When jack-screws and moving teams had done their work in the town of Paradise but one house remained, the minister’s, and that only because Curtis Clayton had purchased it and moved into it, with Justin. The farmers of the valley wondered that he should remain, but tempered their surprise with gratitude.

He and Justin seemed even more closely linked now. But not even to Justin did he ever speak of why he had come to the valley or why he tarried. The coming appeared to have been a thing of chance, as when a batted ball rolling to some obscure corner of the field stops there because no force is applied to move it farther. If there was any observable change in him after Wingate’s death, it was that he became more restless. The mind of the dreamer, in its workings somewhat akin to his own, yet with a simple faith which he did not possess, had soothed and rested him.

Clayton wore out his increased restlessness by long walks with Justin, abandoning the rides apparently because he disliked to leave the boy alone. But his fame as a doctor was spreading through the thinly-settled country, and when forced away from home by calls he left Justin at the house of some farmer, usually that of Sloan Jasper, for there the boy found pleasant companionship in the person of Mary Jasper, a dark-eyed girl, with winning, mischievous ways and cheeks like wild rose petals. Time never hung heavily with Justin at Sloan Jasper’s.

In addition to his work of instructing Justin, and his reading, Clayton spent much time in writing, in the little room which the minister had fitted up as a study. Sometimes Justin was given the privilege of dusting this room, and once when so engaged he whisked from the table the scorched photograph he had seen before. Clayton had evidently been looking at it, had placed it under a large blotter, and then had neglected to put it away before admitting Justin. The boy stared intently into the beautiful face shadowed forth on that bit of cardboard, for he wondered; then he replaced it beneath the blotter and resumed his dusting. But a question had arisen in his heart.

To give Justin pleasant occupation and make the time pass more rapidly, Clayton purchased a few sheep and placed the boy over them as a herder; and, as if to furnish diversion for himself, he assisted Justin in building a sod-walled corral and sod shelters for the sheep.

It was a delight to Justin to guard the sheep on the grassy slopes and drive them to the tepid water-holes. Often he did this in company with Mary Jasper; he on foot, or high on Clayton’s horse, the rosy-cheeked girl swaying at his side on her lazy gray burro, which she had to beat continually with a small cudgel if she progressed at all.

Once Clayton remonstrated with her for what he deemed her cruelty to the beast.

“Doctor Clayton,” she said severely, wrinkling her small forehead, “the only way to make this critter go is to kill him; that’s what my paw says!” and she swayed on, pounding the burro’s back with the stick and kicking his sides energetically with her bare heels.

Yet the valley life was lonely, so that the coming of any one was an event; and it was a red-letter day when Lemuel Fogg drifted in with his black-topped, wine-colored photograph wagon, and William Sanders with his dirty prairie schooner. Fogg was a fat young man, whose mustache drooped limply over a wide good-humored mouth, and whose round face was splotched yellow with large freckles. Sanders was even younger than Fogg. He lacked Fogg’s buoyancy and humor, had shrewd little gray eyes that peered and pried, and slouched about in shabby ill-fitting clothing. Clayton gave them both warm welcome, and they remained with him over night.

Sanders, who was alone in his wagon, was looking for land on which to settle. Apparently Fogg’s present business was to take photographs, and he began by taking one of Justin standing in the midst of his sheep, with Mary Jasper sitting on her burro beside him, her bare feet and ankles showing below her dusty gray dress.

In addition to the land, which he looked over carefully with his shrewd little eyes, Sanders cast furtive glances at Clayton’s stiff arm. He ventured to word a question, when he and Fogg sat with Justin and Clayton in the little study after supper, surrounded by Clayton’s books and papers, while the sheep were securely housed in the sod corral and the unrelenting wind piped insistently round the house.

“'Tain’t any my business as I know of,” he began, apologetically, “but I can’t help lookin’ at that arm o’ your’n, and wonderin’ what made it so. I had my fortune told onc’t by a man who had an arm like that, and he said a tiger bit it. He was an East Injun, er a Malay, I reckon. It come to me that you might have met with an accident sometime, er somethin’ er 'nuther? There’s a story about it, I reckon?”

The blood rushed in a wave to Clayton’s face and appeared to suffuse even his dark eyes. He did not answer the question, being sensitive on the subject, and deeming it an impertinence.

Sanders waited a time, while Fogg talked; then he returned to his inquiry, with even greater emphasis.

“Yes, there is a story,” said Clayton, speaking slowly, after a moment of hesitation, while a ghastly smile took the attractiveness out of his thoughtful countenance. “It wasn’t an accident, though.”

“No?” said Sanders.

“The thing was done in cool deliberation. I was in college, in a medical college, for I’m a doctor you know. I was a student then; and it was the custom among the students to perform various operations on each other, by way of practice, so that when we went out from there to begin our work we would know how things should be done. One day I sawed a student’s skull open, took out a spoonful of his brains, and sewed the wound up so nicely that he was well in a week. The operation was a great success, but I dipped a little too deep and took out too much of the gray matter, and after that he was always omitting something or other that he should have remembered. In return for what he had permitted me to do he put me on the operating table one day, broke my arm with a mallet, and then proceeded to put it together again. In doing so he omitted the funny bone, and my arm has been this way ever since.”

Fogg broke into a roar of laughter. Sanders flushed slowly; and getting up walked to the other end of the room, chewing wrathfully, splintering the story with his teeth as he splintered the grass blades that he plucked and chewed when walking about to view the valley land.

“Huh!” he grunted, coming back and dropping lumpily into his chair. “Tell that to a fool an’ mebbe you’ll git a fool to believe ye, but I don’t!”

Fogg slapped his fat knee and roared again.

“Ha, ha! Ho, ho! Ask him something else, Sanders! Who-ee! Doc, I didn’t think it was in you! If you do anything like that again I’ll have to let a reef out of the band of my trousers. Fire another question at him, Sanders.”

“No,” said Sanders, while a sullen fire glowed in his little eyes; “I was goin’ to ask him some other things, but I’m done!”

Then he chewed again, tried hard to laugh, and seemed about to say something; but Fogg broke in.

“I say, Doc, you can tell a story so well you’d ought to be in my line. Story telling is my long suit. Lincoln ought to have altered his immortal saying before giving it to the world. My experience is that if you keep the people in a good humor you can fool _all_ of them _all_ of the time, and there ain’t any better way than by feeding them anecdotes and jollying them until they think they are the smartest ever. For instance, Sanders believes in fortune tellers; they jolly him, and that pleases him, and they get his coin. It’s the same way with everything and everybody.”

In addition to the photographic apparatus stored in the wine-colored wagon Fogg had a collection of Navajo blankets, Pueblo pottery, Indian baskets, bows and arrows, and such things. Seeing that his host was not to be a purchaser, and being in a communicative mood, he did not hesitate to expose now the secrets of his trade, in proof of his view of the gullibility of the general public.

“See that,” he said, taking up a hideous image of Pueblo workmanship. “Ninety men out of a hundred will believe that thing, with its froggy mouth, is a Pueblo idol, without you telling them, and the others will believe it when you do tell them.”

“Huh!” grunted Sanders, still angry; “if 'tain’t an Injun idol, what is it?”

It seemed natural for Fogg to laugh, and he laughed again, with easy gurgling.

“You may call it anything you want to, but it ain’t an idol. I’ve seen Pueblo idols; there’s a room full of them in the old Governor’s Palace in Santa FÉ, and they look more than anything else like stone fence posts with holes gouged near one end for the eyes, nose and mouth. Them are genuine old Pueblo idols, but you bet the Pueblos didn’t sell them, and they didn’t give ’em away. Did you ever know of a people that would sell their God? I never did.”

“None, except Christians!” said Clayton, speaking slowly, but with emphasis.

Fogg set the staring image on the table and looked at him.

“I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, I reckon they do, a good deal of the time. But an Indian wouldn’t; he would never sell his God. Maybe it’s because Christians think so little of theirs that they’re so ready to believe a Pueblo will sell his for 'most any old thing. Them images are just caricatures, made to sell. I go among the Pueblos three or four times a year and buy up a lot of their pottery, and I encourage them to make these images, which the average tourist thinks are gods, for they sell better even than the water jars and other things that they turn out.

“Then I buy blankets of the Navajos, which they make dirt cheap now. I helped to put ’em onto that. You can sell a dozen cheap blankets easier than a single expensive one, especially when the people you’re selling to think they’re getting the genuine goods at a bargain. It’s easier for the Navajo weavers to tear old government blankets to pieces and re-weave them and color them with analine dyes than it is for them to take their own wool and their own dyes and put the things together in the old way. They won’t wear of course, and the colors fade, but they sell like hot cakes.

“I buy for a dealer, who snaps up everything of the kind I can bring him and hollers for more. You ought to see the crowds of people, especially tourists, who wear out his floors. I’m going to have a store of that kind myself some day. I take photographs for him, of scenery and other things that will sell; and bring him loads of basket work and bows and arrows from the Jicarilla Apaches just over the New Mexican line. He grabs for the Jicarilla work, which I can get almost cheaper than anybody, for I know the head men. The Jicarillas used to be slow workers and too honest, like the Navajo weavers; but they’re onto their job now, and can put a willow basket together and dye it with patent dyes in almost no time.”

Thus Lemuel Fogg discoursed of his business methods, until he had succeeded in proving several things concerning himself, in addition to his easy belief that the whole world is either covetous or dishonest.

Fogg departed the next morning, on his way to Denver. Sanders lingered in the valley for two or three days, peeking and prying, at intervals visiting a fortune teller of local repute in the town, who saw land, houses, and cattle for him, in the grounds of a coffee cup. But he was angered against Clayton and did not return to his house. A dozen times he told inquiring farmers that he “reckoned” he would take land there and become one of them. But the grounds in the coffee cup did not settle just right, and at length he, too, departed.