When he awoke, he looked into soft branches, gray in dim light. The whole mountain was lyric with birds. There was no other sound, save the lift and touch of branches, and the chatter of a squirrel, and there was as yet no sun.

He remembered. And with the memory, a rush of aching, eating shame seized on him and he closed his eyes again. Then he thought that he must have dreamed it all. And that it was impossible that such a thing should be. Yet here he was in the woods, where she had left him because he was a fool. Where had she gone? He sprang up, mad to find her, possessed by the need to make amends, and by the sheer need to find her.

As he sat up, he threw off his blanket, and he marvelled that this should have been covering him. Then he found himself looking into Lory Moor’s face.

She was sitting near him, wrapped in her own blanket, leaning against a tree. She was wide awake, and by all signs she had been so for a long time, for a great cluster of mountain violets lay on her blanket.

When she saw that he was awake, she smiled, and this seemed to the Inger the most marvellous thing that ever had befallen him: that she was there and that she smiled.

He looked at her silently, and slowly under the even brownness of his skin, the color rose from his throat to his forehead, and burned crimson. But more than this color of shame, it was his eyes that told. They were upon her, brown, deep, like the eyes of a dog that has disobeyed, and has come back. For a moment he looked at her, then he dropped his face in his hands.

She moved so quietly that he did not hear her rise. He merely felt her hand on his shoulder. And when he looked up again, she was sitting there beside him.

“Don’t,” she said.

He looked at her in amazement. Her look was gentle, her voice had been gentle.

“You mustn’t,” she said. “It’s all over now.”

“What do you think of me? What do you think of me?” he muttered, stupidly.

She shrugged lightly. “It don’t make any difference what I think of you,” she said. “Ain’t it whether I’m goin’ to get away from Inch or not? Ain’t that the idea?”

When he came to think of it, that was the immediate concern. With his first utterance he had blundered, as he had blundered since the moment when she had put herself in his keeping. None the less his misery was too sharp to dismiss. But he had no clear idea how to ask a woman’s forgiveness—a thing that he had never done in his life.

“I feel as bad as hell,” he blurted out.

“What for?” she asked.

“For all I’ve done,” he put it.

She considered this.

“Look here,” she said slowly. “You’ve been drunk before often enough, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered, miserably.

“Well, don’t feel bad about this just because I mixed up in it,” she said. “I’m used to it. I see Dad and all of ’em drunk more times ’n I see ’em sober.”

He looked away from her.

“I wasn’t thinking just about being drunk,” he said. “I meant—what I said to you.”

“Oh—that!” she said. “Well. All men say that, I guess.” She looked at him. “I did guess you was differ’nt, but I ought to knowed better.”

Then in a flash of intense joy, he remembered what she had said to him in the hut. Her words came back as if she were speaking them again: “I didn’t know no woman I could tell. Nor no other decent man.” Once more the warmth of this was upon him, within him. Then the recollection of how he had failed her invaded him in an anguish new, impossible to combat. For she had thought that he was different from Jem Moor and Bunchy....

The Inger got to his feet.

“I am differ’nt,” he heard himself surprisingly saying.

She regarded him curiously, and with nothing in her eyes. It came to him as he stood looking down at her, that he would give all that might be asked if he could have seen her eyes as she looked up at him in the hut the night before and told him why she had come to him to help her. In the face of what had happened, the foolishness of protesting that he was different overcame him, and he fell silent.

A new anxiety beset him.

“Did you sleep?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “I was afraid,” she answered, simply.

The Inger stood for a moment as if the strength had run from his body. She had sat there, afraid, while he had slept—and he himself had been a part of her fear....

He turned away, and across the tops of the trees, he looked over the valley, still lying in the shadow. There was mist, and down there the pointed tops of the trees showed like green buds fastened to soft wool. Where they two were, the sun was already smiting the branches, and silencing the birds. Overhead, the clear blue, touched by sunny clouds, lay very near. It was as if he were trying to find, among them, something that could help him to tell her what he was feeling. But he found nothing and he said nothing. He caught up the blanket and flung it savagely aside, seized a great dead limb lying beside him and broke it over his knee.

“Get out the stuff,” he bade her. “We’ll have a fire.”

He built and lighted the fire, brought the water, and found his way down to the brook. He threw off his clothes, and lay flat in the bed of the stream, his head on a rock. The sharp stones cut his flesh, and the water somehow helped to heal him. He shook himself, dried by a run down the trail, dressed, and returned, glowing.

The coffee was on the fire, and she was making toast on a stick. She had spread what food she had brought, chiefly fruit and cooked meat and cheese.

“Didn’t I bring any grub?” he demanded.

“The bird,” she answered. “The big bird.”

“That’s for dinner,” he observed, gruffly, and said no more.

He took the stick from her and made the toast. When she poured the coffee, it was clear and golden and fragrant. She had two plates and two cups, the Inger noticed. She made him roll the blankets for seats. In spite of his suffering—which was the more real that it was new to him—the cheer and the invitation of the time warmed him. But as for her loveliness, he found himself now hardly looking at that, save when he must, as if what she was had become to him something utterly forbidden.

As for her, while she ate, she continually listened, and if a twig broke, she started. For this she laughed at herself once.

“But if he should come,” she said, “if he should come....”

The Inger looked at her, that once, steadfastly.

“If he should come,” he said, “I could save you—now.”

The elusive trail which had baffled him, led with perfect distinctness along a little shelf three steps up and around that sharp height of rocks which he had scaled, and then the trail dipped down into a narrow caÑon, and up. Before the sun was an hour high, they were on their way again.

With their brisk progress, her spirits rose, and once, to the Inger’s exquisite delight, she broke into a lilt of song.

“You sing the way you laugh,” he said awkwardly. And she flashed him a smile, over shoulder, as she had done that morning on the desert.

A tanager drew a line of scarlet through the trees, and burned from a bough before them. In an instant the Inger’s hand was raised, and he had aimed. But in that second, his arm was struck aside, the shot glanced harmlessly among the trees, and the bird flashed safe to the thicket.

He looked round at her in open amazement.

“What did y’ do that for?” he demanded.

“What did you want to go and kill him for?” she cried.

He considered this: what had he wanted to kill that red bird for?

“He was such a pretty little fellow,” she said, but instead of a rebuke, this seemed to him a reason.

“Yes,” he seized it eagerly. “That’s why. You want to get up close to ’em.”

“But if they’re dead....” she protested.

“You want to get up nearer to ’em,” he repeated. “Don’t you see? It’s the only way you can.”

She said nothing. She was walking before him now, and he watched her. She had braided her hair, and he liked the way the bright braids moved on her shoulders when she walked, and hung against the hollow of her waist. She must have braided her hair, he reflected, before he woke. Then he remembered the blanket which he had found folded across his shoulders. She must have found it, unstrapped it, covered him as he lay. He longed to let her know that he knew, but he could not bring himself to recall the time. “She seems to do everything so careful,” he thought, and remembered the red bird and tried to fathom her care for that. When she stooped to pick up a shining stone, he laughed out.

“See!” he said. “You want to pick up that stone to see it. Well, I wanted to kill the bird—to see it.”

“But the bird was alive!” she exclaimed.

He stared at her.

“What of it?” said he. “Look at the lots of ’em there are!”

She said nothing.

“Who’d miss it?” he argued. “Who wants it? You always kill things.”

“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I don’t know why. But it don’t seem right.”

Women were like that, he reflected. They hated blood. But—a bird! It was unfathomable.

High noon found them on the summit of Whiteface, looking down upon the crouching shoulders of the east foothills. Where they stood, the sun beat hotly, and the bare rocks and the coarse growth lay in intense brooding quiet. Everything there was flat, as if the long pressure of the sun had told, like weight.

Electrically, the Inger’s spirits returned to him. Here on the height, kindling fire, boiling water, spreading food, were no such business as these had been to him down on his little shelf. Here everything had a way of being that was hitherto unknown to him. When their table was spread in the shade of a pine, and the wood duck roasted slowly over the fire on a spit which he had fashioned, he stood up and surveyed their work, and his look fell on the girl, sitting relaxed, with loosely fallen hands, the sun striking her hair to brightness.

For a moment he let himself watch her, and catching his look, she smiled, as she had smiled when his eyes had met hers as he woke.

“Yi—eh! Yi—eh! Yi—e—h!” he suddenly shouted with the strength of his lungs.

The echo rolled back to them like a taunt.

She sprang up.

“If they’re huntin’ us—” she said, trembling, “oh, they’ll hear that!”

He looked at her in horror. Fool! Would he never have done with his blundering....

“Oh, my God, I forgot,” he exclaimed, contritely, and dropped to the ground. “I don’t get rested between kicking myself for being a damn fool,” he said.

While they ate, he was quiet. There was no way to let her know how much he hated himself, and his thought was occupied with nothing else. And it was as if she divined, for she became very gentle.

“I guess maybe you wanted to do somethin’ else to-day,” she said.

He shook his head.

“It’s awful, me makin’ you do this,” she added. “Don’t you think I don’t know that.”

“I ain’t doin’ anything—what am I doin’?” he burst out.

She looked at him gravely.

“You’re takin’ me out of a good sight worse’n death,” she answered. “And don’t you think I’ll ever forget it.”

There was about her manner of saying this something infinitely alluring. She fell in a sudden breathlessness, and her voice had a tremor which seemed to lie in the very words themselves. And with this, and with what she said, the Inger found himself suddenly utterly unable to deal.

“Oh, g’on,” he said, feebly.

She said no more, and for a moment he was wretched again lest he had offended her. But the gentleness and softness of her manner reassured him. Moreover, he became conscious that of the cheese and bread she was leaving the greater part for him, and pretending to have finished.

After their lunch, a consuming content fell upon the man, and he lay stretched on his back, under the pine, staring upward, thinking of nothing. For a little she moved about, and then she came and sat beside him, saying nothing. More than he knew, this power of hers for silence conquered him. When a man knows how to live alone, he may or may not understand words, but he always understands silence.

Presently he looked over at her, and seeing that her eyes were heavy, he sat erect, with the memory of her night’s vigil.

“Could you go to sleep?” he demanded.

She nodded. “I could,” she said. “I guess there ain’t the time,” she added.

“Yes, there is,” he said eagerly. “We can get down from here in no time. You rest yourself.”

She regarded him for a moment. Then, without a word, she drew her blanket toward her, rested her head upon it, and relaxed like a child. In a moment she lay sleeping.

Then he looked at her. All that day he had averted his eyes, in his shame. But now that there could be in her look no rebuke, no reminiscence of the night, he looked at her as freely as he had looked that day on the desert, when she had sat his horse before him. Only then his look had been a flame, and now it was as if the sight of her was to him a healing power. For she still trusted him. She was lying here asleep, and she had set him to watch. Immeasurably, she was giving him back his self-respect, restoring to him his own place in her eyes and in his own. He had no knowledge that this bore so strong a part in the creeping sweetness which possessed him. He only knew that he was happy, that he dreaded the time when she should awaken almost as much as he longed for it; and he hoped with childish intensity that the afternoon would never end.

That was an hour such as the man had never known. Women had followed him, tempted him, run from him, but never in his life had a woman either begged his help, as one being of another, or walked with him, comradely. And with women he had always moved as lord and dispenser, avoiding them, taking them for granted, occasionally pursuing them, but always as chief actor. Now, suddenly, he had become in his own sight, infinitely the lesser of the two; and even that grateful return of belief in himself was a thing which she was, so gently, bestowing. He sat, sunk in the newness of what had come upon him, making no effort to understand, and looking neither forward nor back. He was beset alike by the knowledge that she trusted him, and by the soft movement of her breathing and by the flushed ripeness of her, and by the fact that, at any second, she might waken and then smile upon him.

When, toward four o’clock, she did waken, her smile, that was as instant as at a child’s awakening, was straightway darkened by a cloud of fear.

“It’s late,” she said. “The train—can we get it now?”

“Can we get it now....” The Inger paused to taste this before he answered.

“Easy,” he said. “You mean the eight: fifteen for Barstow?”

“Yes,” she said. “The eight: fifteen.” She had not meant for Barstow, but that, as the farthest eastern destination of those who usually took train from Inch, was the limit of the Inger’s imagining.

“Easy,” he repeated.

The way of descent, in the slanting light, was incredibly lovely. The time had assumed another air. With that low sun, everything was thrown sharply against the sky, like a pattern on a background. Something of the magic of the Northern days lay upon that Southern land.

Once, feeling suddenly articulate, the Inger looked over his shoulder at her, as she followed.

“It’s hell, ain’t it?” he said admiringly.

She understood this as the extreme of expression, anywhere applied.

“Ain’t it?” she agreed fervently.

It was not yet seven o’clock when they emerged from the last caÑon, and tramped across the sage brush toward the town. There the lights were slowly shining out, and all the tawdry, squalid play of the night was beginning, as night after night it begins in the ugly settlements where men herd on the Great Desert under solemn skies. As the first sound of rattling music came to the man and the woman, she turned to him.

“Is big towns like little ones, do you know?” she asked.

He reflected, remembered San Francisco, and replied:

“Yes,” he said, “I s’pose so, mostly. But the parts where the folks try to be nice,” he added, vindictively, “are worse’n this and Inch.”

“Why?” she demanded, in surprise.

“Because,” he said, “they get too nice. They’re slush nice,” he explained it.

She mulled this.

“I saw a lady, once,” she said. “She got off at Inch to mail a letter. Her hair was combed pretty and she had her gloves on and her shoes fit her feet—I donno. She must of come from somewheres,” she added vaguely.

He was silent and she tried to be clear.

“She wasn’t good-dressed like Beautiful Kate and them,” she added anxiously. “She spoke nice, too. I heard her get a stamp from Leadpipe Pete. Her words come so—easy.”

He nodded.

“There are them,” he said from his experience. “But not many.”

As they approached the station some stragglers were gathering to wait for the train, and the two remained near the far end of the platform. A monotonously repeated command forced itself to their attention. On a stretch of bare, hard-trodden sand, a company of the town guard was drilling in the twilight. About forty slim, loose-jointed youths were advancing and wheeling under the direction of a stocky, middle-aged man who walked like a rooster and shouted indistinguishably, in the evident belief that the tone was the thing. The Inger walked to the edge of the platform, and stared at them.

“That’s the United States Army,” he said, not without reverence.

She made no comment, and they watched the whole line in columns of four, advancing in double time. The rhythmic motion of the khaki legs vaguely touched the Inger with sensuous pleasure.

“Ain’t it grand?” he said.

“Grand!” repeated the girl. “It’s the limit.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, looking round at her.

“When they march,” she said, “I always think: ‘Dead legs, dead legs, dead legs.’ I hate ’em.”

He smiled tolerantly.

“Women are lame ducks on the war game,” he admitted. “Look-a-here,” he added. “I might as well tell you: I’m goin’ to Europe to get into the fight.”

“On purpose?” she asked, incredulously.

He nodded. “It’s the only man’s job on the place just now,” he told her. “Everybody else is just hangin’ round, lookin’ on. I want to be in on it.”

She stood very still, and in the half light her face seemed white and suddenly tired.

“Why don’t you ask which side?” he prompted her.

“I don’t care which side,” she answered, and walked back toward the end of the platform.

He kept beside her, curiously beset by the need to follow his spectacular announcement with some explanation. And abruptly he thought that he understood her attitude.

“I s’pose,” he said, shamefacedly, “you’re thinkin’ I won’t be much of a soldier if I behave as I did last night.”

“Oh no,” she said, “I don’t see as it matters much whether they’re shot drunk or shot sober.”

While he was groping at this, she added:

“I donno but they’re better off drunk—they can’t kill so many o’ the others.”

“You don’t understand—” he began, but she cut him short curtly.

“I better get my ticket,” she said.

“I’ll get it,” he told her. “Barstow—ain’t it?”

“No, I’m not going to Barstow,” she answered. “Get it to Lamy.”

He faced her in astonishment.

“Lamy!” he cried. “Murderation. Clear east?”

“I’ve counted up,” she explained. “That’s as far as I’ve got the money to get. I can stay there till I earn some to go on with. I’ve got an aunt in Chicago.”

“East!” he said weakly. “Why, I never thought o’ you goin’ East.”

The station platform led with that amazing informality of the western American railway station, to the raw elemental sand of the desert. Within sight of the electric lamps of the station, were the tall flowers of the Yucca and the leaves of the Spanish bayonet and the flare of the spineless cactus under uninterrupted areas of dusky sky, stretched as sand and sky had stretched for countless ages. Of the faint tread of the soldiers, the commands of the captain, the trundle of a truck, the click of the telegraph instrument, those sands and those stars were as unconscious as they had been in the beginning. And abruptly, as he looked at these lifelong friends of his, the Inger felt intolerably alone.

“What do you want to go East for?” he demanded.

“Chicago’s the only place I’ve got anybody I could go to,” she said. “But that ain’t the reason,” she added. “I want to get as far as I can, ’count of Bunchy.”

She looked back at the group gathering at the station to see the train come in.

“You better get the ticket just to Albuquerque,” she said. “Somebody might try to follow me up.”

“Albuquerque nothing,” he said roughly. “I’ll buy you your ticket right through—to Chicago.” He went toward her. “Don’t go—don’t go!” he said.

She looked at him, intently, as if she were trying to fathom what he would have said. But in that intentness of her look, he saw only her memory of the night before. He drew sharply back, and turned away. “I hate for you to go ’way off there alone,” he mumbled.

Across the desert, clear against the dusk of the mountains, a red eye came toward them. She saw it.

“Oh quick,” she said. “There’s the train. Get it just to Albuquerque. I’ll be all right.”

She gave him a knotted handkerchief, and he took it and ran down the platform. This handkerchief he could give back to her as she was leaving, and he would of course buy the ticket through—

He stopped short on the platform.

“What with, you fool?” he thought.

He remembered his drunken impression of the night before that there was, before he should leave, something more to do, or to fetch. His hand went to his pocket. Half a dozen silver dollars were there, no more. In his wallet, which he searched under the light, were two five dollar bills. By now he could hear the rumble of the Overland.

Outside the station two or three Mexicans were lounging. Half a dozen renegade Indians were faithfully arriving with their bead chains and baskets. The waiting-room was empty.

The Inger went in the waiting-room and closed the door. The ticket agent stood behind his window, counting that which ticket-agents perpetually count. The Inger thrust his own head and shoulders through the window, and with them went his revolver.

“I’m Inger of Inch,” he said. “I guess you know me, don’t you? Just you give me a through ticket and all the trimmings to Chicago, till I can get to a bank, or I’ll blow all your brains out of you. Can you understand?”

The ticket agent glanced up, looked into the muzzle, and went on quietly counting.

“All right, Mr. Inger,” he said. “I guess the Flag-pole can stand that much. But you hadn’t ought to be so devilish lordly in your ways,” he complained.

The Inger pocketed his revolver, and smiled—the slow, indolent, adorable smile which had made all Inch and the men at the mines his friends.

“If you feel that way about it, my friend—” he said, and leaned forward and added something, his hand outstretched.

The man nodded, shook the hand, and went to his ticket rack. The Inger wrote out a message to his father, instructing him to pay to the agent a sum which he named; and to his bank he scribbled and posted a brief note. Then as the train pulled in, he turned back to where Lory waited.

“It’s all right,” he told her. “Everything’s all right,” he added jubilantly. “Come on!”

Beside the train she would have taken his hand, but he followed her. “I’m coming in,” he said brusquely, and in the coach sat down beside her in her seat.

Then she turned to him, and in her voice were the tremor and the breathlessness which had been there for an instant when, in the morning, she had tried to say her thanks:

“I wish’t I could thank you,” she said. “I wish’t I could!”

He met her eyes, and he longed inexpressibly for a way of speech which should say the thing that he meant to try to say.

“You know, don’t you,” he asked awkwardly, “that I’d do anything to make up—”

“Don’t,” she begged. “I know. Don’t you think I don’t know.”

With this his courage mounted.

“Tell me,” he burst out. “Will you tell me? Am I different—ain’t I different—from the way you thought?”

It was blind enough, but she seemed to understand.

“You’ve treated me whiter to-day than I’ve ever been treated,” she said, very low. “Now good-bye!”

The Inger sat silent, but in his face came light, as if back upon him were that which she had kindled there in the hut, by her trust in him, and as if it were not again to darken. The train began to move, and he sat there and did not heed it.

“Good-bye—oh, good-bye!” she said. “We’re going!”

“Yes,” he said, “we’re going! I donno what you’ll say—I got me a ticket too.”