Jasper Ewold was a disciple of an old-fashioned custom that has fallen into disuse since the multiplicity of typewriters made writing for one's own pleasure too arduous; or, if you will have another reason, since our existence and feelings have become so complex that we can no longer express them with the simple directness of our ancestors. He kept a diary with what he called a perfect regularity of intermittency. A week might pass without his writing a single word, and again he might indulge freely for a dozen nights running. He wrote as much or as little as he pleased. He wrote when he had something to tell and when he was in the mood to tell it.

"It is facing yourself in your own ink," he said. "It is confessing that you are an egoist and providing an antidote for your egoism. Firstly, you will never be bored by your own past if you can appreciate your errors and inconsistencies. Secondly, you will never be tempted to bore others with your past as long as you wish to pose as a wise man."

He must have found, as you would find if you had left youth behind and could see yourself in your own ink, that the first tracery of any controlling factor in your life was faint and inconsequential to you at the time, without presage of its importance until you saw other lines, also faint and inconsequential in their beginnings, drawing in toward it to form a powerful current.

On the evening that Jack took to the trail again, Jasper Ewold had a number of thick notebooks out of the box in the library which he always kept locked, and placed them on the living-room table beside his easy chair, in which he settled himself. Mary was sewing while he pored over his life in review as written by his own hand. Her knowledge of the secrets of that chronicle from wandering student days to desert exile was limited to glimpses of the close lines of fine-written pages across the breadth of the circle of the lamp's reflection. He surrounded his diary with a line of mystery which she never attempted to cross. On occasions he would read to her certain portions which struck his recollection happily; but these were invariably limited to his impressions of some city or some work of art that he was seeing for the first time in the geniality of the unadulterated joy of living in what she guessed was the period of youth before she was born; and never did they throw any light on his story except that of his views as a traveller and a personality. But he did not break out into a single quotation to-night. It seemed as if he were following the thread of some reference from year to year; for he ran his fingers through the leaves of certain parts hastily and became studiously intense at other parts as he gloomily pondered over them.

Neither she nor her father had mentioned Jack since the scene by the hedge. This was entirely in keeping with custom. It seemed a matter of instinct with both that they never talked to each other of him. Yet she was conscious that he had been in her father's mind all through the evening meal, and she was equally certain that her father realized that he was in her mind.

It was late when the Doge finished his reading, and he finished it with the page of the last book, where the fine handwriting stopped at the edge of the blank white space of the future. An old desire, ever strong with Mary, which she had never quite had the temerity to express, had become impelling under the influence of her father's unusually long and silent preoccupation.

"Am I never to have a glimpse of that treasure? Am I never, never to read your diary?" she asked.

The Doge drew his tufted eyebrows together in utter astonishment.

"What! What, Mary! Why, Mary, I might preach a lesson on the folly of feminine curiosity. Do you think I would ask to see your diary?"

"But I don't keep one."

"Hoo-hoo-hoo!" The Doge was blowing out his lips in an ado of deprecatory nonsense. "Don't keep one? Have you lost your memory?"

"I had it a minute ago—yes," after an instant's playful consideration,
"I am sure that I have it now."

"Then, everybody with a memory certainly keeps a diary. Would you want me to read all the foolish things you had ever thought? Do you think I would want to?"

"No," she answered.

"There you are, then!" declared the Doge victoriously, as he rose, slipping a rubber band with a forbidding snap over the last book. "And this is all stupid personal stuff—but mine own!"

There was an unconscious sigh of weariness as he took up the thumbed leather volumes. He was haggard. "Mine own" had given him no pleasure that evening. All the years of his life seemed to rest heavily upon him for a silent moment. Mary feared that she had hurt him by her request.

"You have read so much you will scarcely do any writing to-night," she ventured.

"Yes, I will add a few more lines—the spirit is in me—a few more days to the long record," he said, absently, then, after a pause, suddenly, with a kind of suppressed force vibrating in his voice: "Well, our Sir Chaps has gone."

"As unceremoniously as he came," she answered.

"It was terrible the way he broke Nogales's wrist!" remarked the
Doge narrowly.

"Terrible!" she assented as she folded her work, her head bent.

"Gone, and doubtless for good!" he continued, still watching her sharply.

"Very likely!" she answered carelessly without looking up. "His vagarious playtime for this section is over."

"Just it! Just it!" the Doge exclaimed happily.

"And if Leddy overtakes him now, it's his own affair!"

"Yes, yes! He and his Wrath of God and Jag Ear are away to other worlds!"

"And other Leddys!"

"No doubt! No doubt!" concluded the Doge, in high good humor, all the vexation of his diary seemingly forgotten as he left the room.

But, as the Doge and Mary were to find, they were alone among Little Riversites in thinking that the breaking of Pedro Nogales's wrist was horrible. Jim Galway, who had witnessed the affair, took a radically contrary view, which everyone else not of the Leddy partisanship readily accepted. Despite the frequency of Jack's visits to the Ewold garden and all the happy exchange of pleasantries with his hosts, the community could not escape the thought of a certain latent hostility toward Jack on the part of the Doge, the more noticeable because it was so out of keeping with his nature.

"Doge, sometimes I think you are almost prejudiced against Jack Wingfield because he didn't let Leddy have his way," said Jim, with an outright frankness that was unprecedented in speaking to Jasper Ewold. "You're such a regular old Quaker!"

"But that little Mexican panting in abject fear against the hedge!" persisted the Doge.

"A nice, peaceful little Mexican with a knife, sneaking up to plant it in
Jack's neck!"

"But Jack is so powerful! And his look! I was so near I could see it well as he towered over Nogales!"

"Yes, no mistaking the look. I saw it in the arroyo. It made me think of what the look of one of those old sea-fighters might have been like when they lashed alongside and boarded the enemy."

"And the crack of the bone!" continued the Doge.

"Would you have a man turn cherub when he has escaped having his jugular slashed by a margin of two or three inches? Would you have him say, 'Please, naughty boy, give me your knife? You mustn't play with such things!'"

"No! That's hyperbole!" the Doge returned with a lame attempt at a laugh.

"Mebbe it is, whatever hyperbole is," said Jim; "but if so, hyperbole is a darned poor means of self-defence. Yes, the trouble is you are against Jack Wingfield!"

"Yes, I am!" said the Doge suddenly, as if inward anger had got the better of him.

"And the rest of us are for him!" Jim declared sturdily.

"Naturally! naturally!" said the Doge, passing his hand over his brow.
"Yes, youth and color and bravery!" He shook his head moodily, as if
Jim's statement brought up some vital, unpleasant, but inevitable fact
to his mind.

"It's beyond me how anybody can help liking him!" concluded Galway stubbornly.

"I like him—yes, I do like him! I cannot help it!" the Doge admitted rather grudgingly as he turned away.

"So we weren't so far apart, after all!" Galway hastened to call after the Doge in apology for his testiness. "We like him for what he has been to us and will always be to us. That's the only criterion of character in Little Rivers according to your own code, isn't it, Jasper Ewold?"

"Exactly!" answered the Doge over his shoulder.

The community entered into a committee of the whole on Jack Wingfield. With every citizen contributing a quota of personal experience, his story was rehearsed from the day of his arrival to the day of his departure. Argument fluctuated on the question of whether or not he would ever return, with now the noes and now the ayes having it. On this point Jim had the only first-hand evidence.

"He said to let things grow until he showed up or I heard from him," said Jim.

"Not what I would call enlightening," said Bob Worther.

"That was his way of expressing it; but to do him justice, he showed what a good rancher he was by his attention to the details that had to be cared for," Jim added.

"He's like the spirit of the winds, I guess," put in Mrs. Galway.
"Something comes a-calling him or a-driving him, I don't know which.
Indeed, I'm not altogether certain that it isn't a case of Mary Ewold
this time!"

"Yes," agreed Jim. "The fighting look went out of his face when she spoke, and when he saw how horrified she was, why, I never saw such a change come over a man! It was just like a piece of steel wilting."

However, the children, who had no part in the august discussions of the committee of the whole, were certain that their story-teller would come back. Their ideas about Jack were based on a simple, self-convincing faith of the same order as Firio's. Lonely as they were, they were hardly more lonely than their elders, who were supposed to have the philosophy of adults.

No Jack singing out "Hello!" on the main street! No Jack looking up from work to ask boyishly: "Am I learning? Oh, I'll be the boss rancher yet!" No Jack springing all sorts of conceits, not of broad humor, but the kind that sort of set a "twinkling in your insides," as Bob Worther expressed it! No Jack inspiring a feeling deeper than twinkles on his sad days! He had been an improvement in town life that became indispensable once it was absent. Little Rivers was fairly homesick for him.

"How did we ever get along without him before he came, anyway?" Bob
Worther demanded.

Then another new-comer, as distinctive from the average settler as Jack was, diverted talk into another channel, without, however, reconciling the people to their loss.