grade of ore was increasingly rich. Jordan, as a practical miner, was much about the tunnel, and being left to himself too much, had time for thought, and, as I have said, he was the sort of man who admired the sort of thing McKenna had done. Along in the early summer the direction of the work in the main gallery was altered at never so slight an angle, and in due course of time was boarded over.

Jordan reported to McKenna that, as the main lead appeared to be nearly worked out, it would be better to put the mine on the market before the fact became generally known. Eventually this was done.

The selling price was not large, but considering what McKenna thought he knew of the property, and what the purchasers, tipped by Jordan, did know, it was satisfactory to both parties. In some unexplained way the Minnietta came shortly into the hands of the foreman, Dan Jordan, who ripped up the siding, and uncovered a body of high-grade ore.

The Minnietta is a nearly horizontal vein in a crumbling country rock that necessitates timbering and an elaborate system of props and siding. The new owner had all the petty, fiddling ways of a man accustomed to days' wages. He bought second-hand timbers from abandoned mines, and took unnecessary risks in the matter of siding, and the men grumbled.

Jordan did not get on well with his men; he gave himself airs, and suspected an attempt to cry down his new dignities. He was swollen and sullen with the pride of his prosperity. By this time the conviction of the hoodoo was well abroad in that country, and men were few and fearful who could be hired to work in the Minnietta.

When there was a good twenty thousand on the dump the men refused to go into the

tunnel again until certain things were remedied. Jordan, who did not believe in it, cursed the hoodoo, cursed the hands, and went down into the tunnel, trailing abuse behind him for the men who followed timorously far at his back.

"Better keep this side the cut, sir," said one of them, respectfully enough. "Them props ain't no ways safe." Jordan kicked the prop scornfully for answer, and when the men, starting back from the sound of falling, dared to approach him, they found him quite dead, his skull crushed and buried under the crumbling rock.

After that the Minnietta passed in due course to Jordan's heirs, two families of cousins who knew nothing of silver mines except that they were supposed to be eminently desirable.

Now, as they had come into the property through no fault of theirs, if the hoodoo were nothing more than the logical tendency of evil-doing to draw to and consume the evil-doer, they should have been beyond its reach. This would have been the case if, as you suppose, the hoodoo were a myth begotten of a series

of fortuitous events. But you, between the church and the police, whose every emanation of the soul is shred to tatters by the yammering of kin and neighbor, what do you know of the great, silent spaces across which the voice of law and opinion reaches as small as the rustle of blown sand? There the castings of a man's soul lie still in whatever shape of hate and rage he threw them from him.

There are places in Lost Valley where, in the early fifties, emigrant trains went through--places so void of wind and jostling weather that the wheel-tracks still lie upon the sand, clear from that single passing; other places where, as at the Minnietta, the rock of men's passions lies in the hollow desertness like an infection, as if every timber had absorbed mischief instead of moisture, and every bolt gives it off in lieu of rust.

If it were not so, there is no reason why the heirs of Dan Jordan should have gone to law about it while the price of silver went down and down. They stripped themselves in litigation while the timbers sagged in the tunnel and the cuts choked with rubble.

The ore on the dump, by no means worth

twenty thousand by this time, went to a lawyer who had been a very decent sort until he became dissolute through prosperity and neglected his family. The battens of the mill, warped through successive summers, fell off, and the boards shrunk from one another and curled at the edges like the lips of men dead and sun-dried in the desert. And the two cousins, who were once very good friends, do not speak. And if they should come together, or the price of silver go up, say, three points, I do not know, unless they are able to charge the enterprise with some counter passion of nobility to sacrifice, how they will escape the hoodoo of the Minnietta.

The Last Antelope [1903] THERE were seven notches in the juniper by the Lone Tree Spring for the seven seasons that Little Pete had summered there, feeding his flocks in the hollow of the Ceriso. The first time of coming he had struck his axe into the trunk meaning to make firewood, but thought better of it, and thereafter chipped it in sheer friendliness, as one claps an old acquaintance, for by the time the flock has worked up the treeless windy stretch from the Little Antelope to the Ceriso, even a lone juniper has a friendly look. And Little Pete was a friendly man, though shy of demeanor, so that with the best will in the world for wagging his tongue, he could scarcely pass the time of day with good countenance; the soul of a jolly companion with the front and bearing of one of his own sheep.

He loved his dogs as brothers; he was near akin to the wild things; he communed with the huddled hills, and held intercourse with the stars, saying things to them in his heart that his tongue stumbled over and refused. He knew his sheep by name, and had respect to signs and seasons; his lips

moved softly as he walked, making no sound. Well--what would you? a man must have fellowship in some sort.

Whoso goes a-shepherding in the desert hills comes to be at one with his companions, growing brutish or converting them. Little Pete humanized his sheep. He perceived lovable qualities in them, and differentiated the natures and dispositions of inanimate things.

Not much of this presented itself on slight acquaintance, for in fact he looked to be of rather less account than his own dogs. He was undersized and hairy, and had a roving eye; probably he washed once a year at the shearing as the sheep were washed. About his body he wore a twist of sheepskin with the wool outward, holding in place the tatters of his clothing. On hot days when he wreathed leaves about his head, and wove him a pent of twigs among the scrub in the middle of his flock, he looked a faun or some wood creature come out of pagan times, though no pagan, as was clearly shown by the medal of the Sacred Heart that hung on his hairy chest, worn open to all weathers. Where he went about sheep camps and

shearings, there was sly laughter and tapping of foreheads, but those who kept the tale of his flocks spoke well of him and increased his wage.

Little Pete kept to the same round year by year, breaking away from La Liebre after the spring shearing, south around the foot of Pinos, swinging out to the desert in the wake of the quick, strong rains, thence to Little Antelope in July to drink a bottle forLa Quatorze , and so to the Ceriso by the time the poppy fires were burned quite out and the quail trooped at noon about the tepid pools. The Ceriso is not properly mesa nor valley, but a long healed crater miles wide, rimmed about with the jagged edge of the old cone.

It rises steeply from the tilted mesa, overlooked by Black Mountain, darkly red as the red cattle that graze among the honey- colored hills. These are blunt and rounded, tumbling all down from the great crater and the mesa edge toward the long, dim valley of Little Antelope. Its outward slope is confused with the outlines of the hills, tumuli of blind cones, and the old lava flow that breaks away from it by the west gap and the ravine of the spring; within, its

walls are deeply guttered by the torrent of winter rains.

In its cuplike hollow, the sink of its waters, salt and bitter as all pools without an outlet, waxes and wanes within a wide margin of bleaching reeds. Nothing taller shows in all the Ceriso, and the wind among them fills all the hollow with an eerie whispering.

One spring rills down by the gorge of an old flow on the side toward Little Antelope, and, but for the lone juniper that stood by it, there is never a tree until you come to the foot of Black Mountain.

The flock of Little Pete, a maverick strayed from some rodeo, a prospector going up to Black Mountain, and a solitary antelope were all that passed through the Ceriso at any time. The antelope had the best right.

He came as of old habit; he had come when the lightfoot herds ranged from here to the sweet, mist-watered canons of the Coast Range, and the bucks went up to the windy mesas what time the young ran with their mothers, nose to flank. They had ceased before the keen edge of slaughter that defines the frontier of men.

All that a tardy law had saved to the

district of Little Antelope was the buck that came up the ravine was the buck that came up the ravine of the Lone Tree Spring at the set time of the year when Little Pete fed his flock in the Ceriso, and Pete averred that they were glad to see one another. True enough they were each the friendliest thing the other found there, for the law ran as far as the antelope ranged, there were hill dwellers who took no account of it, namely, the coyotes. They hunted the buck in season and out, bayed him down from the feeding grounds, fended him from the pool, pursued him by relay races, ambushed him in the pitfalls of the black rock.

There were seven coyotes ranging the east side of the Ceriso at the time when Little Pete first struck his axe into the juniper tree, slinking, sly-footed, and evileyed. Many an evening the shepherd watched them running lightly in the hollow of the crater, the flash-flash of the antelope's white rump signaling the progress of the chase. But always the buck outran or outwitted them, taking to the high broken ridges where no split foot could follow his seven-leagued bounds. Many a morning Little Pete, tending his cooking pot

by a quavering sagebrush fire, saw the antelope feeding down toward the Lone Tree Spring, and looked his sentiments.

The coyotes had spoken theirs all in the night with derisive voices; never was there any love lost between a shepherd and a coyote.

The pronghorn's chief recommendation to an acquaintance was that he could outdo them.

After the third summer, Pete began to perceive a reciprocal friendliness in the antelope. Early mornings the shepherd saw him rising from his lair, or came often upon the warm pressed hollow where he had lain within cry of his coyote-scaring fire. When it was mid-day in the misty hollow and the shadows drawn close, stuck tight under the juniper and the sage, they went each to his nooning in his own fashion, but in the half light they drew near together.

Since the beginning of the law the antelope had half forgotten his fear of man.

He looked upon the shepherd with steadfastness, he smelled the smell of sheep and the unhandled earth, and the smell of wood smoke was in his hair. They had companionship without speech; they

conferred favors silently after the manner of those who understand one another. The antelope led to the best feeding grounds, and Pete kept the sheep from muddying the spring until the buck had drunk. When the coyotes skulked in the scrub by night to deride him, the shepherd mocked them in their own tongue, and promised the best of his lambs for the killing; but to hear afar off their hunting howl stirred him out of sleep to curse with great heartiness. At such times he thought of the antelope and wished him well.

Beginning with the west gap opposite the Lone Tree Spring about the first of August, Pete would feed all around the broken rim of the crater, up the gullies and down, and clean through the hollow of it in a matter of two months, or if the winter had been a wet one, a little longer, and in seven years the man and the antelope grew to know each other very well. Where the flock fed the buck fed, keeping farthest from the dogs, and at last he came to lie down with it.

That was after a season of scant rains, when the feed was poor and the antelope's flank grew thin; the rabbits had trooped down to the irrigated lands, and the

coyotes, made more keen by hunger, pressed him hard. One of those smoky, yawning days when the sky hugged the earth, and all sound fell back from a woolly atmosphere and broke dully in the scrub, about the usual hour of their running between twilight and mid-afternoon, the coyotes drove the tall buck, winded, desperate, and foredone, to refuge among the silly sheep, where for fear of the dogs and the man the howlers dared not come.

He stood at bay there, fronting the shepherd, brought up against a crisis greatly needing the help of speech.

Well--he had nearly as much gift in that matter as Little Pete. Those two silent ones understood each other; some assurance, the warrant of a free given faith, passed between them. The buck lowered his head and eased the sharp throbbing of his ribs; the dogs drew in the scattered flocks; they moved, keeping a little cleared space nearest the buck; he moved with them; he began to feed. Thereafter the heart of Little Pete warmed humanly toward the antelope, and the coyotes began to be very personal in their abuse. That same night they drew off the shepherd's dogs by a ruse and stole two of his lambs.

The same seasons that made the friendliness of the antelope and Little Pete wore the face of the shepherd into a keener likeness to the weathered hills, and the juniper flourishing greenly by the spring bade fair to outlast them both. The line of ploughed lands stretched out mile by mile from the lower valley, and a solitary homesteader built him a cabin at the foot of the Ceriso.

In seven years a coyote may learn somewhat; those of the Ceriso learned the ways of Little Pete and the antelope. Trust them to have noted, as the years moved, that the buck's flanks were lean and his step less free. Put it that the antelope was old, and that he made truce with the shepherd to hide the failing of his powers; then if he came earlier or stayed later than the flock, it would go hard with him. But as if he knew their mind in the matter, the antelope delayed his coming until the salt pool shrunk to its innermost ring of reeds, and the sun-cured grasses crisped along the slope. It seemed the brute sense waked between him and the man to make each aware of the other's nearness. Often as Little Pete drove in by the west gap he

would sight the prongs of the buck rising over the barrier of black rocks at the head of the ravine. Together they passed out of the crater, keeping fellowship as far as the frontier of evergreen oaks. Here Little Pete turned in by the cattle fences to come at La Liebre from the north, and the antelope, avoiding all man-trails, growing daily more remote, passed into the wooded hills on unguessed errands of his own.

Twice the homesteader saw the antelope go up to the Ceriso at that set time of the year. The third summer when he sighted him, a whitish speck moving steadily against the fawn-colored background of the hills, the homesteader took down his rifle and made haste into the crater. At that time his cabin stood on the remotest edge of settlement, and the grip of the law was loosened in so long a reach.

"In the end the coyotes will get him. Better that he fall to me," said the homesteader.

But, in fact, he was prompted by the love of mastery, which for the most part moves men into new lands, whose creatures they conceive given over into their hands.

The coyote that kept the watch at the head

of the ravine saw him come, and lifted up his voice in the long-drawn dolorous whine that warned the other watchers in their unseen stations in the scrub. The homesteader heard also, and let a curse softly under his breath, for besides that they might scare his quarry, he coveted the howler's ears, in which the law upheld him.

Never a tip nor a tail of one showed above the sage when he had come up into the Ceriso.

The afternoon wore on, the homesteader hid in the reeds, and the coyotes had forgotten him. Away to the left in a windless blur of dust the sheep of Little Pete trailed up toward the crater's rim. The leader, watching by the spring, caught a jack rabbit and was eating it quietly behind the black rock.

In the meantime the last antelope came lightly and securely, by the gully, by the black rock and the lone juniper into the Ceriso. The friendliness of the antelope for Little Pete betrayed him. He came with some sense of home, expecting the flock and protection of man-presence. He strayed witlessly into the open, his ears set to catch the jangle of the bells. What he

heard was the snick of the breech bolt as the homesteader threw up the sight of his rifle, and a small demoniac cry that ran from gutter to gutter of the crater rim, impossible to gauge for numbers or distance.

At that moment Little Pete worried the flock up the outward slope where the ruin of the old lava flows gave sharply back the wrangle of the bells. Three weeks he had won up from the Little Antelope, and three by way of the Sand Flat, where there was great scarcity of water, and in all that time none of his kind had hailed him. His heart warmed toward the juniper tree and the antelope whose hoof-prints he found in the white dust of the mesa trail. Men had small respect by Little Pete, women he had no time for: the antelope was the noblest thing he had ever loved. The sheep poured through the gap and spread fan-wise down the gully; behind them Little Pete twirled his staff, and made merry wordless noises in his throat in anticipation of friendliness.

"Ehu!" he cried when he heard the hunting howl, "but they are at their tricks again," and then in English he voiced a volley of broken, inconsequential oaths, for he saw what the howlers were about.

One imputes a sixth sense to that son of a thief misnamed the coyote, to make up for speech, persuasion, concerted movement, in short, the human faculty. How else do they manage the terrible relay races by which they make quarry of the fleetest footed? It was so they plotted the antelope's last running in the Ceriso: two to start the chase from the black rock toward the red scar of a winter torrent, two to leave the mouth of the wash when the first were winded, one to fend the ravine that led up to the broken ridges, one to start out of the scrub at the base of a smooth upward sweep, and, running parallel to it, keep the buck well into the open; all these when their first spurt was done to cross leisurely to new stations to take up another turn. Round they went in the hollow of the crater, velvet-footed and sly even in full chase, and biding their time. It was a good running, but it was almost done when away by the west gap the buck heard the voice of Little Pete raised in adjuration and the friendly blether of the sheep. Thin spirals of dust flared upward from the moving flocks and signaled truce to chase. He broke for it with wide panting bounds and many a missed step picked up with incredible

eagerness, the thin rim of his nostrils oozing blood. The coyotes saw and closed in about him, chopping quick and hard.

Sharp ears and sharp muzzles cast up at his throat, and were whelmed in a press of gray flanks. One yelped, one went limping from a kick, and one went past him, returning with a spring upon the heaving shoulder, and the man in the reeds beside the bitter water rose up and fired.

All the luck of that day's hunting went to the homesteader, for he had killed an antelope and a coyote with one shot, and though he had a bad quarter of an hour with a wild and loathly shepherd, who he feared might denounce him to the law, in the end he made off with the last antelope, swung limp and graceless across his shoulder. The coyotes came back to the killing ground when they had watched him safely down the ravine and were consoled with what they found. As they pulled the body of the dead leader about before they began upon it, they noticed that the homesteader had taken the ears of that also.

Little Pete lay in the grass and wept simply; the tears made pallid traces in the

season's grime. He suffered the torture, the question extraordinary of bereavement.

If he had not lingered so long in the meadow of Los Robles, if he had moved faster on the Sand Flat trail,--but, in fact, he had come up against the inevitable. He had been breathed upon by that spirit which goes before cities like an exhalation and dries up the gossamer and the dew.

From that day the heart had gone out of the Ceriso. It was a desolate hollow, reddish-hued and dim, with brackish waters, and moreover the feed was poor.

His eyes could not forget their trick of roving the valley at all hours; he looked by the rill of the spring for hoof-prints that were not there.

Fronting the west gap there was a spot where he would not feed, where the grass stood up stiff and black with what had dried upon it. He kept the flocks to the ridgy slopes where the limited horizon permitted one to believe the crater was not quite empty. His heart shook in the night to hear the long-drawn hunting howl, and shook again remembering that he had nothing to be fearing for. After three weeks he passed out on the other side and came that way no

more. The juniper tree stood greenly by the spring until the homesteader cut it down for firewood. Nothing taller than the rattling reeds stirs in all the hollow of the Ceriso.

The Little Coyote [1902] WITHOUT doubt a man's son is his son, whether the law has spoken or no, and that the Little Coyote was the son of Moresco was known to all Maverick and the Campoodie beyond it. In the course of time it became known to the Little Coyote. His mother was Choyita, who swept and mended for Moresco in the room behind the store, which was all his home. In those days Choyita was young, light of foot, and pretty,--very pretty for a Piute.

The Little Coyote was swart and squat, well-knit but slow- moving, reputed dull of wit, though that, people said, he did not get from Moresco. Moresco was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, and sharp, so that they said at Maverick "as sharp as Moresco," and there was an end of comparison. Land and goods gravitated to Moresco. His Bed Rock Emporium was the centre of their commercial world, running out threads of influence to the farthest corners of the desert hills. Everybody at Maverick owed or had owed Moresco, and would be glad, if opportunity offered, to owe him again.

Moresco dealt in merchandise and miners'

supplies at a profit that made men swear as they continued to buy. Moresco grubstaked prospectors, and outfitted miners for the working of prospect holes, for a lion's share of the findings. To do him justice, if there were no findings he was not heard to complain. Moresco had always the cash in hand for the backing of new enterprises, for a consideration. In short, Moresco was the burning glass that focused at Maverick whatever of bustle and trade was left in the depleted hills.

What the people perceived chiefly was, that as the country grew poorer Moresco waxed richer, and they grumbled accordingly. But the real sore spot in Maverick was his relation to the Campoodie.

It was said, and believed, that Moresco dealt brotherly by the Piutes. He gave them plain terms, forbore to haggle, preferred them for small employments, warmed them at his fire, gave them good-morrow and good-night. The fact was, Moresco had the instincts of a patriarch. To outwit Maverick was business, to despoil the Gentile might be religion; but the hapless, feckless people who dwelt gingerly beside them

were his dependents, his beneficiaries,--in a word, his children. In reality they cost him very little. He was amused, he was diverted, he expanded with paternal graciousness. For their part, the Indians revered him, and Choyita was envied of the women to have borne him a son.

Not that Moresco admitted anything of the kind, but there are no secrets in a Campoodie. Choyita left the child behind when she went to clean and mend for Moresco. What was she or her son that her lord should be mindful of them? Once, when the child was about a year old, and she sat with the Mahalas by the sunwarmed wall, watching the daily pageant of white life as it passed through the streets of Maverick, Moresco called her into the store, and gave her a pair of shoes for the child, and red calico for a frock. Thereafter Choyita walked proudly. To her mind the child was acknowledged, and so it was received in the Campoodie. Happy was she among women, though her son should be called the Coyote.

Among Piutes, Coyote as a name to be called by is a matter for laughter or killing, as the case may be. For the coyote,

though evilly bespoken, is of all beasts the most gullible; the butt, the cat's-paw, the Simple Simon, of four-footed things,--the Jack Dullard of Piute folk lore. So from the time he stumbled witlessly about the Campoodie on his fat, bowed legs, Choyita's son was the Little Coyote; and the time is past when a man may win a new name for himself,--long past with the time when there were deeds worth naming.

The Little Coyote he remained when he was come to his full size, which was something short of the stature of a man.

By that time, Choyita, who had lost her prettiness and grown fat, had gone to keep house for a miner down Panniment way, and Moresco had married a wife, who bore him only daughters, and spent much of her time and most of his money in San Francisco. By that time, too, the Coyote knew whose son he was. It came to him as a revelation, about the time his slow wit perceived that the other children mocked him for his tainted blood.

"Nana," he asked, when the savory smell of the cooking pots drew the children in from their long day's playing,--"Nana, whose son am I?"

"Moresco's," she answered, and there fell a long silence between them. If she had said the alpenglow had fathered him, he would not have been more amazed. It lay all about them now, the diurnal benediction of high altitudes, the transfiguration of the rifted hills, and the boy at the heart of it thought of Moresco,--Moresco, who stood for power and pleasance, the quintessence of all things desired or feared, the little god of the Piutes.

"Moresco, Moresco," he repeated softly, under his breath. He did not call him "father," and he told no man, but he never forgot.

When the Little Coyote was, as nearly as he could guess, about seventeen, he killed his first big game. It was a deer, shot at the time of pinons, when all the tribe went up to the annual harvest. The Coyote made next to nothing of it, for he had the good manners of his tribe; but he put by the best cut, wrapped in fern leaves, and the next day walked the eleven miles to Maverick that he might bring it to Moresco. He stood at the door of the Bed Rock Emporium until the merchant noticed him.

"Vell, Kyode, vat you wandt?" said Moresco."

"That you should have this," said the Coyote, and then he went away.

A few days later the merchant called him into the store, and gave him a box of sardines and two tins of corn. Nobody understood the etiquette of present-giving better than Moresco.

After that, when it began to be observed there was a kindliness between the Hebrew and the Coyote, people crooked one finger to the curve of an aquiline nose and winked slyly.

Although Maverick could not deny Moresco's ultimate winnings in the financial game, it permitted itself the luxury of questioning the several moves by which he achieved them. Never, in the opinion of Maverick, had he behaved more foolishly than in the matter of Jean Rieske's sheep.

Jean Rieske was a sheep-owner in a small way, shepherding his own flock in the windy passes of the hills, made his exclusive pasture by the strip of

barrenness that encompassed them. Jean Rieske had been several other things in a small way, and had thoughts other than belong properly to sheep- herding. He collected bits of ledges and outcrops, and carried them to Maverick to be assayed, until at last he conceived that he had made a "strike." Forthwith he would be a miner.

Making a mine out of a prospect hole is an expensive business, but if Moresco was willing to risk the money, Jean Rieske would risk his sheep. He worked at it ten months, and at the end of that time he discovered that he had no mine and no flock. So he went a- shepherding again, and to the same flock, but as a hireling, not an owner,--at which he considered himself aggrieved, and was comforted with strong waters. At the end of other ten months Moresco discharged him, and gave his place to the Little Coyote.

Whatever Jean Rieske swore and Maverick prophesied, the Coyote proved himself born for it. He knew the hills; he scented pasture from afar; he had an instinct for short cuts like a homing pigeon; he was weather-wise as--an Indian. The flock prospered. The Little Coyote was

happy: he did a man's work, and he served Moresco. Two or three times in a year he came in to replenish his stores and to make report. He stood at the door of the store, grave and still, until Moresco came out and spoke to him: "Vell, vat you wandt, Kyode?" The shepherd gave the tale of his flock in straight-spoken words and few, with long pauses. When he had quite done, Moresco would say, with his hand withdrawn from his left breast pocket, "Take a cigar, Kyode." Then he would light his own, and they smoked together, the man and his son, for a sign of good understanding, and went each his own way.

The flock increased and became notable.

Moresco trusted his shepherd. It was a responsible employment, and there were men in Maverick who coveted it. Persons who felt the situation to be indefensible probed it a little, gingerly. Why should the likes of that job fall to a Piute, when there were better men wanting it? "Vell, for one ting, id is cheaber," said the merchant, with his bland, inclusive smile. And that was as much as most people got out of Moresco.

Three, four, five years the Little Coyote

worked the flock from Keynot across the summit to Rose Springs, and in all the foodful hollows that lie between. He saw little of men, and missed them not at all. If in the wickiups beyond Maverick there were young breasts and bright, desirous eyes, he took no thought of them: he thought only of Moresco and the flock, how he might prosper it. All the slow heat of his being burned in a passion of service for the man who treated him as if he were white.

He ran at the head of his flock; he lay down with it by night; he carried the lambs in his bosom. He lived as simply as one of his own sheep, and looked a young god, walking clear on the skyline with the nimble flock, or coming up out of streams on summer mornings, with the sun shining on his fine gold-colored limbs. And oh, but he was a silent one, was the Little Coyote. He had no pipes to play, nor any song; but at times, as he walked in the full tide of the spring, near naked and unashamed, throwing up the tall stalk of some hillside flower and catching it, his lips moved in the minor croon of his people, the "he-na, ahna, ha-na," that is the burden of their songs,--an old word of a forgotten tongue, never to be laid aside. It seemed as if the morning prime of earth persisted in him

with that word.

By this time the flock had trebled, and the Coyote, going down to make report, so far forgot his Indian training as to admit his pride.

"Id is too much for you, Kyode," said Moresco. "I vill ged Chopo to helb you."

"Chopo is a fool," said the Coyote. "I would rather have another dog."

"Two dogs, if you like," returned Moresco.

The Coyote considered. "No," he said, "one, if I may choose him."

So Moresco's shepherd had one of the famous dogs of Del Mar, and Maverick outdid itself guessing the price Moresco paid for it. Maverick had other things to talk about before the season was over, for that was the winter of the "great snow." Snows came occasionally to Maverick, in the wake of storms fleeting over from ridge to crest.

They whitened the hills, crusted the streams, and snuggled away into the roots of the pines by the bare rock gullies. They came in a swirl of wind sometimes, that

packed them deep in the canons, and left the high places bare to days of twinkling cold, but afforded nothing by way of contrast to the great snow. For two days the sky lowered and brooded and the valleys filled and filled with a white murk, dry, and warmer than should be for the time of year. The moon of nights showed sickly white and cast no shadow.

The Little Coyote smelled snow in the air, and began to move the flock toward the Marionette. The Marionette was the hole in the ground that Jean Rieske hoped would turn out a mine. It was a deep, wide gouge in the face of the hill, at the head of a steep gully. The Coyote had built corrals in the gully, and used it at lambing time. The Indian's instinct proved him right. The third morning snow fell, wet and clogging. It increased with the day, and grew colder.

The man and the dogs put all their skill to the proof, but the sheep huddled and stumbled. They were half a day's journey from the mine in the best of weather, and every hour the storm thickened. Crossing Cedar Flat, two miners, going hastily down from a far, solitary mine, gave the Coyote a friendly hail.

"Leave the sheep to the dogs, and get out of this!" they cried. "It's going to be a hell of a storm."

But that the cold had stiffened his face into immobility the Coyote would smiled. They to talk to him of the weather and the sheep!

He saw what his work was to be, and settled to it. He lightened the camp burro of his pack and let him go. The little beast trudged doggedly beside him, until presently they came to a wind-tilted cedar in the lee of a hill. The burro considered; he looked at the shepherd, and put his nose to the thick, sodden snow; he backed under the cedar and dropped his head. It was a hard shift, but he would see what came of it. The shepherd spoke to his dogs: they lagged and whimpered, but they heard his voice. He who had been chary of words grew voluble: he shouted, he urged, he adjured them, he wrestled with them in the white silence of the snow. The Piute had none of the white man's gift for expedients to save himself and as many of the sheep as he could. The sheep were Moresco's, and Moresco trusted him: he must bring them all in. If one halted and stumbled, the Coyote carried it until it was

warmed and rested a little. They floundered in a drift, and he lifted them out upon his shoulders, the dogs whining a confession of helplessness. It grew dark, and the snow still fell, sharp, and fine, and most bitter cold. The wind came up and snatched his breath from him; but there was no longer any need for crying out,-the dogs understood. They had passed the first revolt of physical terror, and remembered their obligations; their spirits touched the man's spirit and grappled with their work. They were no longer dogs, but heroes. Moreover, they knew now where they went, and helped him with their finer sense. Happen what would to the man and the dogs, the sheep would all come in.

Late, late they found the ravine of the Marionette. The Little Coyote had lost all sense of time and feeling. He drowsed upon his feet, but moved steadily about the flock. The dogs bayed, and he heard the sharper clang of the bells given back by the rocks as the sheep began to pour into the cavern of the mine. His head floated in space; he was warm and comforted, and he knew what these things might mean.

His feet slipped in the yielding drifts.

"Moresco! Moresco!" he cried, as a man might call, in extremity, on God. The morning broke steely blue and cold upon a white wonder. At Maverick, people looked up from their path-shoveling to ask if the men from the mines had all come in, and what was to be done for those who had not. Two miners, arriving late the previous day, had told redoubtable tales of the trail and the wind and the snow.

Incidentally, they mentioned having seen the Little Coyote. By ten o'clock it was known in all the saloons that Moresco was offering inducements for men to go to the rescue of his shepherd. Opinion gained ground that the Coyote was a fool for not looking out for himself better, and that cold never hurt a Piute anyway, and if he was at the Marionette he was all right.

"Yes," said a man nursing a frozen foot,--"yes, if he got in."

Within an hour there were three found willing to start,--Salty Bill, an Indian called Jim, and one Duncan, a miner from Panniment way,--and who else but Moresco! People said it was ridiculous; Moresco was short and fat, and turned fifty.

The barkeeper at the Old Corner wanted to know if anybody thought Moresco would trust the counting of his sheep to any other.

It is fifteen miles from Maverick to the Marionette, and all uphill. By the time they came to the turn of the trail they were knee-deep in the snow. It was soft and shifty, and balled underfoot. They kept as much as possible to the high places; this avoided the drifts, but made more climbing.

Crossing the flats they floundered hipdeep, wide of the trail. Perspiration rolled from their foreheads and froze upon their beards. Their bodies were warm and wet, and their lungs wheezing; they had lost the sense of their feet under them. The sun on the snow made them blind and sick. They had been out four hours, and were little more than halfway. The white men cursed with what breath they had; only the Indian kept a stolid front. Moresco was purple and gasping.

"Give up," cried Salty Bill,--"give up, Moresco! We'll never make it. Such a peck of trouble about a Piute and a parcel of sheep. Better for the Coyote to freeze than us four. Give up, I say."

"Ah yes, der Kyode," said Moresco, dazed and feebly,--"der Liddle Kyode. He vas my son," and he burrowed on through the snow.

The men stared, but they followed. Salty Bill kept the lead; he was in a ferment to have the thing over with, that he might go home and tell his wife.

Six hours out, quite spent, and drunk with fatigue, they came to the ravine of the Marionette. They heard the sheep bleat and the dogs yelp, trailing frozen-footed across the snow. At the foot of the gully a white heap lay, covered but well defined, spread out in the symbol of a sacrifice that the Hebrew repudiated and the Indian had never known. Moresco brushed the snow from it with his hands, and, as he stooped above it, tears fell upon a face grown white in death and strangely like his own. It was the Little Coyote.

The Little Town of the Grape Vines [1903] THERE are still some places in the West where the quail cry, "Cuidado;" where all the speech is soft, all the manners gentle; where all the dishes havechile in them, and they make more of the Sixteenth of September than they do of the Fourth of July. I mean in particular El Pueblo de Los Vinos Uvas. Where it lies, how to come at it, you will not get from me; rather would I show you the heron's nest in the Tulares. It has a peak behind it, glinting above the Tamarack pines; above, a breaker of ruddy hills that have a long slope valley-wards, and the shore-ward steep of waves toward the Sierras.

Below the Town of the Grape Vines, which shortens to Los Vinos for common use, the land dips away to the river pastures and the Tulares. It shrouds under a twilight thicket of vines, under a dome of cottonwood trees, drowsy and murmurous as a hive. Hereabout are some strips of tillage and the headgates that dam up the creek for the village weirs; upstream you catch the growl of thearrastra . Wild vines that begin among the willows lap over to

the orchard rows, and take the trellis and rooftree.

There is another town above Los Vinos that merits some attention, a town of arches and airy crofts, full of linnets, blackbirds, fruit-birds, small, sharp hawks, and mocking-birds that sing by night. They pour out piercing, unendurably sweet cavatinas above the fragrance of bloom and musky smell of fruit. Singing is in fact the business of the night at Los Vinos, as sleeping is for midday. When the moon comes over the mountain wall new washed from the sea, and the shadows lie like lace on the stamped floors of the patios, from recess to recess of the vine tangle run the thrum of guitars and the voice of singing.

At Los Vinos they keep up all the good customs brought out of Old Mexico, or bred in a lotus-eating land: drink and are merry, and look out for something to eat afterward; have children, nine or ten to a family; have cock-fights, keep the siesta, smoke cigarettes, and wait for the sun to go down. And always they dance, at dusk, on the smooth adobe floors, afternoons, under the trellises, where the earth is damp and has a fruity smell. A betrothal, a

wedding, or a christening, or the mere proximity of a guitar, is sufficient occasion; and if the occasion lacks, send for the guitar and dance anyway.

All this requires explanation. Antonio Sevadra, drifting this way from Old Mexico with the flood that poured into the Tappan district after the first notable strike, discovered La Golondrina. It was a generous lode, and Tony a good fellow; to work it he brought in all the Sevadras, even to the twice removed, all the Castros, who were his wife's family, all the Saises, Romeros, and Eschobars, the relations of his relations-in-law. There you have the beginning of a pretty considerable town. To these accrued much of the Spanish California float swept out of the Southwest

by Eastern enterprise. They slacked away again when the price of silver went down and the ore dwindled in La Golondrina. All the hot eddy of mining life swept away from that corner of the hills, but there were always those too idle, too poor to move, or too easily content with El Pueblo de Los Vinos Uvas.

Nobody comes nowadays to the Town of the Grape Vines except, as we say, "with

the breath of crying," but of these enough.

All the low sills run over with small heads.

Ah, ah! There is a kind of pride in that if you did but know it,--to have your baby every year or so as the time sets, and keep a full breast. So great a blessing as marriage is easily come by. It is told of Ruy Garcia that when he went for his marriage license he lacked a dollar of the clerk's fee, but borrowed it of the sheriff, who expected reelection, and exhibited thereby a commendable thrift.

Of what account is it to lack meal or meat when you may have it of any neighbor?

Besides there is sometimes a point of honor in these things. Jesus Romero, father of ten, had a job sacking ore in the Marionette, which he gave up of his own accord. "Eh, why?" said Jesus, "for my fam'ly."

"It is so, Senora," he said solemnly. "I go to the Marionette; I work, I eat meat--pie-frijoles--good, ver' good. I come home Sad'day nigh'; I see my fam'ly. I play a lil' game poker with the boys, have lil' drink wine, my money all gone. My fam'ly they have no money, nothing eat. All time I work at mine I eat good, ver' good grub. I think

sorry for my fam'ly. No, no, Senora, I no work no more that Marionette; I stay with my fam'ly." The wonder of it is, I think, that the family had the same point of view.

Every house in the Town of the Vines has its garden plot, corn and brown beans, and a row of peppers reddening in the sun, and in damp borders of the irrigating ditches clumps ofyerba santa , horehound, catnip, and spikenard, wholesome herbs and curative, but if no peppers then nothing at all. You will have for a holiday dinner in Los Vinos soup with meat balls and chile in it, chicken with chile, rice with chile, fried beans with more chile, enchilads, which is corn cake with a sauce of chile and tomatoes, onion, grated cheese and olives, and for a relish chilepepinos passed about in a dish; all of which is comfortable and corrective to the stomach. You will have wine which every man makes for himself, of good body and inimitable bouquet, and sweets that are not nearly so nice as they look.

There are two occasions when you may count on that kind of a meal; always on the Sixteenth of September, and on the twoyearly visits of Father Shannon. It is absurd

of course that El Pueblo de Los Vinos Uvas should have an Irish priest, but Black Rock, Minton, Jimville, and all that country round do not find it so. Father Shannon visits them all, waits by the Red Butte to confess the shepherds who go through with their flocks, carries blessing to small and isolated mines, and so in the course of a year or so works around to Los Vinos to bury and marry and christen. Then all the little graves in the Campo Santo are brave with tapers, the brown pine head-boards blossom like Aaron's rod with paper roses and bright cheap prints of Our Lady of Sorrows. Then the Senora Sevadra, who thinks herself elect of heaven for that office, gathers up the original sinners, the little Elijias, Lolas, Manuelitas, Joses, and Felipes, by dint of adjurations and sweets smuggled into small perspiring palms, to fit them for the Sacrament.

I used to peek in at them, never so softly, in Dona Ina's living-room; Raphael-eyed little imps, going sidewise on their knees to rest them from the bare floor; candles lit on the mantel to give a religious air, and a great sheaf of wild bloom before the Holy Family. Come Sunday, they set out the altar in the schoolhouse, with the fine

drawn altar cloths, the beaten silver candlesticks, and the wax images, chief glory of Los Vinos, brought up muleback from Old Mexico forty years ago. All in white the communicants go up two and two in a hushed sweet awe to take the body of their Lord, and Tomaso, who is priest's boy, tries not to look unduly puffed up by his office. After that, you have dinner and a bottle of wine that ripened on the sunny slope of Escondito. All the week Father Shannon has shriven his people, who bring clean consciences to the betterment of appetite, and the father sets them an example. Father Shannon is rather big about the middle, to accommodate the large laugh that lives in him, but a most shrewd searcher of hearts. It is reported that one derives much comfort from his confessional, and I for my part believe it.

The celebration of the Sixteenth, though it comes every year, takes as long to prepare for as Holy Communion. The Senoritas have each a new dress, the Senoras a newrebosa . The young gentlemen have new silver trimmings to their sombreros, unspeakable ties, silk handkerchiefs, and new leathers to their spurs. At this time, when the peppers glow in the gardens and

the young quail cry, "Cuidado," "Have a care!" you can hear theplump, plump of themetate from the alcoves of the vines, where comfortable old dames, whose experience gives them the touch of art, are pounding out corn fortamales .

Schoolteachers from abroad have tried before now at Los Vinos to have school begin on the first of September, but get nothing else to stir in the heads of the little Castros, Garcias, and Romeros but feasts and cockfights until after the Sixteenth.

Perhaps you need to be told that this is the anniversary of the Republic, when Liberty awoke and cried in the provinces of Old Mexico. You are roused at midnight to hear them shouting in the streets, "Vive la Libertad!" answered from the houses and the recesses of the vines, "Vive la Mexico!"

At sunrise shots are fired commemorating the tragedy of unhappy Maximilian, and then music, the noblest of national hymns, as the great flag of Old Mexico floats up the flagpole in the bare little plaza of shabby Los Vinos. The sun over Pine Mountain greets the eagle of Montezuma before it touches the vineyards and the town, and the day begins with a great shout. By and by there will be a reading of

the Declaration of Independence and an address punctured byvives; all the town in its best dress, and some exhibits of horsemanship that make lathered bits and bloody spurs; also a cockfight.

By night there will be dancing, and such music! old Santos to play the flute, a little lean man with a saintly countenance, young Garcia, whose guitar has a soul, and Carrasco with the violin. They sit on a high platform above the dancers in the candle-flare, backed by the red, white, and green of Old Mexico, and play fervently such music as you will not hear elsewhere.

At midnight the flag comes down. Count yourself at a loss if you are not moved by that performance. Pine Mountain watches whitely overhead, shepherd fires glow strongly on the gloomy hills, the plaza, the bare glistening pole, the dark folk, and the bright dresses are lit ruddily by a bonfire. It leaps up to the eagle flag, dies down, the music begins softly, and aside. They play airs of old longing and exile; slowly out of the dark the flag drops, bellying and falling with the midnight draft. Sometimes a hymn is sung, always there are tears. The flag is down; Tony Sevadra has received it in his

arms. The music strikes a barbaric swelling tune; another flag begins a slow ascent,--it takes a breath or two to realize that they are both, flag and tune, the Star-Spangled Banner,--a volley is fired, we are back, if you please, in California of America. Every youth who has the blood of patriots in him lays hold on Tony Sevadra's flag, happiest if he can get a corner of it. The music goes before, the folk fall in two and two, singing.

They sing everything,--America, the Marseillaise, for the sake of the French shepherds hereabout, the hymn of Cuba, and the Chilean national air, to comfort two families of that country. The flag goes to Dona Ina's, with the candlesticks and the altar cloths; then Los Vinos eats tamales and dances the sun up the slope of Pine Mountain.

You are not to suppose that they do not keep the Fourth, Washington's Birthday, and Thanksgiving at the Town of the Grape Vines. These make excellent occasions for quitting work and dancing, but the Sixteenth is the holiday of the heart. On Memorial Day the graves have garlands and new pictures of the saints tacked to the headboards. There is great virtue in anave said in the Camp of the Saints. I like

that name which the Spanish-speaking people give to the garden of the dead, Campo Santo, as if it might be some bed of healing from which blind souls and sinners rise up whole and praising God. Sometimes the speech of simple folk hints at truth the understanding does not reach. I am persuaded only a complex soul can get any good of a plain religion. Your earthborn is a poet and a symbolist. We breed in an environment of asphalt pavement a body of people whose creeds are chiefly restrictions against other people's way of life, who have kitchens and latrines under the same roof that houses their God. Such as these go to church to be edified, but at Los Vinos they go only for pure worship, and to entreat their God. The logical conclusion of the faith that every good gift cometh from God is the open hand and the finer courtesy. The meal done without buys a candle for the neighbor's dead child. You do foolishly to suppose that the candle does no good.

At Los Vinos every house is a piece of the earth,--thick- walled, whitewashed adobe that keeps the even temperature of a cave; every man is an accomplished horseman and consequently bow- legged; every

family keeps dogs, flea-bitten mongrels that loll on the earthen floors. The people speak a purer Castilian than obtains in like villages of Mexico, and the way they count relationship everybody is more or less akin.

There is not much villainy among them.

What incentive to thieving or killing can there be when there is little wealth, and that to be had for the borrowing? If they love too hotly, as we say, "take their meat before grace," so do their betters. Eh, what! shall a man be a saint before he is dead? And besides, Holy Church takes it out of you one way and another before all is done. Come away, you who are possessed with your own importance in the scheme of things, and have got nothing you did not sweat for, come away by the brown valleys and full-bosomed hills, to the even-breathing days, to the kindliness, earthiness, ease of El Pueblo de Los Vinos Uvas.

The Mother of Felipe THAT triangular portion of the great Mojave desert lying south of the curve of the Sierra Nevadas, where those mountains unite with the coast hills is known as Antelope Valley. A big, barren, windy country, rising from the level of the desert in long, undulating slopes that face abruptly toward the mountains.

In the open placers rise weird phalanxes of yucca palms, and among the hills little dark pools hide their treacherous margins in unwholesome grasses, and the white leprous crest of alkali. A country to be avoided by the solitary traveler, with its hard, inhospitable soil, and its vast monotony of contour and color. A country sublime in its immensity of light, and soft unvarying tints,--fawn, and olive, and pearl, with glistening stretches of white sand, and brown hollows between the hills, out of which the gray and purple shadows creep at night. A country laid visibly under the ban of eternal silence.

Crossing the valley, and forming the third side of the triangle, runs the long road that leads from San Diego and the south to the

open country along the Sacramento and the San Joaquin. Coming over the rise of the hill where this road turns away from Elizabeth Lake, rode in the early October morning a little train of horsemen, followed by half a dozen nondescript vehicles from which the faces of women and children peered through a confusion of household goods.

They were of the class commonly styled "Greasers," a mixed origin plainly visible in the dark hue of the skin, the crisp, coarse hair, the high-arched foot and the Madonna-like outlines of the women's heads. The dust of travel lay thick on the wide sombreros of the men and in the creases of their heavy saddles. The horses and women showed the fatigue of a long journey. Still they went forward briskly.

There was the vigor of youth in the clear air. The grease of the breakfast shone on the children's faces. There was much animated conversation among the men and gay sallies from the young women; but whenever unusual laughter was provoked it was checked by sighs and shrugs of commiseration, and the women glanced sympathetically at the last wagon in the train.

It was driven by a woman, whose form betrayed the shapeless middle-age common to her class. The strong patience of the hills was in her eyes and mouth.

Whenever a smooth bit of road permitted her to take her eyes from the horses she looked back into the wagon, where on a rude bed, under an improvised covering of calico bed-quilts, lay a young man in the delirium of fever. He had been ailing for some time, and three days ago the fever seized him with an intermittent force that sapped his strength visibly, like the shaking of an hour-glass.

The mother had urged the expedition forward with all possible speed. They were still many days distant from a physician to make him well, or a priest if he should die.

"Mother of God! if he should die!" A sudden spasm of anxiety contracted her oval, unwrinkled face into the semblance of shrunken old age. Had she not daily prayed to the Virgin that he might live to comfort her, now that his father was dead.Ave Santisima! He was her only son.

For what sin would the good God punish her?

There was the heavy gold bracelet theIngles had given her,--and Felipe's father had been so angry. She, she had been a vain, foolish thing, but, Santa Maria, what can you expect when one is young? The bracelet had been given to the priest, and she and her husband had been very happy together. Mother of Christ! how proud he had been when Felipe was born!

That was because she had prayed to the Virgin for a son. She had burned a wax candle before the Virgin for each month of her pregnancy, and they had burned quite clear and evenly down to the end; not one had flickered or gone out. Ave Maria!--and Felipe was such a son,--there was never another like him. Now if he would get well, she would give the Virgin the gold beads her husband had bought her. True, she had intended the beads for Felipe's wife,-but if he should die, what then? Ay, Jesu Christi! He must not die.

At noon the travelers halted before a brackish spring that oozed stealthily out of the hillside. The horses drank thirstily of the warm, turbid stream that flowed across the road; the men shook their damp, crisp hair, pressed close to the head in a shining crease where the heavy sombrero rested.

The women gathered sympathetically around the mother of Felipe, chattering together in their soft dialect, with little nods and shrugs, and pious ejaculations in quick, bird like accents. For only one of these the mother drew back the calico curtain; this was Benita, Felipe's betrothed.

The girl rested one round arm on the rim of the wheel, and laid her hand on the young man's forehead. She leaned forward lazily; her dress fell away untidily from her brown throat, revealing the beauty of the warm, young curves within. She remained silently stroking her lover's forehead, while the elder women questioned and suggested volubly.

The halt at noon was short; the expedition hoped to cross the mountains before night, and the ascent was long and difficult.

A dry, warm wind was blowing; the horses strained in their collars, the sick man tossed and moaned continually.

The hills were higher and more desolate, and seemed endowed with some infernal mechanism, shutting in silently behind, and opening out noiselessly before, giving up the road grudgingly, as if the very secret of

the earth went with it.

There is always a wind at the summit of the hills. There is full daylight there, too, until the night falls suddenly. It is as if the wind blew against the shadows that would have crept up from the valley, beating them back and back from the high places until night falls.

There is hope, too, at the summit of the hill. Who has not drawn it in with deep breaths of the scentless wind? Felipe forgot his delirious dreams, turned easily on his side and slept, and Benita and the mother comforted each other.

The two women rode down the grade together. Antonio Lesalda, Benita's father, walked beside the wagon, saying, "It is a good country that we come to. There is much food there for the horses, and wood, and a good spring that I know of, coming out of the rocks at the foot of the last grade. It will be better for Felipe if we rest there three days. Besides the hunting is good. My father and Mateo Gonzales killed three bears there in one week. It will not be long now, but it is soon dark in the cañon."

The women spoke to each other seldom. It was inexplicable to Benita that her lover should be ill. Luis and Pablo had not so much strength in their whole bodies as was in Felipe's right arm, and she could hear them laughing now with that Gonzales girl.

Felipe could not be very sick. How soundly he slept. Her father was right,--they would rest for three days, and the men would get him fresh meat to eat, and he would be strong again. "Now, what are they laughing at there, I wonder!"

The elder woman glanced furtively at the girl's face between her mumbled prayers.

"She is so young, how will she bear it if he should die?" she thought. "Jesu! What am I saying! If he sleeps, all will be well, and I will live with them,--but the Virgin shall have the gold beads."

At the foot of the mountains the men came to unharness the horses. This they did quietly, for the mother had fallen on her knees, rosary in hand. She could not do this before. It took both her hands to drive.

The horses wallowed in the rank grass, the children ran about to gather sticks for the fire. "See that you go not too far, or the

bears will get you," cried Antonio teasingly.

The women busied themselves about the supper. Benita sat beside Felipe and held his hand. He had recognized her, and she felt now more than ever that she loved him.

She began to be touched by the fierce anxiety the mother displayed in every tone and movement.

When all had been made safe for the night, the mother of Felipe went a little apart from the camp to pray. After the children were asleep the other women joined her, each for a little while,--moving sidewise while they prayed, to rest their knees from the hard stones.

There was no motion in the hills and the moon was shining. The click of the rosary sounded as loud to her as the "shriek, shriek" of the night birds. The mother mumbled on,--"The Virgin will surely hear me,--she also is a mother,--he is my only son,--and I will burn my candles."

"Come," said Benita, "you must sleep. See how wet the grass is."

In the morning Felipe was dead.

The travelers had camped in a broad, sandy basin, strewn with bowlders, cut across with deep irregular gullies, now concealed by a coarse rank growth of weeds and grass,--the dry bed of a mountain torrent.

The mother would not consent that Felipe should be buried here. "How shall I find my son if he be buried here?" she thought.

"It is well," said Antonio to the men. "It is hard to dig here, we will go on."

When they had come to a little rise of ground overlooking Lastac Lake, Antonio drew rein. "Shall it not be here?"

The woman shook her head.

Again in a little while,--"Shall it not be here?"

"Not yet. Not yet."

They were now well into the Cañon de Los Vinos. Great oaks lined the water-courses, and climbed half way up the hills. There were still green places by the springs, and running water. The cavalcade drew out

from the roadside. "It must be here, Señora," said Antonio authoritatively.

The women sobbed vehemently, Benita loudest of all. The mother did not weep.

She seemed suddenly to have fallen into that inscrutable old age that overtakes women of her race. She could look no older, and appeared never to have been young.

When it was over, some one cut Felipe's name on the oak under which they buried him.

At high noon the diminished party of wanderers passed slowly and with effort over the barrier that rears itself across the cañon's mouth like the outer rim of the world, dropping down into the vast, dim valley of the San Joaquin, hazy with the mists of its marshes, and the floating phantoms of mirage where the quivering light strikes back from the long vistas of its unsheltered sands.

AFTER ten years the mother of Felipe no longer mourned openly for her son, but her face had forgotten any other expression than the look of inscrutable old age she

had carried away from his grave. It had become as fixed as the contour of the hills or as the purpose in her heart.

Mass had been said for her son's soul; his body must not always lie in unblessed ground. After ten years God gave her an opportunity. Her brother's son and one of the men that had buried Felipe had affairs that took them within a few hours' journey of the Cañon de Los Vinos. It is not in the hearts of these people to deny a consolation to old age. They had little faith in the success of her undertaking: many trees had been cut down, the old wagon trail was obliterated, and the present stage road had been made on the other side of the cañon.

The mother felt no uncertainty. She had marked the place too well for that. A feverish excitement stirred her dull pulses.

Yonder, under that blazed oak Felipe was lying,--his face was turned a little to one side,--the cross was on his breast.

Antonio had marked out the grave by the shadow of the straight, thick trunk, three paces from the foot of the tree. The men stepped off the distance, and began to dig.

Presently they perceived that they had made a mistake. Felipe had been buried in the early morning, and it was now noon.

They selected a new place more carefully, and began again.

Conversation flagged when they were knee deep; at waist deep, perspiration broke out suddenly. They threw down their shovels, and began to poke in the loosened earth with sticks, never with their hands.

First there was a collar bone, then an arm and a hand. The men threw the bones out upon the grass, shaking their hands free of the earth that clung to them. The mother of Felipe gathered the bones into her apron, stooping painfully. Age overcame her power of quick motion; moreover she was fat. Tears ran from her sunken eyes, and hung in the creases of her withered cheeks. Patches of damp mould clung to the unwholesome relics; these she wiped off upon the grass and on her dress.

The diggers finished their task quickly.

She sat down upon the grass hugging the ghastly bundle to her breast, unwilling to allow it to be placed in the box prepared for

it. She took up handfuls of the discolored earth and wept over it.

This purpose accomplished she had one other desire. She wished to see Benita.

Antonio Lesalda, in pursuance with his nomadic instincts, had drifted back from the north into these very mountains and made his home in one of those innumerable triangular openings between the hills. This much she knew from floating bits of information that had reached her.

She knew also that his wife was dead, and that Benita was still with him. The heart of the mother was very tender toward the woman who also mourned for her son. "We will not forget Felipe," the two women had sobbingly protested to each other at parting.

They found Lesalda's place with little difficulty, and Benita was very glad to see them. She put down her baby that she might discharge the duties of hospitality.

When the youngster rolled over on the floor and cried she put both hands under his arms and dragged him into a sitting posture, chattering with short-breathed volubility.

"Did she not know she was married?

Yes,--for five years, and she had three children. Her husband was in Los Angeles with the horses. Such a good man and so handsome,--but they would see; he would surely be home in a day or two. What?

They must go on tonight!"

Benita was genuinely sorry for this; visitors were rare with her. The old woman had made her decision suddenly. The mother of her son would not stay in a house that had forgotten him. She had never contemplated the possibility of Benita's marriage; the fact came to her with all the shock of a flagrant desertion. She was almost dumb under the fire of Benita's good-natured questioning.

Now, what had she come for? For Felipe?

"Ah! poor Felipe! But you should have stayed with me, and my father would have gone with the men. It is not for women to be digging in the graves of the dead."

An hour later the mother of Felipe, looking back from the last curve of the winding road, saw Benita balancing the baby with her fat hands while the bare, brown legs wavered through the intricacies of three

short paces.

The treasured box of grisly relics had not been disturbed. Only in the hearts of mothers lives unconsolable regret.

The Pot of Gold [1901] WHAT FERROL FOUND AND WHAT HE LOST IN THE PLAIN OF BITTER WATERS "THE thing is impossible."

"Yes--but there's the pot; you can see for yourself."

"Oh, that's likely enough. You can't strike down to bed rock anywhere in this country without getting colors. The impossibility is that you should find the place it came from, or, finding it, that it should be profitable to work."

"I wasn't thinking of working it."

"Well, whatdo you want with it?"

"Oh, to sell!"

The map maker laugher. "Ferrol," he said, "you haven't a rudiment of conscience; not a trace."

"Oh, come, it's not so bad as that. People always bite at these stories of buried

treasure and lost mines. They like to be fooled that way. And as for finding it, there is no great difficulty about that, I take it. A pot like this won't outlast a generation, and these fellows get the material for their artifacts from the same places time out of mind. And gold has to be thick where an Indian can't scoop up a handful of clay to make him a cooking pot without getting it.

Why, man, the thing fairly reeks with gold, good yellow gold."

The map maker did not speak. He bent above his instruments; his lips moved softly as he worked. The expedition was camped in the swale of the Dripping Spring, where its waters gathered in a rock basin under the wild almonds. The desert fell away towards Death Valley. A blanket stretched upon tent stakes stood between them and the sky. Behind a hill shoulder Chio kept the camp for his women folk, beginning to be incredibly busy, like ants, with seeds and roots, dried grasshoppers, and the flesh of chuckwallas.

Ferrol had found a cooking pot of an old, crude sort, shot through with grains of yellow gold, in Chio's cooking camp.

"I will not sell the pot," said Chio to all his chaffering.

"Come, now, what will you do one of these days when the pot is broken? With the money I will give, you can buy iron pots that will outlast you many such."

"It has lasted since my father's time. Will the pots of the white man last longer than that?"

"Confound the old rascal!" said Ferrol to himself. "But tell me, Chio, you who know so much, was the pot made by your own people, or came it from the south?"

"Of my own people, surely; what should I do with a pot of the Arizonas?"

"And made hereabouts? I should like to know. Perhaps, since you will not sell, I shall make me a pot for myself."

Tuyomai looked up from the fire she was stirring and laughed.

"Tuyomai, go into the house," said her father.

Ferrol knelt on the sand, sketching rapidly with his finger. "Look, Chio, here is the desert; here is Armagossa; here the Dripping Spring. These are the mountains.

Is it here you make pots?"

"I think so; I no know," said Chio, relapsing from his own speech into broken English, after the manner of Indians who do not wish to understand.

Ferrol gave him a cigar and began again.

"Is it here towards the getting up of the sun? Here?"

"Maybe so--I think so, long time my people not make um. I no know."

Ferrol, sweeping his map out with his hand, got up, laughing. As he stood, the day lapsed suddenly. The alpen-glow flowed in evenly across the dead levels of burnt earths, and the round browed, shouldering hills. "A rainbow land," he said, and laughed again a whimsical assent to his own conceit. "A rainbow land, and a pot of gold at the end of it!"

Going back by the way he came, Fer- rol met the bright, regardful glance of Tuyomai

from the chinks of the thin, twig woven walls of the wickiup. "The women," he said, struck by a sudden thought. "The women, of course; they are the pot makers. I'll go for the girl."

The expedition had finished its work, and was for returning by way of Pilot Knob, and thence across the Valley of Salt Wells to the stage road going south. Ferrol, it was given out by the map maker, would forge north and east to the unnamed purple barrows touching the desert rim, on the trail of some prehistoric ruins of which he had word from Chio.

"If you must go," said the map maker, "for goodness' sake, don't let the expedition know what wild goose's feather has set you off. If this should get to headquarters, it would spoil your chance of getting on the Peruvian expedition, and you know you've set your heart on that."

"Oh, that's all right! Besides, it is really true--about the ruins, I mean. Tuyomai says they did not make the pot, but found it near an ancient pottery. The old man lied, it seems. And Tuyomai says that there are ruins there of hewn stone with pictures on

them. Besides, I can hardly help finding something in this country; why, man, it's in the air. Tuyomai says--" "Does the girl go with you?" asked the map maker brutally.

Ferrol laughed. He had a quick insight and facility, and a merry temper, that made him invaluable in difficult expeditions. He had done some notable things, too, but the adventurous blood of the Celt stood him in evil stead. He liked the credit which his work brought him, but government expeditions have limitations, and more than anything else Ferrol desired a fortune, that he might go adventuring upon his own account. Clear through the soul of him he loved a happy chance better than the price of conscious toil; so now he would be off to the impossible borders of a barren land, on the edge of the dry season, seeking a rainbow end. But the map maker was wrong about the girl. Ferrol had no notion of burdening a difficult way with woman's gear.

The trail, straight away to the Borax Marsh, and north to the red hill that the Defiance twisted through, and east again

by the California Girl, would bring him to the end of the mining country, and thence across to the nameless hills as best he might. The landmarks the girl had given him were sure: a white, wind sculptured chalk cliff, the tilted beds of vermilion earth, and the black, cleaving outcrop between two beds of clay--coal, perhaps. Well, that might be worth while also. Ferrol counted two months to his hazard, and made dry camp by starlight, having walked on into the gentle night wide eyed with the first fever of his enterprise. In the dark behind him a coyote howled, and he could hear the softpush, push , of the burrowing owls clearing out of the trail, and the crisping of sand under human foot. Ferrol drew his revolver and dropped it again, catching the stir of a woman's dress.

"Who?" he called across the gloom.

"Tuyomai--I have brought you the pot."

She put it down from her head and stooped beside it, still and wearied.

"Oh, yes, the pot. So the old man changed his mind, did he?"

"My father does not know. He is an old

man--and the pot would be mine."

"Quite so. Well, this is awkward; I have only a little silver with me. Will this do?"

The girl did not move. "Why should I take money?" she said. "I have brought my father's pot. And I cannot go back."

The sky filled and filled with unwinking stars, and the soft gloom grew into sound in the love notes of the burrowing owls.

Ferrol remembered, in the night, to be grateful that the expedition had traveled well away from Dripping Spring the day before. Waking, it fell in with his desert mood to see Tuyomai moving softly, and not without grace, between him and the kindling fire. Well, she knew, if any knew, where were the beds of golden sand, and the time was past when the tribe would arise hot on his path for the theft of a girl and a cooking pot.

When they came to the Borax Marsh, the girl had wit enough to turn out of the trail and wait for him on the other side; and again when they came to the Defiance, where Ferrol replenished his store; but by the time they came to the California Girl,

he was past caring.

The thing began to take the color of a lotus eating dream; a man and a woman free of all things in a big new land, a woman of shining, gold colored limbs and black, deep lighted eyes, who loved him dearly; a strong young life that trod the hills with him, resourceful, tireless, and unafraid. Ferrol thought how good the days of the first pair must have been. He thought once of the women he had known, and forgot them utterly.

Tuyomai had the wisdom of her people in foodful roots and berries and the flesh of wild things. The days broke softly luminous upon rayed blossomings, and the dewless nights were deep and sweet with sleep.

All this time they had not found the golden sands. Old potteries they found, and strewn shards, clay beds of surpassing qualities, mineral earths, chrome and vermilion, and huge outcroppings of wasteful ore, but never the thing they sought.

At the end of eight weeks Ferrol found, at the Defiance, a letter from the map maker,

calling him several kinds of a fool, for the Peruvian expedition had been made up suddenly without him. Ferrol sent in a report on the deposits of mineral earths, and went back to the hills and Tuyomai.

In golden noons, under the almond bushes, he taught her to write upon the sands, and began to explore the lore of her people, and to learn how many things a man may drop out of his life without making himself unhappy. So they fared along the rim of the aching sand wastes, exploring the washes of forgotten streams, until they came again to the Dripping Spring, where Tuyomai built him a wattled hut; and while Ferrol dozed, she sat under the creosote brushes, pondering, and writing upon the sand. Ferrol came upon one of these scrawls one day--his own name written large, and aside and falteringly "Mrs. Ferrol." He wiped it out hastily with his foot, Tuyomai accepting the omen silently as becomes a woman of her race.

When the heat began to beat down the hollow of the valley, insistent and palpable, they got them up to the high ridges and the scant shadows of the fox-tail pines, and,

when the heat was past, back to the spring. Here Ferrol built a hut such as miners use in the rainless hills, for by this time he knew all that was in the mind of Tuyomai when she wrote upon the sand.

He meant, when he had made all safe for her, to go back to his own; but when the fire was lit and the stars burned in the velvet void, and Tuyomai huddled against his feet, silent as he was silent, glowing when he glowed, he found that the taste of life was good. And always the cooking pot pricked him towards the golden quest. The desert wantoned with his intimate desires, kindled, and promised, and withheld. In the next luminous hollow, the farther hidden hills--everywhere the secret pressed and warmed him. And the message of the imperturbable hills is that one must take no account of mere days.

The mail came up from Minton, and supplies in the ore wagon of the Defiance.

Prospectors hailed him in his wanderings; gipsy bands of Indians shifted from Panniment to Pilot Knob, and back by way of the Dripping Spring, and Tuyomai made friends with their women against her time of need. By the time the almonds flowered

again, one came and dwelt by them in a little leafy hut, and Tuyomai, gone back in time of stress to the habit of her kind, bore him a son lying under the wattles by the rill of the spring.

Ferrol showed his pot to the miners he met. The things he knew about it and the things he hoped were blown about in the common talk, even as far as Angustora, and came back to him as a thing long established and believed, of a forgotten treasure in a hidden hill. It would have been better for Ferrol in those days if the little horned snake of the desert had bitten him, for there is more wealth in that unstinted land than a man can look upon and keep perfectly sane. So in the end Ferrol went mad, stark, desert mad; in all else orderly of speech and judgment, but mad. And Tuyomai made him very comfortable.

Meanwhile the child grew and arrived at the age of speech. At first the bright blackness of its eyes and hair, so much darker against the mitigated blackness of its skin, was an offense to Ferrol; but the clinging of its hands went through and through him.

By the time the boy could pull himself up babbling by his father's knee, Ferrol understood that this was a son of his own begetting, and required to be named.

"Light on the Mountain," Tuyomai called him, "Sweetwater," "Little Coyote," and the like foolish women's phrases, but as yet he had no name by which a man might be known.

"And what will you be called, sonny?" said Ferrol, giving the child a finger to hold by.

"Very good," laughed Tuyomai. "As thou art the great sun of all my days, so he shall be Sunny, my little sun." Tuyomai's English lapsed in those days, since Ferrol had a fancy for speaking her own speech.

So Sonny he was called, and when he could run at his father's heels for the better part of a day, Ferrol found no fault with his life, though his fortune was not yet made, and he had not yet begun his great work upon mineral deposits, with the promise of which he sopped the promptings of an old ambition.

Upon a day when the light broke rayed

and luminous from every blossoming herb, and the creosote, spreading down into the swale of the spring, fretted the soft air with new leafage, Ferrol set forth across the hills, and the child got up unbidden from his play to follow. Tuyomai, plaiting a basket under the wattles, saw them go.

About noon the mail carrier from Minton called to her from the road that he had seen the child straying alone on the Argus trail, going further away from home.

Tuyomai knew instantly what had happened. Ferrol had not seen the child following, or, seeing, had bidden him home, and Sonny had turned out of the trail to explore on his own account.

Tuyomai filled a canteen and the pitch smeared wicker water bottle that her people use, took food, and bethought herself how she might let Ferrol know, if he returned and found them gone. "Sonny Ferrol passed this way," she wrote upon the door, for so Ferrol had taught her to mark their trail when they two journeyed out towards Armagossa in an unforgotten spring. Then, her English failing, she filled up the space with crude sketches, and cast about from the beaten path to pick up the

boy's trail with the native craft and patience that wins against all speed.

Ferrol, coming home about the time the twilight purple began to fill between the hollow of the desert and the hollow sky, found the writing on the door, and understood. He looked at the embers dead upon the hearth and the day dying along the hills; he ran to the spring for water, and ate as he ran, knowing what was before him. Seeing the water bottle gone, he cast about for another vessel that might hold water, and there, on the chimneypiece, stood the cooking pot, in the net Tuyomai had made to carry it by. He caught it up as he ran, and thrust it gurgling into the spring.

Ferrol found and followed the double trail until the night closed. He spent the dark hours fruitlessly, going down to the cabin of a man he knew for help, and finding none.

At dawn he picked up the trail where Tuyomai had marked it, Indian fashion, as she went. Ferrol had the explorer's instinct for topography, could make straight away to a given landmark, and keep direction clear, but he had not the Indian's trained faculties for tracking, and in stony ground

he was baffled. It takes a strong man to deal with a barren land and the madness that lies in the heart of it. If he knows no landmarks, and cannot pick up his back tracks, he is not like to see his starting point again, and none but a skilled tracker, following fast, shall find him. Consider now if it be a child that is lost, with the mother following, and the father hard upon the trail of both.

Ferrol followed the woman's trail, understanding by its windings that she followed some trace of the child that he lacked wit to see. But there were traces later which he could understand, body prints where it had stumbled, blood upon the cutting edges of the black rocks, and crushed twigs where the child had thrust his face in the midst of the thorns to be free of the burning sun.

So he came at last, quite spent, and with little water, to a place where all trace of the child failed, and the woman had lain down and mourned over it. From thence a strong, steady trail ran down across a limitless, wind beaten sand flat. Under all the sky nothing moved to the eye, nor any speck showed that might be a living thing;

but that way the woman had gone, grief crazed or moved by some swift certain hope, and that way went Ferrol, for the woman had been to him as his wife, and the child was his child.

The desert has taken many men in its time, and the thirst consumes like fire.

Ferrol was already far spent when he came to the plain. In the night a wind arose and covered all the trails with drifted sand.

The cabin stood by the Dripping Spring until the sun warped it asunder, and a miner from Panniment way carried off the timbers to patch his own dwelling; and there, when the door swings outward and the light is strong, one might read a penciled scrawl, "Sonny Ferrol passed this way." In one of the wandering Indian tribes that drift about the desert rim are a dull, withered woman, neither young nor old, and a half white boy who answers to the name of Sonny.

Somewhere out in the plain of Bitter Waters are the bones of a man, and away on the sand flat, where he cast it from him when he ran in madness, and the hills mocked him as he ran--somewhere in that

rainbow land lies the pot of gold.

The Return of Mr. Wills [1907] MRS. WILLS had lived seventeen years with Mr. Wills, and when he left her for three, those three were so much the best of her married life that she wished he had never come back. The only real trouble with Mr. Wills was that he should never have moved West. Back East, I suppose, they breed such men because they need them, but they ought really to keep them there.

I am quite certain that when Mr. Wills was courting Mrs. Wills he parted his hair in the middle and the breast pocket of his best suit had a bright silk lining which Mr. Wills pulled up to simulate a silk handkerchief.

Mrs. Wills had a certain draggled prettiness and a way of tossing her head, that came back to her after Mr. Wills left, which made one think she might have been the prettiest girl of her town. They were happy enough at first when Mr. Wills was a grocery clerk, assistant Sunday school superintendent, and they owned a cabinet organ and four little Willses. It might have been that Mr. Wills thought he could go right on being the same sort of man in the West--he was clerk at the Bed Rock Emporium and had

brought the organ and the children--or it might have been he thought himself at bottom a very different sort of man, and meant to be it if he got a chance.

There is a sort of man bred up in close communities, who is like a cask, to whom the church, public opinion, the social note, are hoops to hold him in serviceable shape. Without these there are a good many ways of going to pieces. Mr. Wills's way was lost mines.

Being clerk at the Emporium, where miners and prospectors bought their supplies, he heard a lot of talk about mines, and was too new to it to understand that the man who has the most time to stop and talk about it has the least to do with mining. And of all he heard, the most fascinating to Mr. Wills, who was troubled with an imagination, was of the lost mines, incredibly rich ledges, touched, and not found again. To go out into the unmapped hills on the mere chance of coming across something was, on the face of it, a risky business; but to look for a mine once located, sampled, and proved, definitely situated in a particular mountain range or a certain canon, had a smack of plausibility.

Besides that, an ordinary prospect might or might not prove workable, but the lost mines were always amazingly rich.

Of all the ways in the West in which a man may go to pieces this is the most insidious.

Out there beyond the towns the long wilderness lies brooding, imperturbable; she puts out to adventurous minds glittering fragments of fortune or romance, like the lures men use to catch antelopes.Clip! then she has them. If Mr. Wills had gambled or drank, his wife could have gone to the minister about it, his friends could have done something. There was a church in Maverick of twenty-seven members, and the Willses had brought letters to it; but except for the effect it had on Mrs. Wills it would not be worth mentioning. Though he might never have found it out in the East, Mr. Wills belonged to the church not because of what it meant to him, but for what it meant to other people. Back East it had meant social standing, repute, moral impeccability. To other people in Maverick it meant a weakness which was excused in you so long as you did not talk about it. Mr. Wills did not because there was so much else to talk about in connection with lost mines.

He began by grub-staking Pedro Ruiz to look for the lost ledge of Fisherman's Peak, and that was not so bad, for it had not been lost more than thirty years, the peak was not a hundred miles from Maverick, and, besides, I have a piece of the ore myself. Then he was bitten by the myth of the "Gunsight," of which there was never any thing more tangible than a dime's worth of virgin silver, picked up by a Jayhawker, hammered into a sight for a gun; and you had to take the gun on faith at that, for it and the man who owned it had quite disappeared. Afterward it was the Duke o' Wild Rose, which was never a mine at all, but merely an arrow-mark on a map left by a penniless lodger, found dead in a San Francisco hotel. Grub-staking is expensive even to a clerk at the Bed Rock Emporium, getting discounts on the grub, and grub-staked prospectors are about as dependable as the dreams they chase, often pure fakes, lying up at seldom visited waterholes while the stake lasts, and returning with wilder tales and more alluring clues.

It was a late conviction that led Mr. Wills, when he put the last remnant of his means

into the search for the White Cement Mines, to resign his clerkship and go in charge of the expedition himself. There is no doubt whatever that there is a deposit of cement on Bald Mountain, with lumps of gold sticking out of it like plums in a pudding. It lies at the bottom of a small gulch near the middle fork of Owens's River, and is overlaid by pumice. There is a camp-kit buried somewhere near, and two skeletons. There was also an Indian in that vicinity who was thought to be able to point out the exact location, if he would. It was quite the sort of thing to appeal to the imagination of Mr. Wills, and he spent two years proving that he could not find it. After that he drifted out toward the Lee district to look for Lost Cabin mine, because a man who had immediate need of twenty dollars had, for that amount, offered Wills some exact and unpublished information as to its location. By that time Wills's movements had ceased to interest anybody in Maverick. He could be got to believe anything about any sort of a prospect, provided it was lost.

The only visible mark left by all this was on Mrs. Wills. Everybody in a mining town except the minister and professional

gamblers, who wear frock-coats, dresses pretty much alike, and Wills very soon got to wear on his face the guileless, trustful fixity of the confirmed prospector. It seemed as if the desert had overshot him and struck at Mrs. Wills, and Richard Wills, Esther Wills, Benjy Wills, and the youngest Wills, who was called Mugsey. Desertness attacked the door-yard and the house; even the cabinet organ had a weathered look. During the time of the White Cement obsession the Wills family looked to be in need of a grub-stake themselves. Mrs. Wills's eyes were like the eyes of trailweary cattle. Her hands grew to have that pitiful way of catching the front of her dress of the woman not so much a slattern as hopeless. It was when her husband went out after Lost Cabin, that she fell into the habit of sitting down to a cheap novel, with the dishes unwashed, a sort of drugging of despair common among women of the camps.

All this time Mr. Wills was drifting about from camp to camp of the desert borders, working when it could not be avoided, but mostly on long, fruitless trudges among the unmindful ranges. I do not know if the man was honest with himself, or if he knew by

this time that the clue of a lost mine was the baldest of excuses merely to be out and away from everything that savored of definiteness and responsibility. The fact was, the desert had got him. All the hoops were off the cask. The mind of Mr. Wills faded out at the edges like the desert horizon, which melts in mists and mirages, and finally he went on an expedition from which he did not come back.

He had been gone nearly a year when Mrs. Wills gave up expecting him. She had grown so used to the bedraggled crawl of life that she might never have taken any notice of the disappearance of Mr. Wills had not the Emporium refused to make any more charges in his name. There had been a great many dry waterholes on the desert that year and more than the usual complement of sun-dried corpses. In a general way this accounted for Mr. Wills, though there was nothing of sufficient definiteness to justify Mrs. Wills in putting on a widow's dress, and, anyway, she could not have afforded it.

Mrs. Wills and the children went to work, and work was about the only thing in Maverick of which there was more than

enough. It was a matter of a very few months when Mrs. Wills made the remarkable discovery that after the family bills were paid at the end of the month there was a little over--a very little. Mrs. Wills had lived so long with the tradition that a husband is a natural provider that it took some months longer to realize that she not only did not need Mr. Wills, but got on better without him. This was about the time she was able to have the sitting-room repapered and to put up lace curtains. And the next spring the children planted roses in the front yard. All up and down the wash of Salt Creek there were lean coyote mothers and wild folk of every sort that could have taught her that nature never makes the mistake of neglecting to make the child-bearer competent to provide. But Mrs. Wills had not been studying life in the lairs. She had most of her notions of it from the church and her parents, and, under the new sense of independence and power, she had an ache of forlornness and neglect. As a matter of fact, she filled out, grew stronger, had a spring in her walk.

She was not pining for Mr. Wills; the desert had him, though for whatever conceivable use, it was more than Mrs. Wills could put him to. Let the desert keep what it had got.

It was in the third summer that she regained a certain air that made one think she must have been pretty when Mr. Wills married her. And no woman in a mining town can so much as hint at prettiness without its being found out. Mrs. Wills had a good many prejudices left over from the time when Mr. Wills had been assistant superintendent of the Sunday school, and would not hear of divorce. Yet, as the slovenliness of despair fell away from her, as she held up her head and began to have company to tea, it is certain somebody would have broached it to her before the summer was over; but by that time Mr. Wills came back.

It happened that Benjy Wills, who was fourteen and driving the Bed Rock deliverywagon, had a runaway accident in which he had behaved very handsomely and got a fractured skull. News of it went by way of the local paper to Tonopah and from there drifted south to the Funeral Mountains and the particular prospect that Mr. Wills was working on a grub-stake. He had come to that. Perhaps as much because he had found there was nothing in it as from paternal anxiety, he came home the

evening of the day the doctor had declared the boy out of danger.

It was my turn to sit up that night, I remember, and Mrs. Meyer, who had the turn before, was telling me about the medicines. A neighbor woman, who had come in by the back door with a bowl of custard, and the doctor, standing in the sitting-room with Mrs. Wills, were present, when Mr. Wills came in through the black block of the doorway with his hand before his face to ward off the light- -and perhaps some shamefacedness: who knows?

I saw Mrs. Wills quiver, and her hand went up to her bosom as if some one had struck her. I have seen horses start and check like that as they came over the pass and the hot blast of the desert took them fairly.

It was the stroke of desolation. I remember turning quickly, at the doctor's curt signal, to shut the door between the sitting-room and Benjy.

"Don't let the boy see you to-night, Wills," said the doctor, with no hint of a greeting; "he's not to be excited." With that he got himself off as quickly as possible, and the neighbor woman and I went out and sat on

the back steps a long time, and tried to talk about everything but Mr. Wills. When I went in at last he was sitting in the Morris chair, which had come with soap wrappers, explaining to Mrs. Meyer about the rich prospect he had left to come to his darling boy. But he did not get so much as a glimpse of his darling boy while I was in charge.

Mr. Wills settled on his family like a blight.

For a man who has prospected lost mines to so great an extent is positively not good for anything else. It was not only as though the desert had sucked the life out of him and cast him back, but as though it would have Mrs. Wills in his room. As the weeks went on, one could see a sort of dinginess creeping up from her dress to her hair and her face, and it spread to the house and the doorway. Mr. Wills had enjoyed the improved condition of his home, though he missed the point of it; his wife's cooking tasted good to him after miner's fare, and he was proud of his boys. He didn't want any more of the desert, not he. "There's no place like home," said Mr. Wills, or something to that effect.

But he had brought the desert with him on

his back. If it had been at any other time than when her mind was torn with anxiety for Benjy, Mrs. Wills might have made a fight against it. But the only practical way to separate the family from the blight was to divorce Mr. Wills, and the church to which Mrs. Wills belonged admitted divorce only in the event of there being another woman.

Mrs. Wills rose to the pitch of threatening, I believe, about the time Mr. Wills insisted on his right to control the earnings of his sons. But the minister called; the church put out its hand upon her poor staggered soul, which sunk back. The minister himself was newly from the East, and did not understand that the desert is to be dealt with as a woman and a wanton. He was thinking of it as a place on the map.

Therefore he was not of the slightest use to Mrs. Wills, which did not prevent him from commanding her behavior. And the power of the Wilderness lay like a wasting sickness on the home.

About that time Mrs. Wills took to novelreading again; the eldest son drifted off up Tonopah way, and Benjy began to keep back a part of the wages he brought home.

Mr. Wills is beginning to collect

misinformation about the exact locality where Peg-leg Smith is supposed to have found the sunburned nuggets. He does not mention the matter often, being, as he says, done with mines, but whenever Pegleg comes up in talk, I can see Mrs. Wills chirk up a little, her gaze wandering to the inscrutable grim spaces, not with the hate you might suppose, but with something like hope in her eye--as if she had guessed what I am certain of, that in time its insatiable spirit will reach out and take Mr. Wills again.

And this time, if I know Mrs. Wills, he will not come back.

The Search of Jean Baptiste I. ONE bred to the hills and the care of dumb, helpless things must in the end, whatever else befalls, come back to them.

That is the comfort they give him for their care and the revenge they have of their helplessness. If this were not so Gabriel Lausanne would never have found Jean Baptiste. Babette, who was the mother of Jean Baptiste and the wife of Gabriel, understood this also, and so came to her last sickness in more comfort of mind than would have been otherwise possible; for it was understood between them that when he had buried her, Gabriel was to go to America to find Jean Baptiste.

He had been a good son to them in his youth and good to look upon: a little short of stature,--no taller, in fact, than Babette, who was a head shorter than Gabriel,--but broad in the shoulders and strong in the thighs beyond belief. But the strength of his thews and sinews had been Jean Baptiste's undoing. About the time he came to the age of a man and the fullness

of his strength, he began to think too much of himself and his cleverness in breaking other people's collar-bones by pitching them over his shoulder.

The towns drew him; the hills had no power to hold. He left minding the sheep; he sought jolly companions, and went boisterously about with them from inn door to inn door. Finally the fame of his wrestling spread until there were few men in the province dared try a fall with him.

From bragging he went to broiling, and at last fell into such grievous trouble that there was nothing for it but to slip away to America between the night and the morning.

Then Gabriel and Babette, who had not thought before to take stock of their years, began to understand that they were old, and at the time when they had looked to see children's children about their knees, Babette had slipped away to find the little ones who died before Jean Baptiste was born, and Gabriel was beginning his search for Jean Baptiste, the well beloved.

America is a wide land, but the places in it where men fare forth to the hills with sheep

are known and limited; and when he had inquired where these were, there, because of the faith he had, went Gabriel Lausanne.

He came, in the course of a year, to the shepherd world that lies within the Sierra Nevada and its outlying spurs. For it is known that the shepherds of the Sierras are strange, Frenchmen, Basques mostly, and a few Mexicans, but never an Englishspeaking one, from the Temblor Hills to the Minaretts.

Things went hardly with Gabriel at first, for he was new to the land and bewildered by its bigness; but once he had gotten a place to help at lambing-time his work was assured, for there was little he did not know about lambs. And finally he was given charge of a flock, and went wandering with it into the high glacier meadows, learning the haps and seasons of the hills. He got to know the trails and the landmark peaks, what meadows were free and what could be rented for a song, the trail of bear and wildcat, the chances of snow in August, and all shepherd's lore.

He knew the brands of sheep as a man knows the faces of his neighbors, and from the signs of the trails how they fared that were ahead of him, and how to prosper his

own.

All this time he had not left off inquiring for Jean Baptiste, though the manner in which he should do this gave much trouble of mind to Gabriel Lausanne. He thought it reasonable to suppose that Jean Baptiste had not kept his own name, lest the old wrong should find him out by means of it.

And if it should come to his ears that inquiries were made concerning him, he might be more careful to hide himself, suspecting an enemy. In the end Gabriel had to content himself asking every man he met for news of his son, whom he loved dearly and would find.

"Jean Baptiste, your father loves you," he wrote upon the rocks; "Jean Baptiste, your father loves you," he cut painstakingly upon the blazed trunks of pines; and "Jean Baptiste!" he whispered nightly to the wideopen stars when he lay with his flocks wintering on the sunward slopes of the Little Antelope.

II. SO the years went over him, and his heart warmed toward the big new land where

any meadow might hold his son, or any coyote-scaring fire might be Jean Baptiste's.

By as many shepherds as he met Gabriel Lausanne was respected for his knowledge of ailing sheep, and laughed at for his simple heart, but as yet he had not come up with the shepherds of Los Alamos. The Los Alamos grant covered thousands of acres of good pasture-lands, but they counted their flocks and herds by tens of thousands, and reached out as far as they could or dared into the free forest-lands and the glacier meadows set between.

They sent out large flocks, strong and well shepherded; and what they could not get by the fair right of first comers, they took by force and wile. They wrested the best feeding-grounds from small shepherds by the sheer force of numbers, and when they met with bands strong and adventurous as their own, the shepherds cracked one another's heads merrily with their long staves, and the pasture went to the men with the thickest skulls.

They were bold rogues, those shepherds of Los Alamos. They would head their

flocks away from the line of the Forest Reserve, under the ranger's eye, and as soon as his head was turned cut back to the forbidden pastures, and out again before he could come up with them.

They turned streams out of their courses, and left uncovered fires behind them to run unchecked in the wood, for the sake of the new feed that grew up in the burned districts. For them the forest existed only to feed sheep, and Los Alamos sheep at that.

There are shepherds in the Sierras who from long association grow into a considerable knowledge of woodcraft and have respect for the big trees, but not the shepherds of Los Alamos. No doubt there was much mischief charged to them which was not properly their own, but in any event they had never been loved, and were even dreaded because of that one of them who was called "The Mule."

Every shepherd has two names--the one he signs to his contract and the one he is known by. The Mule, so called because of a certain manner of surly silence and the exceeding breadth and strength of his back, had been picked up by Le Berge, the

head shepherd, at a shearing, poorly clad and wholly at the end of his means. There was that in his look and the way in which he handled a sheep that made it plain that he had been born to it; and when he had plucked up a man who annoyed him and pitched him over his shoulder, Le Berge loved him as a brother. He hired him forthwith, though he had to discharge another man to make place for him. And now it was said that whoever came in the way of the shepherds of Los Alamos must try a fall with The Mule for the right of the feeding-grounds; and the fame of his wrestling was such that timid shepherds kept well away from his trail.

III. GABRIEL LAUSANNE, keeping to the small meadows and treeless hills, had not yet fallen in with the flocks of Los Alamos.

The fifth year of his shepherding there was no rain at all on the inland ranges. The foot-hill pastures failed early, and by the middle of July the flocks were all driven to the feeding-grounds of the high Sierras.

Gabriel came early to Manache, a chain of grassy, gentian-flowered plats strung on

the thread of a snow-fed brook, large and open, and much frequented by shepherds.

In Manache, if one waits long enough, one gets to know all the flocks and every shepherd ranging between Tahoe and the Temblors. Gabriel, a little wearied at heart, purposed to stay the summer through in that neighborhood, moving only as the flock required.

Jean Baptiste he knew must come to the hills as surely as the swallow to the eaves or the stork to her chimney, but he was perplexed by the thought that in the years that had passed so many changes had come to them both that they might unwittingly meet and pass each other. He wished that he might find other messengers than the wind and the rainwashed rocks and the fast-obliterating pines. And while Gabriel pondered these things with a sore heart, two thousand of the Los Alamos sheep poured down upon his meadow from the upper pass.

Their shuddering bleat, their jangling bells, sounded unseen among the tamarack pines all the half of one day before they found him. But when they came into the open and saw him feeding down the

stream-side among the dwarf willows, the shepherds of Los Alamos promised themselves great sport.

Le Berge, walking lazily at the head of his flock, spoke a word to his dogs, and the dogs in their own fashion spoke to the flock, and straightway the sheep began to pour steadily down the meadow and around the flock of Gabriel; for that was a way they of Los Alamos had--compelling shepherds to keep their sheep parted out at their own cost.

"And what do you here, friend?" said Le Berge, when he had reached Gabriel.

"I feed my flock," answered the old man.

"The pasture is free. Also I seek my son."

The under-shepherds came hurrying, expecting to be greatly entertained, and one called to another, "Hi, Mule, here is work for you!"

The man so called came slowly and in silence, a short man, but close-knit and broad in the shoulders, a wrestler by the look of him, and leaning upon his staff until his part of the entertainment should begin.

"Free is it," said Le Berge, still to Gabriel.

"Yes, free to those who can hold it. By the turn of your tongue you should be from Bourdonne. Here, Mule, is a countryman of thine. Come teach him the law of the feeding-ground."

"I am an old man," said Gabriel, "and I wish no harm. Help me out with my flock and I will begone. But you," he said to The Mule, "are you truly of Bourdonne? I am Gabriel Lausanne, and I seek my son, Jean Baptiste, whom I love. We also are of Bourdonne; it may be you can tell where he is to be found."

"Enough said," cried Le Berge. "Up with him, Mule."

IV. AND then the shepherds of Los Alamos looked with mouths agape to see that The Mule stood still, and the knuckles of the hand that grasped his staff were strained and white. The voice of Gabriel wavered on amid the bleating of the sheep: "If you are surely of Bourdonne you will

earn an old man's blessing; and say to him that his mother is dead, and his father has come to find him. Say to my son, 'Jean Baptiste, your father loves you.'" The old man stooped a little, that he might meet The Mule eye to eye.

"Jean Baptiste," he said again, and then his staff shook in his hands, though there was no wind, and his voice shook, too, with a sudden note of hope and doubt and wistful inquiry. "Jean Baptiste," he cried, "your father loves you! Jean Baptiste--" Jean Baptiste, called The Mule, dropped his staff and wept with his face between his hands, and his whole strong frame shook with emotion, and his father fell on his neck and kissed him.

So Gabriel found his son.

V. AND now it is said that there are no better shepherds in the Sierras than the two Lausannes, the one famed for his skill with the lambs, the other for his knowledge of the feeding-grounds.

They will not be hired apart, and it is believed that it will be so until the end; for it is said at shearings, as a joke that is half believed, that when father Gabriel is too old to walk, The Mule will carry him.

They are a silent pair, and well content to be so; but as often as they come by Manache, when they sit by the twilight fire at the day's end, Gabriel puts out his hand to his son, saying softly, as of old habit, "Jean Baptiste, your father loves you"; and The Mule, patting the hand upon his arm, makes answer, "Ay, father; Jean Baptiste knows."

THE SONG-MAKERS [1911] THE talk had been going on for nearly an hour without affording me an occasion for saying anything, which was exceedingly tiresome.

"The fact is," said the Professor, and the rest of the company agreed with him, "that the only place you can hear Wagner as he should be, is at Bayreuth." The pines outside quivered at this announcement, and a blear old sea fog came and peered through the panes at us. Suddenly the firelog snapped asunder.

The red glow leaped into a three-inch point of flame. Instantly the fog caught it by reflection a rod outside and made of it a desert camp-fire spiring upward from the crossed ends of the back log. Dark against it by some superior sort of refraction from my mind I could see the dreaming face of my friend Tinnemaha, the Medicine-man.

What I thought the Professor had said was that the only place nowadays where you could see any genuine song-dancing is in Shoshone Land, and, out of the velvet desert dark beyond, Kern River Jim

answered him.

"But in the old days," said he, "right here in Sagharanite there was a Chisera who could sing the wind up out of the west with the rains behind it; and she could sing the rain away, too, when she had done with it; and you could no more be still when you heard her than the wind could, but you must get upon your feet and dance what she sang."

"In Shoshone Land," said Tinnemaha, "I remember a man who could dance the heart out of your bosom. He made a rattle of ram's horn stopped with a round of mescal stem, and would keep time with it.

He taught me to dance some of his songs for a bag of taboose, but I could never match with him, for the best of his singing was that he made it new for every occasion."

What the Professor was actually saying at that moment was that Wagner's intellectuality made it improbable that the French should ever be able to interpret him, but I went on listening to Tinnemaha, for, besides being much the same sort of talk, it was vastly more interesting.

"Nowadays in the schools," said he, "they teach our children white men's songs, but they do not lay hold on your insides as the old songs do. White man's songs, they talk too much." He dropped out of his native speech into the clipped English in which he courteously held any criticism of white men's ways should be couched. "What man sings too much with his mouth," said he, "but Shoshone sings here"--he extended his hand across his body, palm inward, with that most expressive gesture of the Indian to include the whole region of the solar plexus, the seat of the Inside Man who sings and is sung to--"here." The hand moved outward, slightly clutching at the strings of sympathy.T dancin'; he cryin' while he singin'. 'Tain't the words that make him cry. I'ss what he thinkin' 'bout when he sing."

"Last night," said Kern River Jim, "I dreamed that I sang, and when I awoke I was crying, but my song had gone from me."

"It was the wolf-song," said Tinnemaha; and we were quiet while the flames lapped and flickered, musing on what I have told

you in another place, how there was a man who, when the people met together, had no song and greatly desired one and was unhappy over it. Then one day he bought a song from the wolf for a basket of tule roots and sang it amid the tribe that night until the earth under him was beaten to a fine dust and he fell into the deep trance which waits beyond the last ecstasy of song.

So the wolf came in the night and stole his song away. I remembered me of an equally old tale of a Saxon singer, and I thought, Beast-god or Man-god, the myth told quite as much as I had been able to fathom for myself of the source of all songs, dropping into the mind spread to receive them, quietly as the shed ashes of the fire.

"But all your songs," I wished to know, "do they come so from inside you?"

"Every man's own song," they averred, "the one he makes for himself, and no one dares sing without his per- mission. But sometimes when it is a very good song he bequeaths it to his friend, and the tribe uses it; other times a man's song is so precious that no one gets to know very well what it is about, and it dies with him."

"And when does a man make a song?"

"How can I tell?" questioned Tinnemaha.

"It is when his Inside Man is raised up within him. Perhaps when he has killed his first buck or made a woman to know that he is man. When his son is born or his enemy is slain. Who knows his great moment?"

"There was one I knew," said Kern River Jim, "who made a song when he was drunk. Three days he had herded the BarN cattle up Tunawai in a sand-storm, scarcely eating or sleeping while the storm lasted, and when it was done the foreman gave him as much whiskey as he liked, and when he was well drunken he made a song." Jim's eyes twinkled. "It was a good song."

I remembered to have heard that air, the most lugubrious Indian melody I had known, and thought I should have felt just that way if I had been thoroughly intoxicated, but Jim esteemed it humorous.

We fell a-talking then of the songs that are not personal, but come down to the people

from old times: cradle-songs, love-songs, songs for the beginning and the end of journeys.

Tinnemaha stood up and began to sing one of Victory: "Ha . . . ah--a, Ha . . . ah--a!" A sharp, throaty noise, as if the Inside Man had waked and fed on what he relished: "Ha . . . ah-a!" while the Medicine-man stamped and swayed: "Come, O ye buzzards, The feast is prepared!

Ha . . . ah!" until I could fairly hear the sweep of their wide wings between the naked dead and naked heaven.

"My father saw that song made when he was a young man and we fought the Mojaves. We had killed the best of their fighting men and taken away their weapons, for they had long arrows that entangled in the brush so that they could

not shoot so fast as our men with the shorter shafts. The dead were beginning to swell, and one of our men danced among them and made a song.

"Then one and another of ours took it from him, and all the way home they danced it until the women heard them returning on the trails. So the song came to the Shoshones."

"And do you always dance when you sing?"

"How else should it be?" said Tinnemaha, with mild amazement.

"First," said he, "the songis , then there are three things--the dance and the music-"Ha . . . ah--a!"

The muscles of his chest rippled under the thin cotton shirt, the throaty syllables gurgled out of him as though jarred by the rhythm of his dancing. "And then," he finished, "there are the words. Sometimes the words are very old and are forgotten, and the people make new words, but it is not a new song because of that. The song

is behind them."

It flashed upon me inwardly as accounting for the accompaniment of meaningless syllables that ran along with much of their tribal ceremonial, swelling with the movement of the ritual into even billows of song with just a sentence or two like a riffle of foam on the crest of each; the song behind the song singing itself out of all their memories and knowledges.

"Give me that song again which you danced for me at the beginning of wild almond bloom," I begged, beating with my hands a sketch of the body rhythm that accompanied it.

"The grass is on the mountain," crooned Kern River Jim. "It is a very old song of the Paiutes."

And the song behind it?" I urged. "'Oh, a long time The snow is over all the mountain.

The deer have come down and the bighorn,

They have passed over Waban.

A long time now we have eaten seeds And dried flesh of the summer's killing, We are wearied of our huts.

The mists have come down like a tent, They have hid the mountain.

And on a day suddenly comes the sun.

The mists are withered away, The grass is seen on the mountain!"

"Therefore," said Jim, "we make a dance and go to the meadow to look for taboose and the young shoots of the tule.

"Also," said he, "I remember a song a woman made to me on Kern River. I had come to it late in the evening and found it big with rains. The woman had a wickiup on the other side and went about her fire to tend the cakes; I called across to her, but I did not attempt the river because of the

flood, and I saw that the woman was alone and no man came to her. By and by when it was dark she piled pitchy boughs on the fire till it leaped up and showed the straight high pines and the river between us like a thick, hurrying snake. Then she made a song and I heard it above the water. So I went into the river as I was, and the woman pulled me out half dead on the other side. But I did not mind it because of the song."

"And the song was?"

"The fire burns," quoted Jim. "It leaps up and nobody is warmed by it. Though it was a very long time ago, I have never forgotten it." I did not ask him for the song behind that. . . .

Once when I had tried to persuade Poco Bill to render a love- song he had refused on the ground that "white men don't like those kind of words. Thass all right song for Paiute, but with white man those words mean bad." Later when one of the women translated the song for me I felt how immeasurably we had dropped behind the Indian in having no words with which to communicate the issues of life except such

as "mean bad."

"But still," I insisted, "I do not understand why you must dance. We also have many songs, but we do not dance to them."

Something drifted down to me just then from the talk going on over my head to remind me that when the white man sings best and most expensively he comes as near dancing as is compatible with the utmost breath: feet of innumerable choruses twinkled across my memory, but I didn't exactly see my way to explain that to the Medicine-man. I had heard a great deal that evening of how a certain cantatrice had waved her arms and swung her magnificent torso in the part of Lucia; there was not a whisper of why. I had seen the bucks in the beginning of October pawing up the earth in deep ravines, pawing and tossing their branched foreheads with a slow, majestic rhythm, and once at Buena Vista, where the slough fell over the ruined drop into the vast reedy lagoon, long since drained away to profitable fields, there in the middle of the hot morning mist I had seen the dipping of the pelicans to their mates, the strange wing-bowing, the retreats and advances of tall water-birds,

with the white expanse of wing feather against the fawn-colored land, most like the extended arms and floating draperies that flee forever about the red ground of an Etruscan vase. I had seen these and divers wonders that, with due respect to Mr. Darwin, I didn't altogether accept as the procreant urge of the world.

That was a good theory as far as it went, but it failed to explain the dance of the Grass on the Mountain, nor why the tenor felt obliged to declare his undying opposition to the basso with both arms at length in the direction of his chest expansion.

At any rate, it would be interesting to know what the Medicine-man said of it. He said it very much to the point.

"We dance always," said he. "It is the shortest road to the Friend of the Soul of Man." I had heard more or less of this Friend among all the Indians I had known or known about, under various names: Great Spirit, The Mystery, The Power, The Trues, God or Holy Ghost. It has nothing to do

with their ordinary spirits or supernaturals, has no appearance and no history. It is the supreme intelligence, perhaps, that plane of consciousness touched in great crises along which runs from mind to mind communicating fire. Through it cures are affected and messages transmitted from the dead.

"By dancing," said the Medicine-man, "the Inside Man erects itself, it is lifted up, it lays hold on the Friend; then singing comes, and many things are possible that were not."

"What things?"

Tinnemaha considered. "Do you know Mahala Joe?" "Who was condemned to wear a woman's dress because he once ran away from battle?"

"He was scarcely grown and it was his first fight," said the Medicine-man, excusingly.

"But it is not an easy thing to appear as a woman in the face of men, and Joe has told me often that unless he had danced greatly, until the Friend knew him for a very

man, he could not have continued in it."

"It was he," continued Jim, "who danced the fear out of our minds during the great sickness."

This was an epidemic of pneumonia which decimated the campodies a few years back, and Tinnemaha nearly lost his life in it, according to the Paiute law, because his own dancing failed to check the progress of the disorder.

"That," he acknowledged, "was because there was no fear in the mind of Mahala Joe. But it is true that by dancing much for one's self the power grows. There was Carson Charlie. His father had been shot by a Washoe in a very old quarrel, and Charlie should have killed the killer, but he had been to Carson to school where they showed him the Jesus road and he was soft-hearted. Then I took him apart in the hills, for his father was my friend and it is not right that the son should grow fat while the killer of his father is abroad. Three days we danced and sang together, and it was not easy for Charlie, he had been to school so long; but I taught him our ancient dances. Three days I strove with him,

fasting, and in the end he found the Friend."

"And--?" I queried--the flicker of a smile played on the face of Tinnemaha--"and he was also not so soft-hearted."

He took up my thought and carried it on beyond the personal instance. "It is so," he said; "by dancing power comes to medicine the souls of men."

"And the bodies?" But, in fact, he had no phrases to signify the partition of man into physical and spiritual which is the graft of theology on an unscientific observation of life.

What he really believed was that if the Inside Man was invulnerable, as he might be made by Good Medicine, to assault of weapon or disease, so would his outside be. I had seen a Shoshone Medicinedancer cure an abscess on the lungs by this method, and a Methodist Evangelist brings souls to healing by singing of hymns and pounding the pulpit, and found the processes not entirely dissimilar, but it hadn't occurred to me until now to attempt the valuation of literature and art on the

same basis. O Dante! O Bach! The shortest road to the Friend of the Soul of Man! I explained to Tinnemaha that we had songs and other matters of our own with which merely to be confronted was to be shot upward into the plane of power, but we hadn't been able, except in rare instances, to manage it with our dances.

"That," said the Medicine-man, "is because you do not dance to yourselves."

He went on to say that once when he had been to Reno, in the matter of the Washoe Boundary Dispute, he had seen some dancing-women at a theater, and he was quite explicit as to the effect upon his outside. But when a man danced to himself and the Friend, it was otherwise. He thought it was reasonable, the Inside Man being so entangled with the body that when it began to move itself aright the body would respond first, and when, by free motion the spirit ascended, then the song came and visions and healing.

"It is so," he explained, "that it is more fortunate to die in battle. For if a man dies before disease has eaten him, he can the

better make his song." . . . It had taken, of course, much more explanation than this, on divers occasions, for me to understand that death to an Indian is no such catastrophe as we modernly conceive it; rather an incident which even their gods and Great Ones are liable to suffer, but it needed no further touch just then to have me see in all manner of dying rites, death songs, battle cries, extreme unction, a vine of the spirit climbing till it laid hold on the Friend and sustained itself in the swelling of Jordan. I knew without doubt where I should go if I died immediately upon reading: "I was with Hercules and Cadmus once When in the woods of Crete they bayed the bear."

Good Medicine! There I had the whole business of song-makers; painted songs, printed songs, or whatever; not to preach, not to please merely, but to make a short road to the mood of power, to touch the Friend. But you had by Tinnemaha's account to touch him yourself first, to swing up by the skirts of the Great Moment and to let down a hand to stumbling men.

The fire snapped and went out; the two ends of the back log burned so far asunder that unless you had seen the live flame at work on them you couldn't have told that they belonged together any more than the two ends of the conversations--mine with the Medicine-man, and the talk within the room, which had by this time fallen off into that reminiscent exchange of dates and places, as to when you last heard Melba or where you saw the portrait of Whistler's mother, which many estimable folk pursue determinedly under the fond imagination that they are talking Art. As the company rose for breaking up I stood up with them, and it occurred to somebody to inquire why I hadn't said anything for quite an hour.

"I was thinking," I said by way of reply, "that I should like to write a song like this."

I swung my arms out, palms upward, the chest raised, the body slightly swaying forward, saluting the six Quarters, as I had seen the Medicine-man in the business of the cure of souls, and the company, especially the younger portion of it, looked

at me commiseratingly. They understood that it was not my fault that I hadn't at that time had the advantage of the Metropolitan Museum and Covent Garden, and they meant, of course, to be kind. I could see the Professor, visibly in the interest of hospitality, hold back a disposition to lecture me. But they do not know even yet why I didn't particularly mind it.

THE WALKING WOMAN [1907] THE first time of my hearing of her was at Temblor. We had come all one day between blunt whitish bluffs rising from mirage water, with a thick pale wake of dust billowing from the wheels, all the dead wall of the foothills sliding and shimmering with heat, to learn that the Walking Woman had passed us somewhere in the dizzying dimness, going down to the Tulares on her own feet. We heard of her again in the Carrisal, and again at Adobe Station, where she had passed a week before the shearing, and at last I had a glimpse of her at the Eighteen-Mile House as I went hurriedly northward on the Mojave stage; and afterward sheepherders at whose camps she slept, and cowboys at rodeos, told me as much of her way of life as they could understand. Like enough they told her as much of mine. That was very little.

She was the Walking Woman, and no one knew her name, but because she was a sort of whom men speak respectfully, they called her to her face, Mrs. Walker, and she answered to it if she was so inclined.

She came and went about our western world on no discoverable errand, and whether she had some place of refuge

where she lay by in the interim, or whether between her seldom, unaccountable appearances in our quarter she went on steadily walking, was never learned. She came and went, oftenest in a kind of muse of travel which the untrammeled space begets, or at rare intervals flooding wondrously with talk, never of herself, but of things she had known and seen. She must have seen some rare happenings too--by report. She was at Maverick the time of the Big Snow, and at Tres Pinos when they brought home the body of Morena; and if anybody could have told whether de Borba killed Mariana for spite or defense, it would have been she, only she could not be found when most wanted.

She was at Tunawai at the time of the cloud-burst, and if she had cared for it could have known most desirable things of the ways of trail-making, burrow- habiting small things.

All of which should have made her worth meeting, though it was not, in fact, for such things I was wishful to meet her; and as it turned out, it was not of these things we talked when at last we came together. For one thing, she was a woman, not old, who had gone about alone in a country where

the number of women is as one in fifteen.

She had eaten and slept at the herders' camps, and laid by for days at one-man stations whose masters had no other touch of human kind than the passing of chance prospectors or the halting of the tri-weekly stage. She had been set on her way by teamsters who lifted her out of white, hot desertness and put her down at the crossing of unnamed ways, days distant from anywhere. And through all this she passed unarmed and unoffended. I had the best testimony to this, the witness of the men themselves. I think they talked of it because they were so much surprised at it.

It was not, on the whole, what they expected of themselves.

Well I understand that nature which wastes its borders with too eager burning, beyond which rim of desolation it flares forever quick and white, and have had some inkling of the isolating calm of a desire too high to stoop to satisfaction. But you could not think of these things pertaining to the Walking Woman, and if there were ever any truth in the exemption from offense residing in a frame of behavior called ladylike, it should have been inoperative here. What this really

means is that you get no affront so long as your behavior in the estimate of the particular audience invites none. In the estimate of the immediate audience-conduct which affords protection in Mayfair gets you no consideration in Maverick. And by no canon could it be considered ladylike to go about on your own feet, with a blanket and a black bag and almost no money in your purse, in and about the haunts of rude and solitary men.

There were other things that pointed the wish for a personal encounter with the Walking Woman. One of them was the contradictious reports of her, as to whether she was comely, for example. Report said yes, and again, plain to the point of deformity. She had a twist to her face, some said; a hitch to one shoulder; they averred she limped as she walked. But by the distance she covered she should have been straight and young. As to sanity, equal incertitude. On the mere evidence of her way of life she was cracked, not quite broken, but unserviceable. Yet in her talk there was both wisdom and information, and the word she brought about trails and waterholes was as reliable as an Indian's.

By her own account she had begun by walking off an illness. There had been an invalid to be taken care of for years, leaving her at last broken in body, and with no recourse but her own feet to carry her out of that predicament. It seemed there had been, besides the death of her invalid, some other worrying affairs, upon which, and the nature of her illness, she was never quite clear, so that it might very well have been an unsoundness of mind which drove her to the open, sobered and healed at last by the large soundness of nature. It must have been about that time that she lost her name. I am convinced that she never told it because she did not know it herself. She was the Walking Woman, and the country people called her Mrs. Walker.

At the time I knew her, though she wore short hair and a man's boots and had a fine down over all her face from exposure to the weather, she was perfectly sweet and sane.

I had met her occasionally at ranch houses and road stations, and had got as much acquaintance as the place allowed; but for the things I wished to know there wanted a time of leisure and isolation. And when the occasion came we talked

altogether of other things.

It was at Warm Spring in the Little Antelope I came upon her in the heart of a clear forenoon. The spring lies off a mile from the main trail and has the only trees about it known in that country. First you come upon a pool of waste full of weeds of a poisonous dark green, every reed ringed about the water level with a muddy white incrustation. Then the three oaks appear staggering on the slope, and the spring sobs and blubbers below them in ashycolored mud. All the hills of that country have the down plunge toward the desert and back abruptly toward the Sierra. The grass is thick and brittle and bleached straw-color toward the end of the season.

As I rode up the swale of the spring I saw the Walking Woman sitting where the grass was deepest, with her black bag and blanket, which she carried on a stick, beside her. It was one of those days when the genius of talk flows as smoothly as the rivers of mirage through the blue hot desert morning.

You are not to suppose that in my report of a Borderer I give you the words only, but the full meaning of the speech. Very often

the words are merely the punctuation of thought, rather the crests of the long waves of intercommunicative silences. Yet the speech of the Walking Woman was fuller than most.

The best of our talk that day began in some dropped word of hers from which I inferred that she had had a child. I was surprised at that, and then wondered why I should have been surprised, for it is the most natural of all experiences to have children. I said something of that purport, and also that it was one of the perquisites of living I should be least willing to do without. And that led to the Walking Woman saying that there were three things which if you had known, you could cut out all the rest, and they were good any way you got them, but best if, as in her case, they were related to and grew each one out of the others. It was while she talked that I decided that she really did have a twist to her face, a sort of natural warp or skew into which it fell when it was worn merely as a countenance, but which disappeared the moment it became the vehicle of thought or feeling.

The first of the experiences the Walking

Woman had found most worth while had come to her in a sand storm on the south slope of Tehachapi in a dateless spring. I judged it should have been about the time she began to find herself, after the period of worry and loss in which her wandering began. She had come, in a day pricked full of intimations of a storm, to the camp of Filon Geraud, whose companion shepherd had gone a three days' passear to Mojave for supplies. Geraud was of great hardihood, red-blooded, of a full laughing eye and an indubitable spark for women. It was the season of the year when there is a soft bloom on the days, but the nights are cowering cold and the lambs tender, not yet flockwise. At such times a sand storm works incalculable disaster. The lift of the wind is so great that the whole surface of the ground appears to travel upon it slantwise, thinning out miles high in air. In the intolerable smother the lambs are lost from the ewes; neither dogs nor man make headway against it.

The morning flared through a horizon of yellow smudge, and by mid-forenoon the flock broke.

"There were but the two of us to deal with

the trouble," said the Walking Woman.

"Until that time I had not known how strong I was nor how good it is to run when running is worth while. The flock traveled down the wind, the sand bit our faces; we called, and after a time heard the words broken and beaten small by the wind. But after a little we had not to call. All the time of our running in the yellow dusk of day and the black dark of night, I knew where Filon was. A flock-length away, I knew him.

Feel? What should I feel? I knew. I ran with the flock and turned it this way and that as Filon would have.

"Such was the force of the wind that when we came together we held by one another and talked a little between pantings. We snatched and ate what we could as we ran.

All that day and night until the next afternoon the camp kit was not out of the cayaques. But we held the flock. We herded them under a butte when the wind fell off a little, and the lambs sucked; when the storm rose they broke, but we kept upon their track and brought them together again. At night the wind quieted and we slept by turns, at least Filon slept. I lay on the ground when my turn was, tired and beat with the storm. I was no more tired

than the earth was. The sand filled in the creases of the blanket, and where I turned, dripped back upon the ground. But we saved the sheep. Some ewes there were that would not give down their milk because of the worry of the storm, and the lambs died. But we kept the flocks together. And I was not tired."

The Walking Woman stretched out her arms and clasped herself, rocking in them as if she would have hugged the recollection to her breast.

"For you see," said she, "I worked with a man, without excusing, without any burden of me of looking or seeming. Not fiddling or fumbling as women work, and hoping it will all turn out for the best. It was not for Filon to ask, Can you, or Will you. He said, Do, and I did. And my work was good. We held the flock. And that," said the Walking Woman, the twist coming in her face again, "is one of the things that make you able to do without the others."

"Yes," I said; and then, "What others?"

"Oh," she said as if it pricked her, "the looking and the seeming."

And I had not thought until that time that one who had the courage to be the Walking Woman would have cared! We sat and looked at the pattern of the thick crushed grass on the slope, wavering in the fierce noon like the waterings in the coat of a tranquil beast; the ache of a world-old bitterness sobbed and whispered in the spring. At last,-"It is by the looking and the seeming," said I, "that the opportunity finds you out."

"Filon found out," said the Walking Woman. She smiled; and went on from that to tell me how, when the wind went down about four o'clock and left the afternoon clear and tender, the flock began to feed, and they had out the kit from the cayaques, and cooked a meal. When it was over, and Filon had his pipe between his teeth, he came over from his side of the fire, of his own notion, and stretched himself on the ground beside her. Of his own notion.

There was that in the way she said it that made it seem as if nothing of the sort had happened before to the Walking Woman, and for a moment I thought she was about to tell me one of the things I wished to

know; but she went on to say what Filon had said to her of her work with the flock.

Obvious, kindly things, such as any man in sheer decency would have said, so that there must have something more gone with the words to make them so treasured of the Walking Woman.

"We were very comfortable," said she, "and not so tired as we expected to be.

Filon leaned upon his elbow. I had not noticed until then how broad he was in the shoulders and how strong in the arms. And we had saved the flock together. We felt that. There was something that said together, in the slope of his shoulders toward me. It was around his mouth and on the cheek high up under the shine of his eyes. And under the shine the look--the look that said, 'We are of one sort and one mind'--his eyes that were the color of the flat water in the toulares--do you know the look?"

"I know it."

"The wind was stopped and all the earth smelt of dust, and Filon understood very well that what I had done with him I could not have done so well with another. And

the look--the look in the eyes--" "Ah-ah--!"

I have always said, I will say again, I do not know why at this point the Walking Woman touched me. If it were merely a response to my unconscious throb of sympathy, or the unpremeditated way of her heart to declare that this, after all, was the best of all indispensable experiences; or if in some flash of forward vision, encompassing the unimpassioned years, the stir, the movement of tenderness were forme --but no; as often as I have thought of it, I have thought of a different reason, but no conclusive one, why the Walking Woman should have put out her hand and laid it on my arm.

"To work together, to love together," said the Walking Woman, withdrawing her hand again; "there you have two of the things; the other you know."

"The mouth at the breast," said I. "The lips and the hands," said the Walking Woman, "The little, pushing hands and the small cry." There ensued a pause of fullest

understanding, while the land before us swam in the noon, and a dove in the oaks behind the spring began to call. A little red fox came out of the hills and lapped delicately at the pool.

"I stayed with Filon until the fall," said she.

"All that summer in the Sierras, until it was time to turn south on the trail. It was a good time, and longer than he could be expected to have loved one like me. And besides, I was no longer able to keep the trail. My baby was born in October."

Whatever more there was to say to this, the Walking Woman's hand said it, straying with remembering gesture to her breast.

There are so many ways of loving and working, but only one way of the first-born.

She added after an interval, that she did not know if she would have given up her walking to keep at home and tend him, or whether the thought of her son's small feet running beside her in the trails would have driven her to the open again. The baby had not stayed long enough for that. "And whenever the wind blows in the night," said the Walking Woman, "I wake and wonder if he is well covered."

She took up her black bag and her blanket; there was the ranch house of Dos Palos to be made before night, and she went as outliers do, without a hope expressed of another meeting and no word of good-by. She was the Walking Woman.

That was it. She had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it. Work,--as I believed; love,--as the Walking Woman had proved it; a child,--as you subscribe to it. But look you: it was the naked thing the Walking Woman grasped, not dressed and tricked out, for instance, by prejudices in favor of certain occupations; and love, man love, taken as it came, not picked over and rejected if it carried no obligation of permanency; and a child;any way you get it, a child is good to have, say nature and the Walking Woman; to have it and not to wait upon a proper concurrence of so many decorations that the event may not come at all.

At least one of us is wrong. To work and to love and to bear children.That sounds easy enough. But the way we live establishes so many things of much more importance.

Far down the dim, hot valley I could see

the Walking Woman with her blanket and black bag over her shoulder. She had a queer sidelong gait, as if in fact she had a twist all through her.

Recollecting suddenly that people called her lame, I ran down to the open place below the spring where she had passed.

There in the bare, hot sand the track of her two feet bore evenly and white.

The Woman at Eighteen-Mile [1909] I HAD long wished to write a story of Death Valley that should be its final word. It was to be so chosen from the limited sort of incidents that could occur there, so charged with the still ferocity of its moods, that I should at length be quit of its obsession, free to concern myself about other affairs. And from the moment of hearing of the finding of Lang's body at Dead Man's Spring I knew I had struck upon the trail of that story.

It was a teamster who told it, stopping over the night at McGee's, a big slow man, face and features all of a bluntness as if he had been dropped before the clay was set.

He had a big blunt voice through which his words rolled, dulled along the edges. The same accident that had flattened the outlines of his nose and chin must have happened to his mind, for he was never able to deliver more than the middle of an idea, without any definiteness as to where it began or ended and what it stood next to.

He called the dead man Long, and failed to remember who was supposed to have killed him and what about.

We had fallen a-talking round the fire of Convict Lake, and the teamster had handed up the incident of Dead Man's Spring as the only thing in his experience that matched with the rooted horror of its name. He had been of the party that recovered the body, and what had stayed with him was the sheer torment of the journey across Death Valley, the aching heat, the steady, sickening glare, the uncertainty as to whether there was a body in the obliterated grave, whether it was Lang's body, and whether they would be able to prove it; and then the exhuming of the dead, like the one real incident in a fever dream. He was very sure of the body, done up in an Indian blanket, striped red and black, with a rope around it like a handle, convenient for carrying. But he had forgotten what set the incident in motion or what became of Lang after that, if it really were Lang in the blanket.

Then I heard of the story again between Red Rock and Coyote Holes, about moonset when the stage labored up the long gorge, waking to hear the voices of the passengers run on steadily with the girding of the sand and the rattle of harness chains, run on and break and

eddy around Dead Man's Spring, and back up the turgid pools of comment and speculation, falling in shallows of miner's talk, lost at last in a waste of ledges and contracts and forgotten strikes. Waking and falling asleep again, the story shaped itself of the largeness of the night; and then the two men got down at Coyote Holes an hour before the dawn, and I knew no more of them, neither face nor name. But what I had heard of the story confirmed it exactly the story I had so long sought.

Those who have not lived in a mining country cannot understand how it is possible for whole communities to be so disrupted by the failure of a lode or a fall in the price of silver, that I could live seven years within a day's journey of Dead Man's Spring and not come upon anybody who could give me the whole of that story. I went about asking for it and got sticks and straws. There was a man who had kept bar in Tio Juan at the time, and had been the first to notice Whitmark's dealing with the Shoshone who was supposed to have stolen the body after it was dug up. There was a Mexican who had been the last to see Lang alive and might have told somewhat, but death got him before I did.

Once at a great dinner in San Francisco, a large positive man with a square forehead and a face below it that somehow implied he had shaped it so butting his way through life, across the table two places down, caught at some word of mine, leaning forward above the bank of carnations that divided the cloth.

"Queer thing happened up in that country to a friend of mine, Whitmark--" but the toast-master cuthim off. All this time the story glimmered like a summer island in a mist, through every man's talk about it, grew and allured, caressing the soul. It had warmth and amplitude like a thing palpable to be stroked. There was a mine in it, a murder and a mystery, great sacrifice, Shoshones, dark and incredibly discreet, and the magnetic will of a man making manifest through all these; there were lonely water- holes, deserted camps where coyotes hunted in the streets, fatigues and dreams and voices of the night. And at the last it appeared there was a woman in it.

Curiously, long before I learned of her connection with the story, I had known and liked her for a certain effect she had of being warmed and nourished from within.

There was about her a spark, a nuance that men mistook--never more than once, as the stage driver told me confidently--a vitality that had nothing, absolutely nothing but the blank occasionless life of the desert to sustain it. She was one of the very few people I had known able to keep a soul alive and glowing in the Wilderness, and I was to find out that she kept it so against the heart of my story. Mine! I called it so by that time, but hers was the right, though she had no more pertinence to the plot than most women have to desert affairs.

She was the woman of the Eighteen-Mile House. She had the desert mark upon her--lean figure, wasted bosom, the sharp upright furrow between the eyes, the burned tawny skin, with the pallid streak of the dropped eyelids, and, of course, I suppose, she knew her husband from among the lean, sidling, vacuous-looking Borderers, but I couldn't have identified him, so like he was to the other feckless men whom the desert sucks dry and keeps dangling like gourds on a string. Twentyfive years they had drifted from up Bodie way, around Panamint, toward Mojave, worse housed and fed than they might have been in the ploughed lands, and

without having hit upon the fortune which is primarily the object of every desert adventure. And when people have been as long as that in the Lost Borders there is not the slightest possibility of their coming to anything else. And still the woman's soul was palpitant and enkindled. At the last, Mayer--that was the husband's name--had settled at the Eighteen-Mile House to care for the stage relays, and I had met the Woman, halting there with the stage, or camping nights on some slower passage.

At the time I learned of her connection with the Whitmark affair, the story still wanted some items of motive and understanding, a knowledge of the man himself, some account of his three months'pasear into the hills beyond Mesquite, which certainly had to do with the affair of the mine, but of which he would never be persuaded to speak. And I made perfectly sure of getting the rest of it from the Woman at the Eighteen-Mile.

It was full nine o'clock before the Woman's household was all settled and she had come out upon the stoop of the EighteenMile House to talk, the moon coming up out of Shoshone land, all the hollow of the

desert falling away before us, filled with the glitter of that surpassing wonder, the moon-mirage. Never mind what went before to draw her to the point of talking; it could have come about as simply as my saying, "I mean to print this story as I find it," and she would have had to talk to save it. Consider how still it was. Off to the right the figures of my men under their blankets stretched along the ground. Not a leaf to rustle, not a bough to creak. No grass to whisper in the wind, only stiff, scant shrubs and the sandy hills like shoals at the bottom of a lake of light. I could see the Woman's profile, thin and fine against the moon, and when she put up her hand to drag down the thick careless coil of her hair, I guessed we were close upon the heart of the story. And for her the heart of the story was the man, Whitmark.

She had been, at the time he came into the country seventeen years before, that which the world knows so little what to do with that it mostly throws away a good woman with great power and possibilities of passion. Whitmark stood for the best she had known; I should have said, from all I learned, just a clean-minded, acute, tolerably cultivated American business

man with an obsession for accomplishing results.

He had been sent out to look after a mine to which the title was not clear and there were counter machinations to take it away from him. This much may be told without breach, for, as it turned out, I was not to write that story, after all, at least not in the lifetime of the Woman at the Eighteen-Mile.

And the crux of the story to her was one little, so little, moment that, owing to Whitmark's having been taken with pneumonia within a week afterward was rendered fixed beyond change or tarnish of time.

When all this was going forward the Mayers kept a miners' boarding-house at Tio Juan, where Whitmark was in and out, and the Woman, who from the first had been attracted by the certain stamp of competency and power, began to help him with warnings, intimations of character and local prejudice, afterward with information which got him the reputation of almost supernatural penetration.

There were reasons why, during his darkest time, Whitmark could find nobody

but the Indians and the Woman to trust.

Well, he had been wise enough to trust her, and it was plain to see from her account of it that this was the one occasion in life when her soul had stretched itself, observed, judged, wrought, and felt to the full of its power.

She loved him, yes, perhaps--I do not know--if you call love that soul service of a good woman to a man she may not touch.

Whitmark had children back East and a wife whom he had married for all the traditions of niceness and denial and abnegation which men demand of the women they expect to marry, and find savorless so often when they are married to it. He had never known what it meant to have a woman concerned in his work, running neck and neck with it, divining his need, supplementing it not with the merely feminine trick of making him more complacent with himself, but with vital remedies and aids. And once he had struck the note of the West, he kindled to the event and enlarged his spirit. The two must have had great moments at the heart of that tremendous coil of circumstance. All this the Woman conveyed to me by the simplest telling of the story as it happened:

"I said . . . and he did . . . the Indian went. . . ."

I sat within the shallow shadow of the eaves experiencing the full-throated satisfaction of old prospectors over the feel of pay dirt, rubbing it between the thumb and palm, swearing over it softly below the breath. It was as good as that. And I was now to have it! For one thing the Woman made plain to me in the telling was the guilt of Whitmark. Though there was no evidence by which the court could hold him, though she did not believe it, though the fulness of her conviction intrigued me into believing that it did not matter so much what he was, the only way to write that story successfully was to fix forever against Whitmark's name its damning circumstance. The affair had been a good deal noised about at the time, and through whatever illusion of altered name and detail, was bound to be recognized and made much of in the newspapers. The Woman of the Eighteen-Mile saw that.

Suddenly she broke off the telling to show me her poor heart, shrivelling as I knew hearts to warp and shrink in the aching wilderness, this one occasion rendering it serviceable like a hearth-fire in an empty

room.

"It was a night like this he went away," said the Woman, stirring to point the solemn moonlight poured over all the world.

That was after twenty-two months of struggle had left Whitmark in possession of the property. He was on his way then to visit his family, whom he had seen but once in that time, and was to come again to put in operation the mine he had so hardly won. It was, it should have been, an hour ripe with satisfaction.

"He was to take the stage which passed through Bitter Wells at ten that night," said she, "and I rode out with him--he had asked me--from Tio Juan to bring back the horses. We started at sunset and reached the Wells a quarter of an hour before the time.

"The moon was half high when the sun went down and I was very happy because it had all come out so well, and he was to come again in two months. We talked as we rode. I told you he was a cheerful man.

All the time when it looked as if he might

be tried for his life, the worse it looked the more his spirits rose. He would have laughed if he had heard he was to be hung. But that night there was a trouble upon him. It grew as we rode. His face drew, his breath came sighing. He seemed always on the point of speaking and did not. It was as if he had something to say that must be said and at the moment of opening his lips it escaped him. In the moonlight I saw his mouth working and nothing came from it. If I spoke, the trouble went out of his face and when I left off it came again, puzzled wonder and pain. I know now," said the Woman, shaking forward her thick hair, "that it was a warning, a presentiment. I have heard such things, and it seems as if I should have felt it too, hovering in the air like that. But I was glad because it had all come out so well and I had had a hand in it. Besides it was not for me." She turned toward me then for the first time, her hair falling forward to encompass all her face but the eyes, wistful with the desire to have me understand how fine this man was in every worldly point, how far above her, and how honored she was to have been the witness of the intimation of his destiny. I said quickly the thing that was expected of me,

which was not the thing I thought, and gave her courage for going on.

"Yet," she said, "I was not entirely out of it, because . . . because the thing he said at the last,when he said it, did not seem the least strange to me, though afterward, of course, when I thought of it, it was the strangest good-by I had ever heard.

"We had got down and stood between the horses, and the stage was coming in. We heard the sand fret under it and the moonlight was a cold weight laid upon the world. He took my hand and held it against his breast so--and said. . . . Oh, I am perfectly sure of the words; he said, 'I havemissed you so.' Just that, not goodby, and notshall miss you, but, 'Ihave missed you so.'

"Like that," she said, her hands still clasped above her wasted bosom, the quick spirit glowing through it like wine in a turgid glass--"like that," she said. But no, whatever the phrase implied of the failure of the utterly safe and respectable life to satisfy the inmost hunger of the man, it could never have had in it the pain of her impassioned, lonely years. If it had been

the one essential word the desert strives to say it would have been pronounced like that.

"And it was not until the next day," she went on, "it occurred to me that was a strange thing to say to a woman he had seen two or three times a week for nearly two years. But somehow it seemed to me clearer when I heard a week later that he was dead. He had taken cold on the way home, and died after three days. His wife wrote me; it was a very nice letter; she said he told her I had been kind to him. Kind!"

She broke off, and far out under the moon rose the thin howl of coyotes running together in the pack. "And that," said the Woman, "is why I made you promise at the beginning that if I told you all I knew about Whitmark and Lang you would not use it."

I jumped. She had done that, and I had promised light- heartedly. People nearly always exact that sort of an assurance in the beginning of confidences; like a woman wanting to be told she is of nobler courage at the moment of committing an indiscretion, a concession to the sacredness of personal experience which always seems so much less once it is

delivered, they can be persuaded to forego the promise of inviolateness. I always promise and afterward persuade. But not the Woman of the Eighteen-Mile. If Whitmark had lived he would have come back and proved his worth, cleared himself by his life and works. As it stood, by the facts against him he was most utterly given over to ill repute. The singularity of the incident, the impossibility of its occurring in any place but Death Valley, conspired to fix the ineffaceable stain upon his wife and his children, for, by the story as I should write it he ought to have been hung. No use to say modestly that the scratchings of my pen would never reach them. If it were not the biggest story of the desert ever written I had no wish to write it. And there was the Woman. The story was all she had, absolutely all of heart-stretching, of enlargement and sustenance. What she thought about it was that that last elusive moment when she touched the forecast shadow of his destiny, was to bind her to save his credit for his children's sake. One must needs be faithful to one's experiences when there are so few of them.

She said something like that, gathering up

her hair in both hands, standing before me in the wan revealing light. The mark of the desert was on her. Heart of desolation! but I knew what pinchings of the spirit went to make that mark!

"It was a promise," she said.

"It is a promise."

But I caught myself in the reservation that it should not mean beyond the term of her life.

THE WOOING OF THE SEÑORITA [1897] MILLARD TRAVIS was a man of ideas; he was also very young. This was not so bad as it might have been, for his ideas were of the toy pistol sort,--a nuisance to everybody, but only occasionally hurtful to the holder. The idea which made Travis particularly odious to his fellow men was less original than unexpected. He merely held that all this peep-show performance of modern affairs was a progression towards emptiness, that there was nothing sound or wholesome, but naked, unblushing savagery, and hisvade mecum was "our progenitor, Adam."

As he was born in Boston of a long line of Doctor-of-Divinity and Professor-of-MoralScience ancestry, it may be inferred that his opportunities for observation were limited. As may be also imagined his peculiar views had not endeared him to his friends. Miss Vandeventer went so far as to say she thought Adam must have been a stupid fellow, he had so few experiences.

But then Miss Vandeventer lived in New York, where the tinsel glitter manifestations of this decried civilization are particularly seductive.

Travis's conceit, however, was polemical rather than personal, and he continued to conduct himself faultlessly by the canons of cultivated society, and fed his theories until they waxed big and obnoxious. Then lest he should grow inflated past all usefulness, fate pricked the bubble of his queer conceit, and the manner of his downfall is worth relating.

He had been holding forth at the club, where his ideas were neither popular nor well received, and had been told incontinently to shut up. It is not gratifying to talk to a man who thinks you would appear to better advantage in red paint and a breech-cloth. There was a visiting stranger at the club, a ruminative little man from the West, who might be conceived as forgiving himself the too evident rotundity of his vest because of its increased facilities for the display of gold link chain and jeweled fob. The Western man wanted to know if Travis had ever seen a Digger Indian, or a Comanche, or a Piute? Travis had not. He had a complacent acquaintance with the most notable institutions of this evanescent fabric of human affairs, but he had never seen raw

humanity at home. He had never seen a Digger, nor a Piute.

"Wait until you do," said the man from the West.

This suggestion, tipped with an air of superior knowledge, had the immediate effect of closing the discussion, the club rejoicing greatly thereat.

When the other man has seen what you have only thought about, there is really nothing more to be said. Conning over this rebuff, Travis conceived the idea of putting his theories to the test of personal observation. A month later saw Travis on his way to California to engage in the study of raw humanity. He was bound for Los Vinos, a cattle ranch in the San Joaquin valley. He had met the owner of Los Vinos on an Atlantic steam-ship the summer before, the Californian being on his way to secure the co-operation of English financiers in his pet irrigation scheme.

Travis had procured him some fortunate introductions and the rancher had extended an invitation with all the effusion of Western landed interests toward Eastern

capital. The Californian had told him that the work on his ranch was done by Indians.

Travis was humble, and recognized his limitations. He would begin with the Indians at Los Vinos, who might be supposed to have suffered a diminution of their naturalness, and work himself into a state of sympathy with raw humanity.

He found Los Vinos with very little trouble, a cattle range skilfully gerry-mandered over the best grazing land in three counties. On the way there he saw Diggers and Piutes, he also smelt them and realized that a course of esoteric culture is not the best preparation for the study of aboriginal humanity. At Los Vinos he found Piutes and Greasers and degenerate halfbreeds,--not exactly what he came to see, but sufficiently raw for his purpose. It was snowing when the train pulled out of Boston, but at Los Vinos woolly clouds rolled up the cañons from blossomy acres of white, mellowed and bordered with gold, and all intoxicating delights exhaled in the sensuous atmosphere. He declined the hospitality of the superintendent at the ranch house and sought bed and board with Juan Romero, head vaquero.

Romero's house was an old stage station,

a long low adobe structure set on the slope where the valley rises to meet the hills, some miles below the ranch headquarters and close to the stream that leaped whitening from the cañon as far as it could or dared, to the plain below.

A row of poplars ran as far up the slope to the mountain as the stream ran down to the valley. Behind the house the water foamed and curdled under a twilight thicket of grape-vines, whose twisted stems, riding the ridge of the roof like some green old man of the sea, dropped pendulous fingers to the eaves of the low veranda that looked full on the glare of the leopard-colored plain.

The chief of the vaqueros welcomed Travis to this ancient hostelry with the air of an hidalgo, and the Señora Romero was very good to him. The proprietor of Los Vinos was still abroad and the superintendent was a man of many cares.

Travis purchased a saddle and a sombrero and resigned himself to the impulse of the hour.

He spent the first two weeks hunting fleas and learning to like villainous messes

ofchile con carne . At the end of that time he had become accustomed to both, and all but forgotten previous states of existence. He rode with the vaqueros after he had learned to manage their vicious little broncos, and had borne with becoming humility the amusement his fashionable-riding-school ignorance of the art provoked. He liked the wild rush through the chaparral and the hazardous scurrying down steep hillsides, and exulted in the bellowing mêlée of the rodeo. Much more he delighted to sleep unhoused between the earth and sky. A new sense stirred within him in the wakeful pauses of the night, a sense of gladsome multitudinous existences peopling the sentient earth. The domestic life he found less interesting, it was so undeniably dirty; but there were phases of it that filled him with unmixed delight.

The women, for instance, were charming.

That the most charming were found sooner or later to be of doubtful origin was to be regretted, but the most aboriginal, if she were anything less than middle-aged, seldom failed of the picturesque. He was never weary of watching the Señora Romero and the felicity of her

compromises between the indolent instincts of race and what she felt to be due to her position as wife of the man who could rope and tie more cattle in a day than any man in Los Vinos.

In the fourth week of his enchantment, when the grape vines were misty with bloom, came to Los Vinos the Señorita De Silvierra. She said she was Spanish. She was the daughter of a tamale man in San José, and bore some unexplained relation to Juan's wife, to whom she had come on a visit. The Señora Romero, it may be remarked in passing, belonged to that race who had not found it incompatible with a state of undiluted human nature to draw rations from the government. But that could hardly account for the general irresistibility which Travis acknowledged in her young relative. Brown, passive, and inscrutable, she held him with a charm that escaped definition, just as the soft illusions of her speech eluded his tongue trained to the prim syllabification of Bostonese. After the Señorita came he rode less often with the vaqueros and cared less interestedly for the indolent simplicity of life in the wickiups. After the Señorita came he neglected his correspondence and began

to learn the vernacular.

The great valley smiled for a brief season and lay still, fainting under the stress of summer suns. All day the light beat down the hollow of the valley, and pulsed back to the translucent dome, but Travis no longer noted the recurrent phases of the day.

Long afternoons the Señorita sat on the veranda with her interminable drawn-work, while Travis smoked cigarettes, which the Señorita rolled for him, and found his appreciation of the curves of her lithe young body in no wise diminished by the cut of her greasy frock, with half the buttons off. When the light failed the Señorita tinkled the strings of her guitar, while the wind shook small mysterious patterings and more mysterious silences out of the poplar trees, and the warm earth turned duskily to the yellow California moon, which is not projected on a glassy sky, [illustration omitted] but hangs full orbed upon the verge of space.

About this time Travis began to take his Sunday dinner with the superintendent at the ranch house. On Sundays there came to Romero's, in the unmitigated ugliness of cheap calicoes and "store clothes," the

youth of Los Vinos, and the Señorita was very glad to see them. She laced her soft young curves into her only pair of stays under a pink and purple frock, and became at once ordinary and unlovely. There came also from Tuniwai, beyond Salt Creek, one Hawker, a villainous half-white, gross and indolent, but not without good points, or what passed for such at Los Vinos; an audacious air, a skin less swart than might have been expected, and a talent for existing without labor.

Now mark the inconsistencies of human nature. Los Vinos admired Hawker in proportion as the white strain was uppermost, and in like degree Travis found him odious, especially as the half-breed began to discover an attitude of mind that, considering the errand on which he had come, the Bostonian had no manner of right to resent. It is one thing to entertain the belief that society is used up and another to find yourself regarded as the product of its effeteness.

Travis acknowledged a diminished personality in the presence of the Señorita, but he did not want Hawker to tell her so.

Sitting on the veranda with the company

adjusting its behavior to the half-breed's opinion of his deserts, he experienced the disgust of a masquerading monarch who finds his incognito more of a disguise than he intended. It was then that he remembered his proxy host, whom up to this time he had somewhat neglected. The superintendent had been nine years at Los Vinos and had but one opinion of the inhabitants, he said. When Travis thought of Hawker he was inclined to agree with him, but he remembered the Señorita and withheld judgment.

Events of late had not softened the asperity of the superintendent's temper.

From time to time marked discrepancies in the count of the Los Vinos herds were found to correspond with the appearance in the market of hides and cattle bearing a mutilated brand. And the nuisance did not abate, notwithstanding the whole population of Los Vinos bent itself with alacrity to hunting down the culprit.

When Travis had been two months at Los Vinos, Romero took another boarder, a shy, silent man who had received permission to prospect the Los Vinos grant for minerals. Travis was at first drawn

towards the stranger, but the event proved him a man of no discrimination, for before a week was out he fellowshiped with Hawker like a brother. Travis returned to the veranda, his cigarette, and his Señorita.

One of those unnumbered languorous days the stranger disappeared in the vaporous distance down the valley toward Summerfield. When he came again he wore the badge of a sheriff's deputy, and the sheriff was with him. They dropped wearily from their saddles in the white, palpitant glare of afternoon, before the dismantled bar room at Romero's, where Travis and the superintendent had worn out the morning with cribs and cigars.

Travis surveyed their grim and war-like aspect with humorous appreciation not unmixed with personal satisfaction, for the much sought-for cattle thief whom they had come to arrest was none other than the half-breed, Hawker. Half an hour later, leaving them to their plans, Travis, passing out of the low dim room, came suddenly on Hawker and the Señorita crouched listening under the window. A dismayed sense of the situation translated itself from

eye to eye with the swiftness of thought.

The sheriff's strident voice reached them through the open window, and the water gurgled continuously among the rocks.

How the recollection of those long afternoons of inconsequent dalliance smote him in the vulgar complacency of the girl's confidence in her power over him.

She was not looking at him, but at her lover in triumphant assurance. The halfbreed, calculating the chances between jealousy and fear, watched him with his hand thrust backward in a menace the Bostonian did not understand. Ten steps away his host plotted with the officers of the law to rid himself of a nuisance, and Travis was a party to his intention. In common courtesy he could do no less than raise his voice in alarm. He saw himself withheld from this by the Señorita's interpretation of his attitude toward her, doubly withheld by the half-breed's mocking distrust of his intention.

The Bostonian walked out of the dilemma as instantly as he had walked in, suddenly aware, as he went, of the rank smell of rawhide crisping in the sun, and Romero's

flea-bitten dogs sprawling on the kitchen floor. Hawker let down his bridle rein from a broken trellis among the vines, and stepped cautiously down the deep wash of the stream that furrowed the plain far below the summer limit of its waters.

If the sheriff and his party had looked back as they climbed the long slope of the hill to Tuniwai, they might have seen the diminished figure of a horseman spurring rapidly across the vari-colored plain. Travis did not meet them, two days later, when they rode back bootless, weary, and profane. Important business, so Romero said, had called him home.

Travis's friends all declared him much improved by his brief sojourn in the West.

He never mentioned this episode to any one, not even to Miss Vandeventer, whom he married the following winter; perhaps because he cannot for the life of him tell what he has done. He is troubled at times over his breach of good faith to his host, but he does not know how he could have consoled the Señorita, having robbed her of her lover. If she has married him since, no doubt he has made her suffer for having

permitted a rival's devotion to reach the point of making her husband his debtor for life.

At all times he sees himself compounding a felony; but he need not trouble himself about his breach of good faith with the superintendent. If he had raised the alarm the half-breed would probably have shot one or both of them, a contingency that has not occurred to him.

Shortly after his return Travis wrote some clever sketches of California life which were much admired, but from beginning to end there was not one word in them of the dirty but adorable Señorita de Silvierra.

THE END