Apprehensively he watched the end of the ribbon running under P.D.'s hoofs for the sight of a horsewoman breaking free of the foothills. The momentary fear which rode with him was that Mary might be returning earlier than usual. If they met on the road—why, the road was without imagination and, in keeping with her new attitude toward him, she might pass him by with a nod. But at the top of the pass imagination would be supreme. There they had first met; there they had found their first thought in common in the ozone which had meant life to them both.

He did not look up at the sky changes. As he climbed the winding path worn by moccasined feet before the Persians marched to Thermopylae, his mind was too occupied making pictures of its own in glowing anticipation to have any interest in outside pictures. This path was narrow. Here, at least, she must pause; and she must listen. Every turn which showed another empty stretch ahead sent his spirits soaring. Then he saw a pony with an empty side-saddle on the shelf. A few steps more and he saw Mary.

She was seated with the defile at her back, her hands clasped over her knee. In this position, as in every position which she naturally took, she had a pliant and personal grace. The welter of light of the low sun was ablaze in her face. Her profile had a luminous wistfulness. Her lashes were half closed, at once retaining the vision of the panorama at her feet as a thing of atmospheric enjoyment and shutting it out from the intimacy of her thoughts. And more enveloping than the light was the silence which held her in a spell as still as the rocks themselves, waiting on time's dispensation where time was nothing. Yet the soft movement of her bosom with her even breaths triumphed in a life supreme and palpitant over all that dead world.

Thus he drank her in before the crunch of a stone under his heel warned her of his presence and set her breaths going and coming in quick gusts as she wheeled around, half rising and then dropping back to a position as still as before, with a trace of new dignity in her grace, while her starkness of inquiry gradually changed to stoicism.

"Mary, I came upon you very suddenly," he said.

"Yes"—a bare, echoing monosyllable.

He stepped to one side to let Firio and his little cavalcade pass. All the while she continued to look at him through the screen of her half-closed lashes in a way that set her repose and charm apart as something precious and cold and baffling. Now he realized that he had made a breach in the barrier of their old relations only to find himself in a garden whose flowers fell to ashes at his touch. He saw the light that enveloped her as an armor far less vulnerable than any wall, and the splendor of her was growing in his eyes.

Jag Ear's bells with their warm and merry notes became a faint tinkle that was lost in the depths of the defile. The two were alone on the spot where the Eternal Painter had introduced them so simply as Jack and Mary, and where he, as the easy traveller, had listened to her plead for his own life. It was his turn to plead. She was not to be won by fighting Leddys or tearing up pine-trees by their roots. That armor was without a joint; a lance would bend like so much tin against its plates, and yet there must be some alchemy that would make it melt as a mist before the sun. It was tenanted by a being all sentiency, which saw him through her visor as a passer-by in a gallery. But one in armor does not fly from passers-by as she had flown while he was climbing up the canyon wall with his pine-tree branch.

"I have learned now to look over any kind of a precipice without getting dizzy," she announced, quietly.

He was not the Jack who had come over the ledge in the energy of his passion yesterday to find her gone. He had turned gentle and was smiling with craved permission for a respite from her evident severity as he dropped to a half-lying posture near her. Overhead, the Eternal Painter was throwing in the smoky purple of a false thunderhead, sweeping it away with the promise of a downpour, rolling in piles of silver clouds and drawing them out into filmy fingers melting into a luminous blue.

"One can never tire of this," he said, tentatively.

"To me it is all!" she answered, in an absorption with the scene that made him as inconsequential as the rocks around her.

"And you never long for cities, with their swift currents and busy eddies?" he asked.

"Cities are life, the life of humanity, and I am human. I—" The unfinished sentence sank into the silence of things inexpressible or which it was purposeless to express.

Her voice suggested the tinkle of Jag Ear's bells floating away into space. If a precipitate were taken from her forehead, in keeping with Jack's suggestion to Dr. Bennington, it would have been mercury, which is so tangible to the eye and intangible to the touch. Press it and it breaks into little globules, only to be shaken together in a coherent whole. If there is joy or pain in the breaking, either one must be glittering and immeasurable.

"But Little Rivers is best," she added after a time, speaking not to him, but devoutly to the oasis of green.

In the crystal air Little Rivers seemed so near that one could touch the roofs of the houses with the fingertips of an extended arm, and yet so diminutive in the spacious bosom of the plateau that it might be set in the palm of the hand.

Jack was as one afraid of his own power of speech. A misplaced word might send her away as oblivious of him as a globule of mercury rolling free from the grasp. Here was a Mary unfathomed of all his hazards of study, undreamed of in all his flights of fancy.

"It is my last view," he began. "I have said all my good-bys in town. I am going."

Covertly, fearfully, he watched the effect of the news. At least now she would look around at him. He would no longer have to talk to a profile and to the golden mist of the horizon about the greatest thing of his life. But there was no sign of surprise; not even an inclination of her head.

"Yes," she told the horizon; and after a little silence added: "The time has come to play another part?"

She asked the question of the horizon, without any trace of the old banter over the wall. She asked it in confirmation of a commonplace.

"I know that you have always thought of me as playing a part. But I am not my own master. I must go. I—"

"Back to your millions!" She finished the sentence for him.

"Then you—you knew! You knew!" But his exclamation of astonishment did not move her to a glance in his direction or even a tremor.

"Yes," she went on. "Father told me about your millions last night. He has known from the first who you were."

"And he told no one else in Little Rivers? He never mentioned it to me or even to you before!"

"Why should he when you did not mention it yourself? His omission was natural delicacy, in keeping with your own attitude. Isn't it part of the custom of Little Rivers that pasts melt into the desert? There is no standard except the conduct of the present!"

And all this speech was in a monotone of quiet explanation.

"He did not even tell you until last night! Until after our meeting on the other side of the pass! It is strange! strange!" he repeated in the insistence of wonder.

He saw the lashes part a little, then quiver and close as she lifted her gaze from the horizon rim to the vortex of the sun. Then she smiled wearily.

"He likes a joke," she said. "Probably he enjoyed his knowledge of your secret and wanted to see if I would guess the truth before you were through playing your part."

"But the part was not a part!" he said, with the emphasis of fire creeping along a fuse. "It was real. I do not want to leave Little Rivers!"

"Not in your present enthusiasm," she returned with a warning inflection of literalness, when he would have welcomed satire, anger, or any reprisal of words as something live and warm; something on which his mind could lay definite hold.

In her impersonal calm she was subjecting him to an exquisite torture. He was a man flayed past all endurance, flayed by a love that fed on the revelation of a mystery in her being superbly in control. The riot of all the colors of the sky spoke from his eyes as he sprang to his feet. He became as intense as in the supreme moment in the arroyo; as reckless as when he walked across the store toward a gun-muzzle. Only hers were this time the set, still features. His were lighted with all the strength of him and all the faith of him.

"A part!" he cried. "Yes, a part—a sovereign and true part which I shall ever play! I was going that day we first met, going before the legate of the millions came to me. Why did I stay? Because I could not go when I saw that you wanted to turn me out of the garden!"

His quivering words were spoken to a profile of bronze, over which flickered a smile as she answered with a prompting and disinterested analysis.

"You said it was to make callouses on your hands. But that must have been persiflage. The truth is that you imagined a challenger. You wanted to win a victory!" she answered.

"It was for you that I calloused my hands!"

"Time will make them soft!"

She was half teasing now, but teasing through the visor, not over the wall.

"And if I sought victory I saw that I was being beaten while I made a profession of you, not of gardening! Yes, of you! I could confess it to all the world and its ridicule!"

"Jack, you are dramatic!"

If she would only once look at him! If he could only speak into her eyes!
If her breaths did not come and go so regularly!

"Why did I take to the trail after Pedro Nogales struck at me with his knife? Because I saw the look on your face when you saw that I had broken his arm. I had not meant to break his arm—yet I know that I might have done worse but for you! I did not mean to kill Leddy—yet there was something in me which might have killed him but for you!"

"I am glad to have prevented murder!" she answered almost harshly.

A shadow of horror, as if in recollection of the scene in the arroyo and beside the hedge, passed over her face.

"Yes, I understand! I understand!" he said. "And you must hear why this terrible impulse rose in me."

"I know."

"You know? You know?" he repeated.

"About the millions," she corrected herself, hastily. "Go on, Jack, if you wish!" Urgency crept into her tone, the urgency of wishing to have done with a scene which she was bearing with the fortitude of tightened nerves.

"It was the millions that sent me out here with a message, when I did not much care about anything, and their message was: 'We do not want to see you again if you are to be forever a weakling. Get strong, for our power is to the strong! Get strong, or do not come back!'"

"Yes?"

For the first time since he had begun his story she looked fairly at him. It was as if the armor had melted with sympathy and pity and she, in the pride of the poverty of Little Rivers, was armed with a Samaritan kindliness. For a second only he saw her thus, before she looked away to the horizon and he saw that she was again in armor.

"And I craved strength! It was my one way to make good. I rode the solitudes, following the seasons, getting strength. I rejoiced in the tan of my arm and the movement of my own muscles. I learned to love the feel of a rifle-stock against my shoulder, the touch of the trigger to my finger's end. I would shoot at the cactus in the moonlight—oh, that is difficult, shooting by moonlight!—and I gloried in my increasing accuracy—I, the weakling of libraries and galleries and sunny verandas of tourist resorts! Afraid at first of a precipice's edge, I came to enjoy looking over into abysses and in spending a whole day climbing down into their depths, while Firio waited in camp. And at times I would cry out: 'Millions, I am strong! I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of anything!' In the days when I knew I could never be acceptable as their master I knew I was in no danger of ever having to face them. When I had grown strong, less than ever did I want to face them. I know not why, but I saw shadows; I looked into another kind of depths—mental depths—which held a message that I feared. So I procrastinated, staying on in the air which had given me red blood. But that was cowardly, and that day I came over the pass I was making my last ride in the kingdom of irresponsibility. I was going home!

"When you asked me not to face Leddy I simply had to refuse. I had just as soon as not that Leddy would shoot at me, because I wanted to see if he would. Yes, I was strong. I had conquered. And if Leddy hit me, why, I did not have to go back to battle with the shadows—the obsession of shadows which had grown in my mind as my strength grew. When I was smiling in Leddy's muzzle, as they say I did, I was just smiling exultantly at the millions that had called me a weakling, and saying, like some boaster, 'Could you do this, millions?' I—I—well, Mary, I—I have told you what I never was quite able to tell myself before."

"Thank you, Jack!" she answered, and all the particles of sunlight that bathed her seemed to reflect her quiet gladness as something detached, permeating, and transcendent.

"When Leddy challenged me I wanted to fight," he went on. "I wanted to see how cool I, the weakling whom the millions scorned, could be in battle. After Leddy's shot in the arroyo I found that strength had discovered something else in me—something that had lain dormant in boyhood and had not awakened to any consciousness of itself in the five years on the desert—something of which all my boyhood training made me no less afraid than of the shadows, born of the blood, born of the very strength I had won. It seemed to run counter to books and gardens and peace itself—a lawless, devil-like creature! Yes, I gloried in the fact that I could kill Leddy. It was an intoxication to hold a steady bead on him. And you saw and felt that in me—yes, I tell you everything as a man must when he comes to a woman offering himself, his all, with his angels, his devils, and his dreams!"

He paused trembling, as before a judge. She turned quickly, with a sudden, winsome vivacity, the glow of a great satisfaction in her eyes and smiling a comradeship which made her old attitude over the wall a thing of dross and yet far more intimate. Her hand went out to meet his.

"Jack, we have had good times together," she said. "We were never mawkish; we were just good citizens of Little Rivers, weren't we? And, Jack, every mortal of us is partly what he is born and the rest is what he can do to bend inheritance to his will. But we can never quite transform our inheritance and if we stifle it, some day it will break loose. The first thing is to face what seems born in us, and you have made a good beginning."

She gave his hands a nervous, earnest clasp and withdrew hers as she rose. So they stood facing each other, she in the panoply of good will, he with his heart on his sleeve. The swiftly changing pictures of the Eternal Painter in his evening orgy seemed to fill the air with the music of a symphony in its last measures, and her very breaths and smiles to be keeping time with its irresistible movement toward the finale.

"I must be starting back, Jack," she said.

"And, Mary, I must learn how to master the millions. Oh, I have not the courage of the little dwarf pine in the canyon! Mary, Mary, I calloused my hands for you! I want to master the millions for you! I would give you the freedom of Little Rivers and all the cities of the world!"

"No, Jack! This is my side of the pass. I shall be very happy here."

"Then I will stay in Little Rivers! I will leave the millions to the shadows! I will stay on ranch-making, fortune-making. Mary, I love you! I love you!"

There was no staying the flame of his feeling. He seized her hands; he drew her to him. But her hands were cold; they were shivering.

"Jack! No, no! It is not in the blood!" she cried in the face of some mocking phantom, her calmness gone and her words rocking with the tumult of emotion.

"In the blood, Mary? What do you mean? What do you know that I don't know? Do you know those shadows that I cannot understand better than I?" he pleaded; and he was thinking of the Doge's look of pity and challenge and of the meeting long ago in Florence as the hazy filaments of a mystery.

"No, I should not have said that. What do I know? Little—nothing that will help! I know what is in me, as I know what is in you. I am afraid of myself—afraid of you!"

"Mary, I will fight all the shadows!" He drew her close to him resistlessly in his might.

"Jack, you will not use your strength against me! Jack!"

He saw her eyes in a mist of pain and reproach as he released her. And now she threw back her head; she was smiling in the philosophy of garden nonsense as she cried:

"Good-by, Jack! Luck against the dinosaur! Don't press him too hard when he is turning a sharp corner. Remember he has a long reach with his old paleozoic tail. Luck!" with a laugh through her tears; a laugh with tremulous cheer in it and yet with the ring of a key in the lock of a gate.

Unsteadily he bent over and taking her hands in his pressed his lips to them.

"Yes, luck!" he repeated, and half staggering turned toward the defile.

"Luck!" she called after him when he was out of sight. "Luck!" she called to the silence of the pass.

Three days with the trail and the Eternal Painter mocking him, when the singing of Spanish verses that go click with the beat of horse-hoofs in the sand sounded hollow as the refrain of vain memories, and from the steps of a Pullman he had a final glimpse of Firio's mournful face, with its dark eyes shining in the light of the station lamp. Firio had in his hand a paper, a sort of will and testament given him at the last minute, which made him master in fee simple of the ranch where he had been servant, with the provision that the Doge of Little Rivers might store his overflow of books there forever.