Macdonald himself had added his own brave word to bear out the doctor’s prediction, as far as Frances would permit him to speak. That was not above ten words, whispered into her ear, inclined low to hear. When he attempted to go beyond that, soft warm fingers made a latch upon his lips.

Mrs. Chadron came down a little after dark, and whispered at the door. Macdonald was sleeping, and Frances went softly to tell her.

“Nola’s askin’ for you,” Mrs. Chadron told her, “she’s all heartbroke and moanin’ in her bed. If you’ll go to her, and comfort her a little, honey, I’ll take as good care of him as if he was my own.”

Frances was touched by the appeal for sympathy. She could picture Nola, little fashioned by nature or her life’s experiences to bear grief, shuddering and sobbing alone in the dark, and her heart went out to her in all its generosity and large forgivingness.

Nola’s room was dark for all except the night sky at her window. Frances stood a moment in her door, listening, believing from the silence that she must have gone to sleep.

“Nola,” she whispered, softly.

“Oh, I feel so mean and wicked!” she cried. “If I hadn’t been so deceitful and treacherous and—and—and everything, maybe all this sorrow wouldn’t have come to us!”

Frances said nothing. She had found one hot hand, tear-wet from lying under Nola’s cheek, and this she held tenderly, feeling it best to let the tears of penitence purge the sufferer’s soul in their world-old way. After a time Nola became quieter. She shifted in the bed, and moved over to give Frances more room, and put up her arms to draw her friend down for the kiss of forgiveness which she knew would not be denied.

Afterwards she sat up in bed, and brushed her hair back from her throbbing forehead with her palms.

“Oh, it aches and aches—so!” she said.

“I’ll bind a cold towel around it, dear; that always used to ease it, you remember?”

“Not my head, Frances—my heart, my heart!”

It was better so, Frances understood. Penitence that brings only a headache is like plating over brass; it cannot long conceal the baseness of the thing that lies beneath.

“Time is the only remedy for that, Nola,” she said, her own words slow and sad.

“He is free, to love and be loved as it may fall, Nola. I told you he was mine, but I thought then that I was claiming him from death. He will live. He never has asked me to marry him; maybe he never will. When he recovers, he may turn to you—who can tell?”

“No, it’s only you that he thinks of, Frances. When I was watching by him he opened his eyes, and you should have seen the look in them when he saw me instead of you. He struggled to sit up and look for you, and he called your name, sharp and frightened, as if he thought somebody had taken you away from him forever.”

Frances did not need that assurance to quiet any fear of his loyalty. She had spoken the truth, only because it was the truth, but not to give Nola hope. For hope she knew there was not any, nor any love, to come to Nola out of that man’s heart.

“We’ll not talk of it,” Frances said.

“I must, I can’t let anything stand between us, Frances. If I’d been fair, all the way through—but I wasn’t. I wasn’t fair about Major King, and I wasn’t fair this time. I was fool enough to think that if you were out of the way for a little while I could make him love me! He’d never love me, never in a million years!”

“But I didn’t want you to come up just to pet me and be good to me, Frances—I wanted to give you something.”

Nola felt under her pillow, and groped for Frances’ hand, in which she placed a soft something with a stub of a feather in it.

“I have no right to keep it,” said Nola. “Do you know what it is?”

“Yes, I know.”

Much of the softness which Frances had for the highland bonnet was in her voice as she replied, and the little bonnet itself was being nestled against her cheek, as a mother cuddles a baby’s hand.

“The best that’s in me goes out to that man,” said Nola solemnly—and truthfully, Frances knew—“but I wouldn’t take him from you now, Frances, even if I could. I don’t want to care for him, I don’t want to think of him. I just want to think of poor father lying out there under the ground.”

“It’s best for you to think of him.”

“Only a day ago he was alive and warm, like you and me, and now he’s dead! Mother never will want to leave this place again now, and I don’t feel like I want to either. I just want to lie down and die—oh, I just want to die!”

Again the heaving breast grew calm, and the tear-wet face was lifted to shake back the fallen hair.

“This has emptied everything out for me,” Nola sighed. “I’m going to be serious in everything, with everybody, after this. Do you suppose Mrs. Mathews would let me help her over at the mission—if I went to her meek and humble and asked her?”

“If she saw that it would help you, she would, Nola.”

“Just think how lonesome it will be here when the post’s abandoned and everybody but the Indians gone! You’ll be away—maybe long before that—and I’ll not see anybody but Indians and cowboys from year’s beginning to year’s end. Oh, it will be so dreary and lonesome here!”

“There’s work up the river in the homesteaders’ settlement, Nola; there’s suffering to be relieved, and bereaved hearts to be comforted. There’s your work, it seems to me, for you and those nearest to you are to blame for the desolation of those poor homes, excuse it as charitably as we may.”

Frances felt a shudder run through the girl’s body as her arm clasped the pliant waist.

“Why, Frances! You can’t mean that! They’re terrible—just think what they’ve done—oh, the underhanded thieves! By the law of the range it’s my fight now, instead of my work to help them!”

“The law of the range isn’t the law any longer here, Nola, and it never will be again. Alan Macdonald has done the work that he put his lone hand to. You have no quarrel with anybody, child, no feud to carry on to a bloody end. Put it out of your mind. If you are sincere in your heart, and truly penitent, you can prove it best by beginning to do good in the place where your house has done a terrible, sad wrong.”

“They started it!” said Nola, vindictively, the lifelong hatred for those who encroached upon the range so deep in her breast, it seemed, that the soil of her life must come away on its roots.

“There’s no use talking to you about it, then,” said Frances, coldly.

Nola seemed hurt by her tone. She began to cry again, and plead her cause in moaning, broken words. “It’s our country, we were here first—father always said that!”

“I know.”

“What he has done in this country calls for no excuse,” returned Frances, loftily.

“In your eyes and mine he wouldn’t need any excuse for anything he might do,” said Nola, with a sagacity unexpected. “We love him, and we’d love him, right or wrong. Well”—a sigh—“you’ve got a right to love him, and I haven’t. I wouldn’t try to make him care for me now if I could, for I’m different; I’m all emptied out.”

“It takes more than you’ve gone through to empty a human life, Nola. But you have no right to love him; honor and honesty are in the way, friendship not considered at all. You’ll spring up in the sun again after a little while, like fresh grass that’s trodden on, just as happy and light-hearted as before. Let me have this one without any more interference—there are plenty in the world that you would stand heart-high to with your bright little head, just as well as Alan Macdonald.”

“I can’t give him up, the thought of him, and the longing for him, without regret, Frances; I can’t!”

“I wouldn’t have you do it. I want you to have regret, and pain—not too deep nor too lasting, but some corrective pain. Now, go to sleep.”

Frances pressed her back to the pillow, and touched her head with light caress.

“Frances,” she whispered, a new gladness dawning in her voice, “I’ll go and see those poor people, and try to help them—if they’ll let me. Maybe we were wrong—partly, anyhow.”

“That’s better,” Frances encouraged.

“And I’ll try not to care for him, or think about him, even one little bit.”

Frances bent and kissed her. Nola’s arms clung to her neck a little, holding her while she whispered in her ear.

“For I’m going to be different, I’m going to be good—abso-lutely good!”

“You don’t tell me? So the old colonel’s got what his heart’s been pinin’ for many a year. Well, well!”

Mrs. Chadron was beside her window in her favored rocker again, less assertive of bulk in her black dress, not so florid of face, and with lines of sadness about her mouth and eyes. A fire was snapping in the chimney, for the gray sky was driving a bitter wind, and the first snowflakes of winter were straying down.

Banjo Gibson was before the fire, his ears red, his cheeks redder, just in from a brisk ride over from the post. His instruments lay beside him on the floor, and he was limbering his fingers close to the blaze.

“Yes, he’s a brigamadier now,” said he.

“Brigadier-General Landcraft,” said she, musingly, looking away into the grayness of the day; “well, maybe he deserves it. Fur as I’m concerned, he’s welcome to it, and I’m glad for Frances’ sake.”

“It was nice of you to come over and tell me the news, anyhow, Banjo; you’re always as obligin’ and thoughtful as you can be.”

“It’s always been a happiness and a pleasure, mom, and I’ve come a good many times with news, sad and joyful, to your door. But I reckon it’ll be many a long day before I come ridin’ to Alamito with news ag’in; many a long, long day.”

“What do you mean, Banjo? You ain’t goin’—”

“To Californy; startin’ from here as soon as my horse blows a spell and eats his last feed at your feed box, mom. I’ve got to make it to Meander to ketch the mornin’ train.”

“Oh, Banjo! you don’t tell me!” Tears gushed to Mrs. Chadron’s eyes, used to so much weeping now, and her lips trembled as she pressed them hard to keep back a sob. “You’re the last friend of the old times, the last face outside of this house belongin’ to the old days. When you’re gone my last friend, the very last one I care about outside of my own, ’ll be gone!”

Banjo cleared his throat unsteadily, and looked very hard at the fire for quite a spell before he spoke.

“The best of friends must part,” he said.

“Yes, they must part,” she admitted, her handkerchief pressed to her eyes, her voice muffled behind it.

“But they ain’t no use of me stayin’ around in this country and pinin’ for what’s gone, and starvin’ on the edge,” said Banjo, briskly. “Since you’ve sold out the cattle and the boys is all gone, scattered ever-which-ways and to Texas, and the homesteaders is comin’ into this valley as thick as blackbirds, it ain’t no place for me. I don’t mix with them kind of people, I never did. You’ve give it all up to ’em, they tell me, but this homestead, mom?”

“All but the homestead,” she sighed, her tears checked now, her eyes on the farthest hill, where she had watched the crest many and many a time for Saul to rise over it, riding home from Meander.

“You hadn’t ort to let it go,” said he, shaking his sad head.

“I couldn’t’a’held it, the lawyers and Mr. Macdonald told me that. It’s public land, Banjo, it belongs to them folks, I reckon. But we was here first!” A futile sigh, a regretful sigh, a sigh bitter with old recollections.

“I reckon that’s so, down to the bottom of it, but you folks made this country what it was, and by rights it’s yourn. Well, I stopped in to say good-bye to the old brigamadier-colonel over at the post as I come through. He tells me Alan and that little girl of hisn that stuck to him and stood up for him through thick and thin ’re goin’ to be married at Christmas time.”

“Then they’ll be leavin’, too,” she said.

“Well, well!” said she, her face brightening a little at the news.

“How’s Alan by now?”

“Up and around—he’s goin’ to leave us in the morning.”

“Frances here?” he asked.

“No, she went over home this morning—I thought maybe you met her—but she’s comin’ back for him in the morning.”

Banjo sat musing a little while. Then—

“Yes, you’ll have neighbors, mom, plenty of ’em. A colony of nesters is comin’ here, three or four hundred of ’em, they tell me, all ready to go to puttin’ up schoolhouses and go to plowin’ in the spring. And they’re goin’ to run that hell-snortin’ railroad right up this valley. I reckon it’ll cut right along here somewheres a’past your place.”

“Yes, changes’ll come, Banjo, changes is bound to come,” she sighed.

“Yes, the cattle days is passin’, along with the folks that was somebody in this country once. Well, Banjo, we had some good times in the old days; we can remember them. But changes will come, we must expect changes. You don’t need to pack up and go on account of that. I ain’t goin’ to leave.”

“I’ve made up my mind. I’m beginnin’ to feel tight in the chist already for lack of air.”

Both sat silent a little while. Banjo’s elbows were across his knees, his face lifted toward the window. The wind was falling, and there was a little breaking among the low clouds, baring a bit of blue sky here and there. Banjo viewed this brightening of the day with gladness.

“I guess it’s passin’,” he said, going to the window and peering round as much of the horizon as he could see, “it wasn’t nothing but a little shakin’ out of the tablecloth after breakfast.”

“I’m glad of it, for I don’t think it’s good luck to start out on a trip in a storm. That there Nola she’s out in it, too.”

“Gone up the river?”

“Yes. It beats all how she’s takin’ up with them people, and them with her. She’s even bought lumber with her own money to help some of ’em build.”

“She’s got a heart like a dove,” he sighed.

“As soft as a puddin’,” Mrs. Chadron nodded.

“But I never could git to it.” Banjo sighed again.

Mrs. Chadron shook her head, with an expression of sadness for his failure which was deeper than any words she knew.

“The loss of her pa bore down on her terrible; she’s pinin’ and grievin’ too hard for a body so young. I hear her cryin’ and moanin’ in the night sometimes, and I know it ain’t no use goin’ to her, for I’ve tried. She seems to need something more than an old woman like me can give, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Maybe she needs a change—a change of air,” Banjo suggested, with what vague hope only himself could tell.

“Maybe, maybe she does. Well, you’re goin’ to take a change of air, anyhow, Banjo. But what’re you goin’ to do away out there amongst strangers?”

“I was out there one time, five years ago, and didn’t seem to like it then. But since I’ve stood off and thought it over, it seems to me that’s a better place for me than here, with my old friends goin’ or gone, and things changin’ this a-way. Out there around them hop and fruit ranches they have great times at night in the camps, and a man of my build can keep busy playin’ for dances. I done it before, and they took to me, right along.”

“They do everywheres, Banjo.”

“Some don’t,” he sighed, watching out of the window in the direction that Nola must come.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” said Banjo.

“I guess everything that comes to us is for the best, if we knew how to take it,” she said. “Well, you set there and be comfortable, and I’ll stir Maggie up and have her make you something nice for dinner. After that I want you to play me the old songs over before you go. Just to think I’ll never hear them songs no more breaks my heart, Banjo—plumb breaks my heart!”

As she passed Banjo she laid her hand on his head in a manner of benediction, and tears were in her eyes.

The sun was out again when they had finished lunch, coaxing autumn on into November at the peril of frosted toes. Mrs. Chadron had brightened considerably, also. Even bereavement and sorrow could not shake her fealty to chili, and now it was rewarding her by a rubbing of her old color in her face as she sat by the window and waited for Banjo to tune his instruments for the parting songs.

Her workbasket was beside her, the bright knitting-needles in the unfinished sock. It never would be completed now, she knew, but she kept it by her to cry over in the twilight hours, when thoughts of Saul came over her with their deep-harrowing pangs.

Banjo put his bow in its place in the lid of the case, the rosin in its little box. But the fiddle he still held on his knee, stroking its smooth back with loving hand, as if he would soothe Mrs. Chadron’s regrets and longings and back-tugging pains by that vicarious caress. So he sat petting his instrument, and after a little she looked at him, her eyes red, and tear-streaks on her face.

“Don’t put it away just yet, Banjo,” she requested; “there’s another one I want you to sing, and that will be the last. It’s the saddest one you play—one that I couldn’t stand one time—do you remember?” Banjo remembered; he nodded. “I can stand it now, Banjo; I want to hear it now.”

Banjo drew bow again, no more words on either side, and began his song:

When he finished, Mrs. Chadron’s head was bent upon her arm across the little workstand where her basket stood. Her shoulders were moving in piteous convulsions, but no sound of crying came from her. Banjo knew that it was the hardest kind of weeping that tears the human heart.

He put away his fiddle, and strapped the case. Then he went to her and laid his hand on her shoulder.

“I’ll have to be saddlin’ up, mom,” said he, his own voice thick, “and I’ll say adios to you now.”

“Good-bye, Banjo, and may God bless you in that country you’re goin’ to so fur away from the friends you used to know!”

Banjo’s throat moved as he gulped his sorrow. “I’ll not come back in the house, but I’ll wave you good-bye from the gate,” said he.

“I had hopes you might change your mind, Banjo,” she said, as she took his hand and held it a little while.

“If I could’a’got to somebody’s heart that I’ve pined for many a day, I would’a’changed my mind, mom. But it wasn’t to be.”

“It wasn’t to be, Banjo,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think she’ll ever marry—she’s changed, she’s so changed!”

“Well, adios to you, mom, and the best of luck.”

“Adios, Banjo, boy; good-bye!”

Mrs. Chadron sat in her old place and watched him until he passed beyond the last hill line and out of her sight. Her last glimpse of him had been in water lines through tears. Now she reached for her basket and took out her unfinished knitting. Broken off there, like her own life it was, she thought, never to be completed as designed. The old days were done; the promise of them only partly fulfilled. She was bidding farewell to more than Banjo, parting with more than friends.

“Good-bye, Banjo,” she murmured, looking dimly toward the farthest hill; “adios!”

Frances came into the room as fresh as a morning-glory. Her cheeks were like peonies, and the fire of her youth and strength danced in her happy eyes. Macdonald rose to greet her, tall, gaunt, and pale from the drain that his wound had made upon his life. He had been smoking before the fireplace, and he reached up now to put his pipe away on the manteltree.

“And how are things at the post?” he asked, as she stood before him in her saddle dress, her sombrero pressing down her hair, her quirt swinging by its thong from her gloved wrist.

Before replying she intercepted the hand that was reaching to stow the pipe away, pressed it firmly back, inserted the stem between his close lips.

“In this family, the man smokes,” she said.

His slow smile, which was reward enough to her for all the trouble that it took to wake it, twinkled in his eyes like someone coming to the window with a light.

“Then the piece of a man will go ahead and smoke,” said he, drawing a chair up beside his own and leading her to it with gentle pressure upon her hand.

“Has Mrs. Chadron been overfeeding you while I was gone? Did she give you chili?”

“She offered me chili, in five different dishes, which I, remembering the injunction, regretfully put aside.”

“Well, they’re coming with the ambulance, I rode on ahead, and you’ll soon be beyond the peril of chili.” She smiled as she looked up into his face, and the smile broadened into an outright laugh when she saw the little flitting cloud of vexation there.

“I could well enough ride,” said he.

“The doctor says you could not.”

“I’m as fit for the saddle this minute as I ever was in my life,” he declared.

She made no reply to that in words. But there was tender pity in her caressing eyes as they measured the weakness of his thin arms, wasted down to tendon and bone now, it seemed. He would ride to the post, she knew very well, if permitted, and come through it without a murmur. But the risk would be foolish, no matter what his pride must suffer by going in a wagon.

“Have you heard the news from Meander?” she inquired.

“No, news comes slowly to Alamito Ranch, and will come slower now that Banjo is gone, Mrs. Chadron says. What’s been happening at Meander?”

“They held their conventions there last week to nominate county officers, and what do you think? They’ve nominated you for something, for—for what do you suppose?”

“Nominated me? Who’s nominated me?”

“Oh, one party or the other began it, and the other indorsed you, for—oh, it’s—”

“For what, Frances?” he asked, laughter in his eyes at her unaccountable way of holding back on the secret.

“Why, for sheriff!” said she, with magnificent scorn.

Macdonald leaned back in his chair and laughed, the first audible sound of merriment that she ever had heard come from those stern lips. She looked at him with reproach.

“It should have been governor, the very least they could have done, decently!” She was full of feeling on the subject of what she believed to be his undervaluation.

Macdonald took her hand, the laughter dying out of his sober face.

“That’s all in the different ways of looking at a man, palomita,” he said to her.

“But you look bigger than sheriff to anybody!” she replied, indignation large in her heart.

“But surely, Alan, you’ll not accept it?”

“Why, I think so,” he returned, thoughtfully. “I think I’d be worth more to this county as sheriff than I would be as—as governor, let us say.”

“Yes, but they go shooting sheriffs,” she protested.

“They’ll not be doing so much careless and easy shooting around here since Colonel—Brigadier-General Landcraft—and that sounds more like his size, too—gave them a rubdown with the iron hand. The cattle barons’ day is over; their sun went down when Mark Thorn brought the holy scare to Saul Chadron’s door.”

“Father is of the same opinion. Do you know, Alan, the whole story about that horrible old man Thorn is in the eastern papers?”

“Is it possible?”

“With sufficient reason,” he nodded.

“She’s afraid her mother will hear of it in some way.”

“She’ll find it out in time, Frances; a thing like that walks on a man’s grave.”

“It will not matter so much after a while, after her first grief settles.”

“Did Nola come back with you?”

“No, she went on to take some things to poor old Mrs. Lassiter. She never has recovered from the loss of her son—it’s killing her by inches, Tom says. And you considering that office of sheriff!” She turned to him with censorious eyes as she spoke, as if struck with a pain of which he was the cause. “I tell you, you men don’t know, you don’t know! It’s the women that suffer in all this shooting and killing—we are the ones that have to bear the sorrows in the night and watch through the uncertain days!”

“Yes,” said he gently, “the poor women must bear most of this world’s pain. That is why God made them strong above all his created things.”

They sat in silence, thinking it over between them. Outside there was sunshine over the brown rangeland; within there dwelt the lifting confidence that their feet had passed the days of trouble and were entering the bounds of an enlarging peace.

“And Major King?” said he.

“Father has relented, as I knew he would, out of regard for their friendship of the past, and will not bring charges based on Major King’s plottings with Chadron.”

“It’s better that way,” he nodded. “Do you suppose there’s nothing between him and Nola?”

“I think she’ll have him after her grief passes, Alan.”

“Better than he deserves,” said he. “There’s a lump of gold in that little lady’s heart, Frances.”

“There is, Alan; I’m glad to hear you say that.” There was moisture in her tender eyes.

“There was something in that man, too,” he reflected. “It’s unfortunate that he allowed his desire to humiliate you and me to drive him into such folly. If he’d only have held those brigands here for the civil authorities, as I requested, we could have forgotten the rest.”

“Yes, father says that would have saved him in his eyes, in spite of his scheming with Chadron against your life, and against father’s honor and all that he holds sacred. But it’s done, and he’s genuinely despised in the service for it. And there’s the ambulance coming over the hill.”

“Ambulance for me!” said he, in disgust of his slow mending.

“Be glad that it isn’t—oh, I shouldn’t say that!”

“I am,” said he, nodding his slow, grave head.

“And to Alamito,” said he, looking out into the frost-stricken garden with a tenderness in his eyes. “I shall always have a softness in my heart for Alamito, because it gave me you. That garden out there yielded me the dearest flower that any garden ever gave a man”—he took her hands, and folded them above his heart—“a flower with a soul in it to keep it alive forever.”

She bowed her head as he spoke, as if receiving a benediction.

“I hate saying good-bye to Mrs. Chadron,” she said, her voice trembling, “for she’ll cry, and I’m afraid I’ll cry, too.”

“Don’t rebuke me for that night now, Alan,” she pleaded, turning her pained eyes to his. “I have suffered for my injustice.”

“It wasn’t injustice, it was discipline, and it was good for both of us. We must come to confidence through misunderstandings and false charges very frequently in this life. Never mind that; I was telling you about that evening on the side of the hill. I had been sitting with my back to a rock, watching the brush for Mark Thorn, but I was thinking more of you than of him. For he meant only death, and you were life. But I thought that I had lost you that day.”

She drew nearer to him as they stood, in the unequivocal consolation of her presence, in the most comforting refutation of that sad hour’s dark forebodings.

only, there were two lines which I did not repeat, I dared not repeat, even in my heart. My vision halted short of their fulfillment.”

“What are the words—do you remember them?” she asked.

“Yes; I can repeat them now, for my vision is broader, it is a better dream:

He pressed her closer, and kissed her hair. They stood, unmindful of the waiting ambulance, their vision fusing in the blue distances of the land their hearts held dear. It was home.

“Come on, Alan”—she started from her reverie and drew him by the hand—“there’s Mrs. Chadron on the porch, waiting for hasta luego.”

“For hasta luego,” said he.