Cuthbertson, urging his jaded horse over the last of the weary miles from the mines to Los Santos, always pulled up at old Juana’s hut. He had pulled up one day when new to the work and the land, deathly sunsick; and Juana had dragged him into the shadow of the wall, and given him water, and finally tramped into the town for the superintendent’s buggy and mules. Cuthbertson never found out why she had done this, but he was grateful, in the silent way he had early learned of the desert. Since then she always had cool water for him, and a skin spread in the shade. And sometimes she would talk to him in brief Spanish. He was the only white man to whom she ever spoke; and she spoke to him because she thought him like the Rainmaker.

If you asked anyone in Los Santos how long Juana had been there, they said, “God knows.” Cuthbertson thought it quite likely that God did know, and kept account of it.

There were peach-orchards round Los Santos, and the sound of running water, and a pleasant acreage of alfalfa fields. But green life stopped where the water stopped; and westward of the last irrigation ditch lay the desert, oldest of all things save the sea. When the east wind blew by day across Los Santos, the scent and bloom of the orchards was breathed out into the sands. But at sunset, when the west wind brought the bitterness of the alkali-wastes, the little town seemed to cower and shrink beleaguered in the heart of the vast night. Only the steady sound of running water, like the footfall of a sentry, stood between Los Santos and the eternal threat of the sand.

The road ran through the town and out into the desert. It paused at the mines, then went on and was lost in the coloured hills of the far distance. No rain fell on these hills, which were like great jewels worn brittle and thin with ceaseless wind and sun. If a man had business with the desert, he went by that road; sometimes he returned by it. Between the town and the mines, beside a tiny pool that dried to white dust in the heats, was Juana’s hut.

When there was water in the pool, she grew a few melons and a patch of corn. When it dried, she carried water from the tanks, miles away. She had a pot hanging under the roof of her hut to keep cool, and in the drip of it, gray lizards and snakes and earth-coloured birds would gather silently. They were voiceless creatures of the voiceless waste, but not more dumb than old Juana.

Every evening she climbed to the crest of a long wave of sand and watched the sun going down at the end of the desert road. She saw the night sweeping inwards visibly with a movement that was as a sound, the sound of great wings trailed along the sand. Then the stars glowed out in the transparent heights of darkness, the lights of Los Santos, twinkling within their defences, were answered over the curve of the world by the one high light from the mines. Then she went home and slept, knowing that that day no word would come from the Rainmaker.

Once, looking at Cuthbertson with her grave eyes, she said, in the speech he but half understood, “Hate is more patient than day or night, the sand is more patient than hate, and love waits longer than the sand.”

Cuthbertson leaned his head back in the shadow. Westward a mirage danced in the heat, and the crumbling dry hills seemed to lift from blue water and green reeds. He said, “I don’t like the sand, Juana.”

Old Juana laid her hand on her breast. “It takes youth and strength, wit and the memory of many gods. I’m only an old woman of the sands.” Her eyes glinted at him like a snake’s. “Only an old woman. . . But the desire of the heart is stronger than the sand.”

Cuthbertson sighed, thinking of the machinery abandoned at Lost Mesa when the water dried. “We’ve found nothing stronger than the sand,” he said grimly, “but tell me about it, anyway.” He had a queer liking for the old woman, and he was grateful; besides, if she would talk, he might profit to the extent of a paper for the Smithsonian.

Juana looked out over the desert. After a time she said, “It is a long time since I was a girl, and the young men fluted to me in the cool of the evening, and in the maize-dance my shadow was blest. Like a shadow at midday was the Rainmaker to me. He was my husband.”

Cuthbertson shifted in the shadow so that he faced her, and his long boots creaked.

“There was no town then, and no mines. Only the cuttings of the Lost People in the mesas, and this little pool. We came here, my man and I, together. He said, ‘Stay here and rest, it is a good place. I am going to look for turquoise in the hills, and when I find another good place, I will send word. Then follow.’ He touched my long black hair and smiled upon me, and went. I watched him as he walked down the road into the wings of the sunset. Then I went back to my water-jars and waited.”

She was silent so long that Cuthbertson said, lazily, “Well, Juana, what’s the rest of it?”

“There is no more. I am waiting still for that word that tells me to follow. But it does not come. Somewhere between here and there”—she pointed to the vacant glare,—“the sand took him.”

“The sand. . . ?”

“Yes. Perhaps. The wind blew and the moving sand took him while he slept. Or perhaps the water had gone. I do not know. But if he lived, I should have seen his face, heard his voice. And I see him only in dreams, hear him only when the wind blows on the Lost Tombs of the mesas. There are many such.”

“And—you’re still waiting for word from him?”

“There is nothing else to do.” Juana would say no more.

Cuthbertson rode into Los Santos silently that night, thinking of many things, and the Smithsonian was not one of them. He went to bed early at the superintendent’s house, where he stayed; the superintendent’s daughter had found him an inattentive listener to her songs; he slept to the faint whispering of blown sand on the iron roof. Sand and yellowed peach-leaves rustled on the floor of his room. And he dreamed all night of a nameless Indian who had gone to look for turquoise in the hills, years and years ago. He dreamed too of Juana. “Is there anyone,” he found himself crying with a kind of passion to the night, “who’d wait like that for me. . . ?” And he rode on his way before breakfast without saying good-bye to the superintendent’s daughter. Somehow, old Juana had set him a new standard of the soul.

After that, as he rode into the hills in the endless search for water and wealth, he thought very much of Juana and the Rainmaker. Old Juana being an established fact, his thoughts went chiefly to the nameless dead man who still lived for one old woman. Riding up the stony Arroyos, through the wine-red gateways of the hills, the sun blistering his bridle-hand and the hot southwest drying his lungs, he began to reconstruct the Rainmaker’s journey from the pool beside Los Santos. It amused him to map it out mentally and in time this mental map grew to be a very minute and logical thing. Then, after the manner of men who lead lonely lives in places where the wind gives death and the sun madness, he began to see his own imaginings.

The first time this happened, he rode to Mesa City for a case of assorted medicines. He dosed himself variously; but the doses did not affect whatever obscure brain-cells or nerve centres were thrown out of balance. They went on busily at their work of building for Cuthbertson the bodily likeness of the Rainmaker.

As the thing went on, and his mind remained otherwise unshaken, Cuthbertson began to regard it scientifically, as befitted one who kept Smithsonian Reports in his packing-case of a room at the mines. He had methodical notes in a diary:—

“April 7. Found reputed spring near Presidio Pass. Water strongly impregnated mineral salts. (Cf. Analyst’s report on sample). Horse would not drink of it. Saw Rainmaker again. Hallucination commenced 11.45, continued until 12.4. He walked parallel with me at a distance of about 25 feet. Headband of antelope skin, circlets of copper or gold, large turquoise on right wrist. Appearance very vivid, as it has been from the beginning. Thought at first it was real Indian, like the one I rode down last week thinking he was an apparition, and had to pacify with 2 dols. (Mexican). Noticed at last that the hair, which is very long did not move in the wind. Face seemed turned away as usual, or somehow indistinct. Letter from Macnamara re sale of machinery at Lost Mesa. Bay pony injured.

“April 18. Sale of machinery fallen through; advised scrapping for old iron. Mac too thrifty make money here. Rode out to the Presidio pools again. Saw Rainmaker suddenly, walking along sand on parallel course as usual. Exceptional that he really does walk instead of sliding along like a magic-lantern picture. Have an idea that the face is not turned so far aside as it was. Don’t like this. Apparition somewhat indistinct otherwise against violent stratification. Had to shoot bay pony. Ordered new safety razor.

“April 25. During hallucinations, which are becoming more frequent, pulse and respiration remain normal. It must be overwork. Rainmaker joined us to-day three miles east of the pools. Very vivid, but only lasted ten minutes. Face undoubtedly being turned towards me. Apparitions coincide remarkably with supposed route of journey. (Logical effect of conscious on sub-conscious ideas or vice versa). Sand moving badly in prevalent winds, lower end of Presidio drifting up. Should I tell Juana?”

But he kept silence, as a lonely child keeps silence over the visualization of his imaginary play-fellows. He was keenly interested, and only at times a little afraid. The apparition always came after a day of unusual fatigue, and in exactly the same way. He began to watch for it as for a friend. . . Turning some rock wall or corner of desert, he would find himself riding parallel with an Indian, who walked through the sand about twenty-five feet away as a tired man walks. Then Cuthbertson would say to his pony “There’s the Rainmaker,” and watch. The pony never paid any attention, and the moving figure never came any nearer. Through it there always ran a certain flicker of uncertainty, as through a mirage. And, like a mirage, it shook and thinned and went out.

Perhaps it was the lonely child, coming to the surface in the lonely man that made Cuthbertson, as the vision passed, lift his hand to the brim of his Stetson with a soft “Vaya con Dios,—go with God.”

The machinery at Lost Mesa found a purchaser at last, and Cuthbertson, through three blinding hot weeks, had to see it taken apart and numbered and packed on mule-back to the Los Santos line. Mules died and men sickened, heads grew light and tempers uncertain. For these three weeks, Cuthbertson lived at the mines; he had no thought to spare by day or night for the Rainmaker.

On the last day he rode back from Lost Mesa to the mines, alone and tired out, sitting his tired pony like a sack. The hills reeled in the afternoon heat, the desert was a grayish glare under a sky so hot it had no colour in it. Cuthbertson was waiting thirstily for the hour when the mesas would suddenly stand up in the evening like the foundations of some apocalyptic city forgotten of God, and the dark sweep in on the world like a wave foamed with stars. He looked about him as he rode, as though half-consciously waiting for something. He was waiting for the Rainmaker. Presently, as he turned down a shallow arroyo grown with mummied yuccas, he saw the little white dazzle of the eyes that preceded the vision.

“There’s the Rainmaker,” he said as usual, the man clear in his brain. “But I didn’t think he’d been so far west.” The Rainmaker was walking through the sand as a tired man walks. With a little jump of the pulses, Cuthbertson saw that the face of the apparition was turned fully towards him.

He sickened for one strange instant, fearing, with a fear as old as the desert, the shadow of his own dream. But the face, seen uncertainly through the flicker of the heat, was only that of a young Indian of the sands; lean, grave, watchful. The headband gleamed with copper or gold, the hair fell long and straight. And beneath it the eyes were directed, not at Cuthbertson, but intently beyond him to the east, along the desert road.

“I know,” said Cuthbertson, quick as thought, “you’re looking for Juana. . .”

He reined in. But the figure moved on, still looking to the east. Against an outcrop of honey-yellow rock it broke and went out. Cuthbertson shook up his horse and followed slowly.

The rock was surrounded with great waves of loose sand that drifted perpetually before the prevailing winds. Sometimes it was buried, then in a few days, bared to the sky. Now as Cuthbertson stooped from the saddle, he saw that the wind had uncovered a little worn hollow in the rock, and in it a pale glitter of colour. He dismounted. The glitter of colour was a piece of turquoise veined with gold.

He had it in his hand. Then, slowly, he stooped and took out what else there was from the keeping of the desert. These things he tied in his handkerchief and fastened to the saddle, and his brown fingers shook a little over the knot. Mounting he rode on. But at the foot of the arroyo he looked back gravely, his hand at the hat-brim.

“Rest with God,” said Cuthbertson.

It was late before he stopped at old Juana’s hut. She sat just within, her chin on her knees, staring out at the low steady stars.

“Juana.” Cuthbertson’s voice was very tired.

“Come in, señor.” Her eyes gleamed in the dusk, alert and watchful as a snake’s. Her face slowly puckered into wrinkles of kindness. But Cuthbertson would not enter.

“It’s the sand, Juana,” he said, and now his voice was not quite steady. “It has given up something,—something it had hidden for a long, long time under a yellow rock beyond the last pools. It has spoken, Juana. Perhaps the word is for you, perhaps for someone else. I don’t know. You told me once the sand gripped hard as the grave.”

Old Juana raised her head. “But the hold of the heart is stronger,” she said, in the language Cuthbertson scarcely understood. But her eyes commanded him. Silently he stooped across the hut’s threshold, laying the beautiful veined turquoise at her feet. And with it what had once been a man’s hand.

The sand had dealt with it so long that it was no more terrible than a child’s toy of bone and leather. The night-wind moved it as it lay, lightly as the yellowed leaves of the peach-orchards, on Juana’s mat. A small square agate, bound in gold wire, shifted on the forefinger. Cuthbertson showed it silently.

“It is the Rainmaker’s ring,” said Juana at last. “The word has come.”

Cuthbertson bent his head. “There was nothing more. Just the turquoise in a little hollow and the curved hand,—kind of keeping it. . .”

“He was keeping it for me,” said old Juana quietly.

“There was nothing else. The rest had been taken by the sand, long ago.” His horse shifted restlessly outside, and he moved to leave. He was deadly tired in body and soul, lonely of heart.

The old woman sat motionless, but her eyes glowed. “It is the word,” she said again contentedly. “I have waited a long time. Now I can go.”

“Go with God,” answered Cuthbertson in deep Spanish as he mounted and rode on to Los Santos.

And when he was out of hearing, Juana wept. She placed her water-jug where the lizards might reach it, and scattered her ground corn on the sand. What the desert had restored to her she hid in her bosom with little murmured words. Behind her the lights of Los Santos twinkled within the guarding water, and ahead the lonely light from the mines shone across the curve of the world. But as she went down the desert road her face was to the stars. Before her the clear dusk parted as in welcome, it closed behind her like a tender barrier to be passed no more. Above her was the infinite heaven and the hosts of it. Under her feet the sand that took all things, youth and strength and the works of all men’s hands, but might not wholly take love.

Old Juana was going at last to join the Rainmaker in a good place.

This is not really the story of a child, though it began when Hypolite caught the measles at dancing-class. And when he was getting better, his uncle, who kept a business-like eye upon his health and his manners, sent him to Madame Dulac at Saint Jacques de Kilkenny, to grow strong in the air of the hills.

Hypolite was a little boy at the time, quiet and brown, with eyes like bronze-purple pansies. It was not his fault that his surname was Gibbs. Even at that age, he preferred to have it ignored. Madame called him “M’sieur Hypolite,” or “le petit sieur.” But then, Madame had served and loved his mother when that mother was Geneviève de Lempriere, before she married Anthony Gibbs, and before Hypolite was born, or Madame herself took boarders. To Hypolite, two white shafts in a cemetery outside Montreal represented that ill-sorted father and mother. But before he had been a week in the village, his French began to return to him.

“It is yours by right,” said Madame, who would hear nothing of the Gibbses. “What wouldst thou for thy dinner, mon ange?”

Madame fed him royally and made a baby of him, and told him stories of the long-ago days, and spoke to him of his mother. In a little while, the Gibbs part seemed to have dropped out of his life. He loved Madame, and Telephore who chopped the wood and André who worked in the garden. But most of all he loved Félice.

Félice was Madame’s help in the kitchen, a girl who belonged to nobody, for whom nobody cared. Perhaps the incipient artist in Hypolite first rejoiced in her; she made an impression on him never effaced. His canvas in last year’s Salon, that canvas full of brown and gold, was a far-off memory of her.

“She was Dian,” I have heard Hypolite say “Dian; not the stately goddess, queen of Nature, but the ever-young Artemis, slender as her own white crescent.”

Hypolite ran about the straggling village and made friends with the children; and climbed the little hill beyond the Calvary, and looked at the great river running to the sea, wishing he might follow it.

“There are many nice things here,” he said, invading the kitchen for cakes, “and nice people. André is nice and Telephore is nice, and so is m’sieur le curé. But Maxime is nicest. I went to-day to see him. He lives in a little cabin all covered with vines, and he has two fields covered with mustard and flowers. He is tall and he has blue eyes. I picked some of his flowers and he came out and talked to me, and told me his name and I told him mine. Then his dog came out, his black big dog he calls Sorrow,—La Tristesse. Why does he call it La Tristesse? It is a nice dog and licked my hands.”

Madame looked up from her cake and crossed herself, with wide eyes. “Hast thou made friends with Sorrow, mon petit?” she asked, gazing at him strangely. “I am grieved. Maxime and La Tristesse are not for thee.”

“It is a very nice dog,” said Hypolite, in the gruff tone that was his sole heritage from the Gibbses. Félice was beating eggs at the table. Her long gray eyes turned lazily towards the child, and then were bent upon her bowl again. Her wrists fascinated Hypolite as she whipped the froth, they were so small and strong and firm, sunburned to a creamy brown. He watched them while he ate the cake, and wondered what her cold eyes had tried to tell him.

“Why am I not to make friends with Maxime’s La Tristesse?” he demanded of old Telephore.

Telephore stared at him as Madame had done, and made the little sign against evil. “La Tristesse?” he said. “La Tristesse? If you make friends with Sorrow, Sorrow will abide with you.”

“But she has not abided with me,” put in Hypolite patiently, “she abides with Maxime.”

Telephore crossed his scarred, knotted hands upon the haft of the axe and leaned his chin upon them. “Not always,” he said in a low voice, “ah! not always. Henri l’Ecossais, he was a strong man last Michaelmas. He stopped to speak with Maxime at his door, and patted on the head that La Tristesse, brute of ill name and ill omen. And she, that La Tristesse, she follows him home, beating with her tail and begging him to look at her, as some dogs will. And he laughs, and gives her bones, and she sleeps a night in his stable. In the morning she goes home, drifting like a black ghost down the road. And Henri, little monsieur, what of Henri? In three days, look you, he is seized with a chill and a weariness, and in a week he is dead,—mon Dieu!—dead! And that is not all. If I had my will, Maxime and La Tristesse should be—eh! sent from here.”

Telephore’s face was as superstitious and cruel as the faces of some of Millett’s peasants, and he muttered to himself as the bright blade of his axe fell upon the wood, and the sweet white chips flew in showers like a tiny snowstorm.

“But that is all foolishness,” said the round-eyed Hypolite, in the lordly tone Saint Jacques de Kilkenny had taught him. “La Tristesse is a nice dog, though she is long and black and cries with her eyes. Once I had a little guinea-pig, un cochon d’Inde, black as Sorrow; but it died of an indigestion.”

“Foolishness, is it?” muttered Telephore. “Then, little monsieur, there are many fools in Saint Jacques. As for the cochon d’Inde, that was different. Gabrielle has a little sucking-pig, and no one is troubled by it, though it visited every house in Saint Jacques. But this Sorrow of Maxime’s—foolishness, is it? Eh, well! Pray the good saints you may not be taught its wisdom.”

Telephore was cross and would not talk any more. André professed to have no opinion at all about La Tristesse. So, as was his way, Hypolite decided to go to headquarters for information.

He crossed one of Maxime’s thriftless fields, and went up the path to the cabin. Once the path led through a garden of flowers, but now garden and fields were all one, overrun with blossoms grown small and hardy and wild, which could not be found elsewhere in Saint Jacques. La Tristesse was lying by the door, in the sun, licking a long red scratch on her side. She put her lank paws on Hypolite’s shoulders and thrust her melancholy nose against his cheek.

“Are you come for more flowers?” asked Maxime, rising from among the wild raspberry canes. “There are pretty flowers in the field beyond the patch of barley. I shall grow oats there next year, they are prettier than the barley, but the flowers are best. My grandfather brought the seeds of some of them from the other side of the world, and a few braved our snows and frosts. Pick all you want, little monsieur.” He laughed at Hypolite, showing his white teeth, and yawned and stretched himself. He was tall and strong, with a fine tanned face and eyes of Breton blue softened by many dreams, and he was shabby to the point of rags.

“Thank you,” said Hypolite politely. “But I did not come for flowers to-day. I came to ask why you call your dog Sorrow? Pardon, m’sieur, if I am too curious.”

Maxime bowed, ready laughter in his eyes. “I am honoured with monsieur’s interest,” said he. “I call her Sorrow because she has the look of it, as any one of these—ganders of Saint Jacques would understand. I found her roaming in the woods, starved, all over of a tremble. I took her home and fed her. That is all there is about her. She would harm no one. Yet, because of her colour and her melancholy she is a witch and a loupgarou and I know not what besides.” He laughed angrily and touched Sorrow’s side gently. “Look you here!” he cried, “this was done last night. It is the mark of a bullet,—of a silver bullet, perhaps, they are such fools.” Hypolite touched the scratch too, with fingers light and tender, and Maxime’s face softened again.

“We have no friends, La Tristesse and I,” he said sadly. “I suppose it is because we do not work or go to church. But those stuffy saints—And why should I work? I have no one to work for, but myself.”

“I’m not very fond of work,” confessed Hypolite. “My uncle says I must go into an engineer’s office when I leave college, but I do not want to. I would rather paint pictures full of pretty colours.”

“And I,” said Maxime, “I also love pretty colours. When I want them, I look at the fields and the skies and the hills, and I am content.” They smiled at each other in perfect understanding.

“And I am a friend to you and La Tristesse if you will have me,” said Hypolite.

“Monsieur honours us,” said Maxime simply, “but Loneliness and Sorrow are an ill pair of friends.”

Hypolite dined with Maxime and La Tristesse, under the vines, with leaves for plates; dined off bread and baked potatoes and little trout from the brook and wild raspberries. “It is poor fare,” said Maxime shyly, “but the air and the sun make it sweet.”

“It is lovely,” answered Hypolite ecstatically. “I should like to have baked potatoes in a little oven and catch little fish for my dinner always. Oh, always.”

“The bread is soft and white,” went on Maxime, “feast-day bread, such as you are used to eating.”

“It is the same as Madame Dulac’s,” said Hypolite with his mouth full.

“It is the same as Madame’s,” repeated Maxime, laughing.

Madame scolded Hypolite for the first time, when she heard where he had been. “It is an ill place,” she cried, “and those who dwell in it have an evil name. That black thing, called a dog, ran and barked at one of Gabrielle’s cows yesterday, and already the cow has sickened. Go not near that La Tristesse, I beg of you, child, nor near her master.”

“La Tristesse is a very nice dog,” repeated Hypolite in the voice of the Gibbses, presenting so stony a front to her shrill vexation that Madame broke into tears and flounced away. When she had gone, Félice slipped over to the child, and, without any change in her small, cold, beautiful face, kissed him. He gasped; feeling as if he had been kissed by a flower, so cool and soft were her lips.

Gabrielle’s cow died, and the whispers against La Tristesse changed to silence, which was a bad sign. Hypolite did not know that there were very few people in Saint Jacques who would have gone to Maxime’s door after dark.

And then the rumours began again, but this time they came from the woods. In the village there was silence and listening. But from the woods there issued a new dread,—a dread of night and loneliness and the sickness that strikes therein. Telephore first put it into words.

“It is said,” he told André in a whisper, “that far to the north there is a deserted village. When that village was full of people, there came to their doors a black dog, long and gaunt and wretched. They took pity on that dog-thing and fed it for three days, and then it went away. But it had left a gift for those people. La Picotte struck them, coming silently as is her wont. They died like flies those people that fed the black dog, and the few that were left ran away.”

André stared, his face growing gray with vague horror. He was slower than Telephore.

“If I were you,” said Telephore with a sort of frightened sneer, “I would change the name of Maxime’s La Tristesse. Maybe she is only biding her time.”

Two or three days afterward, Hypolite went to see Maxime. It was early evening and he moved through a golden world. “I have never forgotten anything of that evening,” he said long afterward. The sky was golden, the air was golden, and everywhere about the fields was the golden glow of mustard. But in front of Maxime’s cabin there was a black little crowd of people, and in the road stood Maxime, facing them fiercely, his hand upon Sorrow’s head. There were boys there, throwing stones, and one or two of the shouting men had old shotguns.

I ran to them, and I think I was screaming with anger. But Telephore was in the crowd, and he caught me in his arms gently, and made me keep still; though I kicked, and bit his hands, and my teeth were as sharp as a squirrel’s. When they saw me, the men who had the guns, lowered them as if ashamed, and the boys stopped throwing stones.

Josef, Gabrielle’s husband, was speaking. “We will not harm you,” he said, “but if you would stay among us, you must shoot that black brute you call your dog, there under your hand.”

“I will not shoot her for any of you cowards of Saint Jacques,” cried Maxime at that. The crowd growled threateningly.

“Then go!” cried Josef, “you and your dog-thing!”

“I shall never forget how Maxime looked, his head thrown back and his eyes like points of blue fire, facing the men who were casting him out of his home. I thought he was going to fight them all. He looked down at Sorrow, cowering beside him and trusting him, and I think he yielded for her sake. He laughed very bitterly.

“I will go,” he said, and they shrank from his eyes. “Sorrow has been my companion and my friend, she has shared my food and my fire, and with Sorrow will I go. She is more faithful to me than any other.”

And then a girl pushed suddenly through the crowd, and stood in front of Maxime. It was Madame’s Félice, and she was laughing aloud. I had never heard her laugh before. “If you go, I will go with you,” she said.

Maxime’s face was suddenly strange and wild at the sight of her. “You—you—you?” he cried. “You—you, O heart of my life, star of my dreams?”

I think he forgot all about the angry crowd on an instant.

“Yes, I,” laughed Félice. “I have seen your heart in your eyes, Maxime, and now you may see my heart in mine. What is the need of words? If you go, I go with you.”

“There is a kind priest at Terminaison,” said Maxime, hot and fierce, his blue eyes on her gray ones that were no longer cold.

Félice laughed still. It seemed as if she could not stop laughing for very happiness, but her beautiful creamy cheeks showed no blush, “As you like,” she answered; “we will go to the curé if it pleases you. But if you go, I go also. I am faithful as La Tristesse.”

“Come then,” said Maxime. And that was all. They forgot the people who were watching them, awed and silent before this strange divine thing shown forth in their midst. Maxime never even looked back at his little cabin, and Félice never looked from his face. They moved away down the road together, hand in hand into the great golden sunset, and Sorrow following them, leaping and frisking. That was absolutely all, and it was over in five minutes. But think of the wonder of it,—a flower of Greece in her golden days, a vision of Italy, a dream of ancient France, there suddenly showing forth for all men to see.

They went unmolested down the lonely road. Once Félice shook her slim arms above her head as if in a very ecstacy of joy. Once Sorrow jumped up to lick her hand.

Yes, they went, and were hidden in the golden mist of sunset, and were gone. Nor did I ever hear of them or see them again,—Maxime, with his blue eyes, his gentle hands, his long lazy body, his rags and tatters; Sorrow, black and faithful as her namesake; Félice, beautiful as the ever-youthful Artemis. Nor can it be said that I saw them go. For I was down on my face, crying so that my tears made little gray runnels in the dust of the road,—crying for the loss of the most beautiful thing I had ever known.

Lobelia is the new residential suburb on the outskirts of a new town, which is itself on the outskirts of most things. The Big Woods come right down to the streets of Lobelia; bears have been seen on Frontenac Boulevard. Yes, Lobelia is pretty new. But not so new that you’d expect to smell kinnikinnick there.

Yet, one June evening, a savour of that tobacco plant passed along Frontenac Boulevard and down Centre Street and up Magnetwan Avenue. Here and there, an old-timer, relegated to carpet slippers and a back bedroom, sniffed it, and dreamed of prairie and poplar-bluff and the Blackfoot brave outside the H.B.C. Store. Leigh Harvey, busy lifting dandelions from his beautiful lawn, with a dental-looking instrument, dropped it and knelt motionless in the growing dew. He set his big hands on his hip, because they trembled suddenly. To himself, he whispered, “It couldn’t be him—come at last—after all these years.”

He drew a deep breath. The smell was yet in the air. He raised his keen eyes slowly from the dandelions and looked across the hedge that screened his new iron fence.

At the base of the gaudy fence a man was sitting, smoking a little, blackened corncob pipe. He was a mere kernel of a little brown, old man, within the husks of many formless garments. On the grass edge beside him was a pedlar’s basket.

Leigh Harvey, leading citizen of Lobelia, rose silently to his feet. He was shaking. His strong mouth twitched. His eyes were guarded, watchful, but triumphant.

He leaned across his new iron gate with the gold knobs on it, and said, “Hallo, there!”

His voice was rough with emotion held in check—for four years. The old pedlar looked up sideways, cautiously. He twitched the shiny cloth cover off the big basket.

“Boot-laces,” he began, mechanically, “pipes, ver’ cheap pipes, plugs, machine-oil, stickin’-plaster, spools, ver’ nice handkerchiefs.”

He shook a faded rag out of the basket. Harvey leaned over the gate, his new gold watch-chain tinkling against the iron—a stalwart figure in shirt-sleeves. “You come far?” he said, as carelessly as he could.

“Ver’ long way, boss.”

The old man pointed north with his pipe-stem. He dangled the faded handkerchief.

“You travel about much this way?”

“All over, boss.” The old man’s hands began to refold the red handkerchief.

“Stop!” said Harvey, suddenly. “I want to buy that.”

“Ver’ nice handkerchief.”

A silver coin changed hands. The old man shook the ashes from his pipe into his palm, and scattered them to the winds. He began to strap his basket.

“You haven’t,” said Harvey, slowly—“you haven’t got any more—houses and gardens in there?”

The quick glance of the black eyes was wary.

“This,” went on Harvey, indicating the house behind him, the finest in Lobelia—“this here came out of a basket like that.”

The old face creased slowly into a hundred doubtful wrinkles. With a gesture that said, “That may be a good joke, but it’s beyond me,” the pedlar went on covering his basket. Harvey was beset by a fear that the old man would yet slip out of his hold.

“Stop a bit!” he said, desperately. “I want to ask you, did you ever know a feller called Gammett?”

“I forget, boss. I know fellers all over.”

The old man was sending Harvey the swift, impenetrable glances of a wild thing frightened. He was strapping his basket quickly. Harvey, gripping the gate in excitement, spoke commandingly.

“Wait! I’ve got something to tell you. Wait!”

The old pedlar hesitated, then silently acquiesced. He squatted once more at the foot of the fence, relighted his pipe, and prepared to listen. Once more, with the faint blue spiral of kinnikinnick smoke, the lost years came down on Harvey like a wave.

“There was a man,” began Harvey, abruptly, “a man who was down and out, five years ago.”

The pedlar glanced up at him.

“Most fellers bin that,” he suggested.

“Most fellers been that,” agreed Harvey, slowly. “But not many have the bad luck this one did. And one can’t rightly say it was his fault. He’d fought it. My faith, how he’d fought his luck for years! But it just seemed that everything he touched went wrong. Year by year he went down, and down, and a little bit farther down. He tried farmin’, but he hadn’t enough capital to tide over the bad seasons. He tried prospectin’, and his health gave out. At last,” he said, quietly, “this feller got so far down that he was workin’ for a Chinaman—for a Chink that kep’ a little store way up in the hills.”

“When that job failed,” Harvey went on, after a silence, “Gammett got him.”

He glanced at the old pedlar’s back, every fold of the rags covering it instinct with listening.

“If you don’t know Gammett,” he went on again, “I’ll have to tell you. Gammett had a store, too—a big store. He made a fortune by helping people. Yes, he was very helpful, was Gammett. If a man was in bad luck, or ill, or’d been on the bust and spent all his money, Gammett was right there, ready for help. He’d supply goods, would Gammett—at his own prices. Many a feller that Gammett helped in the bad years has spent all he made in the good years payin’ off Gammett. Yes, every down-and-outer in the hills got on Gammett’s books sooner or later.

“This feller, this down-and-outer I was telling about, he was on Gammett’s books, and Gammett ground him hard. Gammett got him. And I hope”—Harvey’s big fist gripped and quivered on the gilded iron—“I hope Death and Judgment’s got Gammett!”

After a moment the heat went out of him. He glanced keenly at the pedlar’s back.

“If you’d been at Gammett’s store,” he said, “one autumn day five years ago; if you’d been sitting on a log in front of the store waitin’ to see Gammett on the quiet to sell him some poached mink pelts, then you’d have seen this feller I’m telling about. He was sitting on the log, too. Sitting there with his head in his fists, staring at two little parcels on the ground between his boots. There was a pound of tea in one. There was some rolled-oats in the other. He’d just given Gammett his silver watch for ’em, the last thing he had left, the very last. He hadn’t even hope or courage left. He was down and out.”

The pedlar on the other side of the fence took his pipe out of his mouth with a soft “cloop.” He turned his old head and stared at Harvey steadily, with impenetrable eyes. Harvey met the long look as steadily. By-and-by the old man turned away and resumed his listening.

In a low voice, Harvey said:

“There was another man sitting on that log. He was an old man even then. He looked kind of poor, but not so’s he was worryin’ any about it. He had a brown face, like yours; a long coat, like yours; and a big basket, like your basket.

“After a bit, them two on the log got talking. And the down-and-outer, he told that old man just what I’ve been telling you.

“He told him more. Why, I dunno. It just happens sometimes that when a feller’s beat out, he’ll talk. This feller talked. He said, ‘It ain’t for myself I mind so much; it’s for her.’

“ ‘You married?’ ses the old man. And the down-and-outer, he says, ‘Yes; eight years ago. We haven’t been apart since. But the life’s too rough for her.’ ”

Harvey glanced back at the house. He went on, after a moment:

“The down-and-outer, he said: ‘You see, she’s not just like other folks. Not just the same. We had two kids, and we lost them. It was too rough for them, too. I wasn’t able to do all I should,’ he said, ‘and they died. Since then she’s not just right. She thinks that if we had a garden they’d come back, the kiddies would. A white garden she wants, a garden full of white flowers, and a white cat. Then, she thinks, they’d come back to play. And the grief of it is,’ says the feller, ‘that she’d need so little to make her happy, and that I can’t get it for her.’ Then he cursed Gammett, and got up and struck off down the trail, home.”

Harvey’s strong voice failed, sank to a whisper. He stood, leaning on the gate, motionless. The old man on the grass outside was as motionless as he. At last, he said, softly, “D’you see anything queer about my garden, friend?”

The pedlar’s answer came slowly.

“All the flowers in it are w’ite flowers.”

“That’s right. All the flowers are white. But wait.

“This feller, he went off down the trail, home. It was late, and it looked like a bad night. He’d gone maybe a half-mile, when someone overhauled him; he saw it was the old pedlar he’d been talkin’ to. The old man, he stops the down-and-outer and puts a little packet in his hand.

“What’s this?’ said the feller. And the pedlar said, ‘To make a garden for the children,’ he said, just like that, and turned away and was gone before the feller could say ‘Thank you.’

“He’s been waitin’,” said Harvey, gently, “to say ‘Thank you,’ ever since.”

Evening was closing to a perfect night. White flowers fell from the locust-trees along the grass, and moths as white and silent haunted the garden of white flowers. A woman came from the house and stood on the white steps as if she were watching something in the garden shadows, and a white cat rubbed against her dress. Harvey’s voice, when it came, was hushed; yet it seemed to break a silence as perfect as a pearl:

“When the feller I’ve been tellin’ you about looked at the little packet, he saw there was writing on it. It said—Harvey spoke as if reading from memory—it said, ‘White Columbine. Hardy perennial. Sow in autumn in carefully prepared soil.’ D’you see anything queer about the flowers in my garden, friend?”

Again the answer came, slowly, from the other side of the fence:

“There are many of one kind.”

The old man stretched a hand through the bars and lightly touched one blossom of a thousand white columbines.

“That’s right. And when the feller had read the writing he gave a kind thought to the pedlar, and put the packet of seeds in his pocket, and forgot it.

“He’d enough to make him forget more things than a packet of flower-seeds an old pedlar had given him. If you knew those hills, you’d know that there was storms on ’em that leap on a man like wolves. He was caught in one, and all night he was lost on the mountains.

“Level rain that drove in his face like a wall: wind that bruised the livin’ flesh on his bones: sleet to glass the rocks, and a moon no more than a blot in the scud—he knew no more of the night. He kep’ going some way, thinkin’ of the woman that waited for him. If he hadn’t fixed his mind on her he’d have just given up and laid down and died, for the weather used him cruel, and he’d no heart to fight it, only because of her. Then he found he’d missed the trail, and he didn’t greatly care—only for her.

“He went on in the dark and the storm, tryin’ to strike back to the trail lower down. He couldn’t make it. Seemed as if he was in hills he’d never been in before, so strange and wild they were with the dark. At last the rain beat him down, and the wind dazed him, and he fell.

“He thought he fell into death. He did fall a long way, but not that far. He came to, very weak, sprawled on a slope of loose stones. If he moved, they moved too. He’d no wish to move for awhile. He was badly knocked about, and his clothes were half-tore off his back, but after a bit he thought of his wife, and got to his hands and knees, groaning. Then the moon came out clear, and he looked at what the slipping stones had uncovered.”

Harvey’s voice shook a little. Presently he steadied it, and went on briskly:

“Silver was not so cheap then as it is now. Even in the dim moonlight he knew what he was lookin’ at. He was lookin’ at a vein of almost pure silver them sliding stones had uncovered.

“He laid quite a long time, just lookin’ at it. Then the situation come home to him.

“He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know where the silver was. He couldn’t get his bearings. He didn’t dare mark the place too plain, for fear someone else’d find it. After a while, he made shift to build some little heaps of stones. Then he went on as well as he could. You see, if he’d stayed by the place till daylight he’d have been dead in that weather. He had to risk it.

“He found his way back to his wife, somehow. He never remembered anything of what happened after he left that place.

“He was near dead, and they thought he was ravin’. Maybe he was. He was ill a long spell. They were helped. When he was sick folks was kind, and they took kindness where they’d been too proud to take it before. Even when he was ill he fought to keep a tight hold on his tongue. When he could crawl he went out to find his claim.

“He couldn’t find it.

“Sweatin’ and tremblin’, the ghost of a man, day after day he wandered in the hills, lookin’ for it. He quartered the ground like a hunting dog, but he couldn’t find the place. There was a hundred spots like his memory of it; a thousand slopes of loose stones. The rain and the wind had swept his little rock-piles away. He had nothin’ to go by. Wealth beyond all he’d thought of, all he struggled for, all he prayed for—for her—was there, somewhere in them hills under his feet, and he couldn’t find it.

“Men thought he was mad. He let them think so. Maybe, as the time went on, he was pretty near mad.

“For the winter went, and the spring, and still he was trampin’ the hills, seekin’ the claim he couldn’t find.”

Harvey glanced down at himself, thoughtfully.

“He began, then, to look as if he was mad. A gaunt thing in rags. I dunno how he and the woman lived at all in them days. He didn’t do any work. He was all the time lookin’ for his claim.”

Harvey glanced up at a star limned in a sky as clear as water. “I hope,” he said, under his breath, “all he said and thought and did in them days is forgiven him. If his soul was black in him can you wonder? If he was ready to curse God and die, can you blame him? After all, ’twasn’t for himself he wanted it so bad.

“There was a day at last, a day in summer. He kind of woke up from a nightmare that day. And he knew it was the end.

“He knew he was finished. He knew he couldn’t go on no more. It’s so, you know. A man gets his soul used up same as his body, when things is too much against him. He knew he just couldn’t go on. He went out in the hills that day, just the same. But he was through with it. The dirty tricks of Life had downed him. He was flat on his back, laid out on the mat, in the great Ring that’s seen the finish of better men than he.

“He kissed his wife. He didn’t take a pick or a shovel that day to dig rocks with. He took his old gun. And he told her—God forgive him!—that he was goin’ to shoot birds.

“He went away, miles about the hills. Everything looked new and strange to him—like things do when you’re looking your last on ’em. He didn’t regard where he was goin’. It was all one. At last he came to a valley under great rocks, where the spruce clung with roots like snakes. He’d no memory of it. He sat down and set the gun between his knees, and slipped off his boot.”

Harvey’s voice checked, faltered. For the first time he moved. He leaned across the fence, and laid a big hand—which shook a little—on the shoulder of the old man squatting in the dew.

“Only for that old pedlar-man that gave him the little packet of flower-seeds,” he said, solemnly—“only for him, that feller’s bones’d be layin’ among the rocks to this day, where the foxes had left ’em.

“For he had his toe on the trigger, friend, when he saw white flowers in bloom a few yards off. At the foot of a slope of loose stones—white columbines.

“There’s plenty of columbines wild in the hills, ain’t there? But these were the dovey kind, the garden ones. His eyes, that were so near shutting on the world for ever, saw ’em for a minute without understanding. And then . . .”

Harvey paused again. His hand quivered on the old man’s shoulder. “And then his memory gave him back some words: ‘White Columbine,’ he was reading off of the paper. ‘Hardy perennial. Sow in autumn in carefully prepared soil.’ He remembered putting it in his pocket; and then no more of it from then till now. He guessed how it had spilt out of his pocket when he fell in the storm. And the seed had filtered into the cracks, and the sun had warmed it, and the rain had fed it; while he was ranging the hills like a lost soul it was safe, and growing, and waiting for that moment, as if the Lord had laid His hand over it till the right time came. And now the time had come. That feller had come into the valley to die; and the little white flowers, like nests of doves, they bade him live. He scraped with his gun-butt in the stones—and there was the lode.”

Harvey was silent. Silent as he; the old man took his pipe from his mouth, and shook out the ashes. A drift of tiny red sparks sank and settled and died in the dew. The reek of the kinnikinnick died. The half-tropic breath of locust and tobacco came into its own.

“That,” said Harvey, “was the beginning of the White Columbine Mine. And ever since”—his hand gripped the lean shoulder, his voice rang loud—“and ever since then that feller’s been looking for the old man that gave him the flower-seeds, and, in so doing, gave him life and fortune and happiness.

“And he thinks he’s found him,” finished Harvey, huskily, leaning low over the fence—“he thinks he’s found him at last.”

After a time the pedlar glanced up at him. He said, very gently: “W’at that feller—that good feller—want with the ole man when he finds him?”

“To give him anything he wants,” said Harvey, quietly.

“What?”

“If he wants a house, it’s his,” said Harvey. “If he wants a farm, it’s his. Money, it’s his. Anything he wants.”

He was smiling, but his keen eyes were dim. The shoulder under his strong hand was so frail, the coat so ragged, the face turned to his so impenetrably old.

“And if that ole pedlar-man want nothing, my frien’?”

“He must want a thousand things!”

“Not one,” said the old man, softly.

“But—”

“Listen. It is my turn.”

“I’m listening.”

“That pedlar, he is ole. Will he grow young if you put him in a fine brick house?”

“No.”

“He is ver’ poor. But the poor man who wants nothing, he is as well off as the rich man?”

“Maybe.”

“You would lay him in a fine, soft bed. But if he did not sleep there for want of the branches and the wind moving in them?”

Harvey was silent.

“You would give him rich food and drinks. Good! But men may starve to death with full bellies, my frien’; and if he starved so for the dawn in summer and the shantymen’s fires in the winter, and the trails of all the hills?”

Again Harvey was silent. The old man rose slowly, and lifted his basket. Harvey started. He said, passionately, “But look at what he—at what you did for me!”

Very gently the old pedlar smiled in a creasing of dim wrinkles. “He only carry the basket,” he said, softly. “It is the good God that settles what shall come out of it. For you, the fine house and the garden full of white flowers for madam to walk in. For me . . . .”

He slung the strap over his shoulder, pulled out his paper of kinnikinnick, filled and lighted the little pipe. “Good man, you,” he said, between puffs; “but there’s one thing you cannot do. You cannot give to the one that wants nothing.”

“I shan’t give up. There’s a thousand of the best waiting for you whenever you want it, anyway. When you’re older or ill my turn’ll come.”

“Per’aps.” The old figure was withdrawing from him into the shadows—infinitely alien, infinitely remote.

“Will you take nothing now?” called Harvey, as if to someone a very long way off.

The old man hesitated. Then, from the columbines nodding through the fence, he picked a single blossom. “This,” he said, “to remember.” His voice, too, was withdrawing, fading away.

The savour of kinnikinnick passed along Magnetwan Avenue, and past the Public Library. Harvey was left, motionless, in the dusk among the white columbines. He held in his hands a red handkerchief. He lifted it, and breathed the rank smell that opened to him the gates of all his past. Shamefacedly, he brushed it with his lips.