Andy P. Symes awoke from a night of troubled dreams with the impression still strong upon him that he was the exact centre of a typhoon in the China Seas. He realized gradually that the house was alternately shivering and rocking, that the shade of the slightly lowered window was flapping furiously, that his nose and throat were raw from the tiny particles of dust which covered the counterpane and furniture, that pebbles were striking the window-panes like the bombardment of a gatling gun. There was a wailing and shrieking from the wires which anchored his kitchen flue, a rattling and banging outside which conveyed the knowledge that the sheet-iron roof on his coal-house was loose, while a clatter from the street told his experienced ears that some one's tin garbage-can was passing.

He groaned. This was the day the Homeseekers' Excursion was due—coming to view the land "where the perfumed zephyrs fanned the cheeks of men and brothers!" Coming to breathe "the Elixir of Life," while they inspected that portion of the desert which was "blooming like the rose!"

Even the elements were against him it seemed.

Symes shoved up the shade to see the lovely Pearline Starr, with her head tied in a nubia, fighting her way through his front gate. She was bearing ahead of her some garment on the end of a stick. Mr. Symes dressed hastily that he might respond to her knock.

When Mr. Symes opened the door Miss Starr was clinging, breathless, to a pillar of the veranda in order to keep her footing. She cast down her eyes as she extended her offering.

"Are these yours, Mr. Symes? We found them around a sagebrush in the backyard."

"If they were," said Mr. Symes shortly, "I'd be in bed. They look like Tuttses."

The air was filled with flying papers, shingles, pans, and there were times when he could not see across the street. Alva Jackson was in his corral distributing hay among his horses from a sack instead of a pitchfork. The Perfect Climate! Symes watched Miss Starr dig in her heels and depart lying back horizontally on the breeze. Then he slammed the door, but not before he saw Parrott's coal-house making its way toward his lot. He already had a cellar-door and a chicken coop which did not belong to him, while a "wash" he did not recognize was lodged in his woodpile of jack-pine and ground-cedar in the backyard.

The Homeseekers' Excursion arrived at last—hours late—delayed by the worst dust-storm in months. The committee of prominent citizens met it where the cinder platform had been before it blew off.

The excursionists looked through the car-windows to see members of the Cowboy Band with one arm locked around the frame-work of the water-tank and with the other endeavoring to keep divers horns, trombones and flutes in their mouth. No sound reached the ears of the excursionists owing to the fact that they were on the windward side of the band and the stirring notes of "Hot Time in the Old Town" were going the other way.

Mr. Symes's neat speech of welcome was literally blown out of his mouth, so he contented himself with shouting a warning to "look out for his hat" in the ear of the first Homeseeker to venture from the car, and led the way to the Terriberry House.

Crowheart found itself in the position of the boy at the double-ringed circus who suffers from the knowledge that there is something he must miss. It could not give its undivided attention to the strangers and at the same time attend the funeral of old Edouard Dubois, which was to be held under the auspices of the beneficiary society of which he had been a member.

To extend the warm, western hand of fellowship to the Homeseekers and find out where they came from, what their business was, and how much money they had was a pleasure to which the citizens of Crowheart had long looked forward, but also it was a pleasure and a duty to walk down the Main street in white cotton gloves and strange habiliments, following the new hearse. The lateness of the train had made it impossible to do both.

They were a different type, these Homeseekers, from the first crop of penniless adventurers who had settled Crowheart, being chiefly shrewd, anxious-eyed farmers from the Middle West who prided themselves upon "not owing a dollar in the world" and whose modest bank accounts represented broiling days in the hay field and a day's work before dawn, by lantern light, when there was ice to chop in the watering trough and racks to be filled for the bawling cattle being wintered on shares.

A trip like this had not been undertaken lightly by these men, but Mudge's alluring literature had stirred even their unimaginative minds, and the more impulsive had gone so far as to dispose of farming implements and stock that they might send for their families without delay when the purchase of the land was consummated.

In the long journey across the plains, one man had been tacitly assigned the position of spokesman for the excursionists. He was big, this prosperous looking stranger who seemed so unconscious of his leadership, as big as Andy P. Symes himself, and as muscular. He was a western type, yet he differed noticeably from his companions in that his clothes fitted him and his cosmopolitan speech and manner were never acquired in Oak Grove, Iowa. His eyes were both humorous and shrewd. He compelled attention and deference without demanding it. They explained him with pride, the Homeseekers, to inquiring citizens of Crowheart.

"That fellow? Why he controls all kinds of money beside what he's got himself; cattleman, banker, land, money to burn. He's representin' some farmers from his section that want to invest if the proposition's good."

This was enough for Crowheart, and Andy P. Symes, who was attracted to Capital by an instinct as sure as a law of Nature, flew to him and clung like a bit of steel to a magnet.

"Murder case," explained Symes for conversational purposes as he and the banker stood at the front window in the office of the Terriberry House and watched a mad race between Lutz, the undertaker, and a plume which had blown off the hearse.

"Yes?"

"Pretty raw piece of work," continued Symes, while the banker searched in his case for a cigar. "Old sheepman shot dead in his tracks the same day he was married to a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Married him for his money and there's no doubt in anybody's mind but that she killed him for the same purpose. She may get away with it, though, for she'll be able to put up a fight with old Dubois's coin."

"Whose?" The banker's hand stopped on its way to scratch a match on the window-sill.

"French Canadian; signed himself 'Edouard Dubois.' Name familiar?"

The banker's face was a curious study as his mind went galloping back through the years.

"You say he was murdered—shot?"

"Dead as a door nail." Symes was pleased to have found a topic interesting to the stranger. "Each shot made a bull's-eye, one through the forehead and the other in his heart. She's a good shot, this girl, her one accomplishment."

"Does she admit it?"

Symes laughed.

"Oh, no; she tells some tale about having gone for water and hearing two shots—just about the sort of a yarn she would tell, but there was blood on her clothing and Dubois's own gun with two empty chambers was found where she had thrown it. They had a row probably and she beat him to his gun or else she waited and got the drop on him."

"But have they looked for strange footprints or any clues to corroborate her story?" persisted the banker.

Symes returned indifferently—

"I suppose so, but it's an open and shut case and the girl is practically a prisoner here in the hotel. The sheriff is hanging back about her arrest—western chivalry, you know, but it can't stand in the way of justice, and the people are pretty sore. Hurts a town, a thing like this," continued Symes feelingly, "gets in all the eastern papers, and when we appear in print we wish it to be in connection with something creditable."

The banker agreed absent-mindedly, and asked—

"Do you know her—this Mrs. Dubois?"

"In a way—as one person knows another in a small town"—he hesitated delicately—"not socially at all. She was never in society."

The banker looked at Symes sidewise through a cloud of smoke and his lips twitched suspiciously at the corners. He said merely:

"No?" and continued to stare at the pall-bearers clinging to the wheels of the hearse while they waited outside the undertaking establishment for Lutz to beat his way back with the plume.

"I'd like to have a look at this man Dubois, if it's possible," he said suddenly.

"Why, yes," said Symes not too willingly. "They're going to the Hall now to hold the services." He hated to be separated from Capital even for so short a time, besides he had a hope that his "magnetic personality" and personal explanations might go a long way toward softening any criticisms he might make when he noted the discrepancies between Mudge's statements and the actual conditions.

Symes had been quick to recognize this man's leadership and importance; simultaneously his sanguine temperament had commenced to build upon the banker's support—perhaps even to the extent of financing the rest of the project.

The banker followed the morbid crowd up the steep stairs to the Hall and seated himself on one of the squeaking folding chairs beside Mrs. Abe Tutts and Mrs. Alva Jackson, who were holding hands and stifling sobs which gave the impression that their hearts were breaking.

The ugly lodge room whose walls were decorated with the gaudy insignias of the Order was filled to overflowing with the citizens of Crowheart, whose attendance was prompted by every other reason than respect. But this a stranger could not know, since the emotion which racked Mrs. Percy Parrott's slender frame and reddened Mrs. Hank Terriberry's nose seemed to spring from overwhelming grief at the loss of a good friend and neighbor.

Mrs. Jackson's rose-geranium had blossomed just in the nick of time, and Mrs. Parrott, who did beautiful work in paper flowers, had fashioned a purple pillow which read "At Rest" and reposed conspicuously upon the highly polished cover of a sample coffin. Nor could the stranger, who found himself dividing attention with the casket, know that the faltering tributes to the deceased taxed the young rector's ingenuity and conscience to the utmost. Indeed, as he saw the evidences of esteem and noted the tears of the grief-stricken ladies, he regretted the impulse which had prompted him to go, for he could not conceive the removal of the Dubois of his acquaintance being the occasion of either private or public sorrow.

But even the sermons of young rectors must end, and at last Lutz, in the tremulous, minor, crepe-trimmed voice and drooping attitude which made the listeners feel that undertakers like poets are born, not made, urged those who cared to do so to step forward and pass around to the right.

Yes, it was he; there was no doubt about that; the brutal, obstinate face had altered very little in twenty years. Twenty years? It was all of that since he had seen old "Ed" Dubois betting his gold-dust on an Indian horse race—twenty years since young Dick Kincaid had floundered through the drifts in a mountain pass to see how the Canuck saved flour gold. Once more he was on the trail, scuffling rocks which rolled a mile without a stop. Before him were the purple blotches which the violets made and he could smell the blossoms of the thorn and service berry bushes that looked like fragrant banks of snow. He felt again the depression of the silence in the valley below—the silence in which he heard, instead of barking dogs and laughing children, the beating of his own heart. He never had forgotten the sight that met his eyes, and he recalled it now with a vividness which made him shudder, and he heard with startling clearness the childish voice of a half-naked, emaciated boy saying without braggadocio or hysteria—

"I'm goin' to find him, m'sieu, and when I do I'll get him, sure!"

Twenty years is a long time to remember an injury, but not too long for Indian blood. It was a good shot—the purple hole was exactly in the centre of the low, corrugated forehead—it had been no boyish, idle threat. His son had "got him, sure!" Neither had Dick Kincaid forgotten his own answer—

"If you do, boy, and I find it out, I don't know as I'll give you away."

He had learned to save flour gold and he was known as Richard H. Kincaid in the important middle west city where he had returned with his fortune. Time and experience had cooled his blood, yet, deep down, his heart always responded to the call of the old, primitive justice of the mining camps—"An eye for an eye: a tooth for a tooth."

Kincaid became conscious that he was being eyed in curiosity and impatience by the eager folk behind. He heard Mrs. Tutts's rasping whisper as he moved along—

"She ain't shed a tear—not even gone into black. I'll bet she don't aim to view the corp' at all!"

Kincaid followed Mrs. Tutts's disapproving gaze.

That was the suspect! That slim, young girl with her delicately cut features hardened to meet the concentrated gaze of a procession of staring, unfriendly eyes? Why, as he glanced about him, she looked the only lady in the room!

Essie sat with the feeling that ice had formed about her heart, trying to bear unflinchingly the curious or sneering looks of those she had known well enough to call by their first names. It was torture for the sensitive girl who saw in each cold eye the thought that she had killed a man—killed a human being—for money!

A feeling of overwhelming pity surged over Kincaid as he looked at her, a feeling so strong that when she raised her eyes and gazed squarely into his he wondered if he had spoken aloud. They were blue and beautiful, her eyes, as two mountain forget-me-nots, like two bruised flowers, he thought, that had been hurt to death. He could remember having seen only one other pair like them.

An impulse so strong, a resolve so sudden and violent that it sent the blood in a crimson wave above his collar and over his face seized him, and he whispered to himself as he moved toward the door—

"I'll see her through, by George! I'll stand by her till there's skating in the place that don't commonly freeze!"