One late fall afternoon a man and a boy lingered under the shadow of tall trees and pondered tall things. The boy was propped against the trunk of an oak; his hat was pushed back from his face; his black tumbling hair made his slim brown face seem browner, his long eyes darker than they were; his young intensities of fancy and feeling were aroused, and manifest in the tremble of his lip, the vibrancy of his voice, the shaking light of his glance. The man lay flat on his back with a book spread out over his stomach and his long white fingers interlaced across the book fondly. Down at their feet the Di flowed swiftly, with the eyrie shiver on her bosom, making haste, like a frightened woman, past the lonely Tigmores toward the livelier corn and cotton lands. All around the horizon the sky so throbbed that here and there it rent the sheer cloud-veil that lay in delicate illusion over the blue. Through the trees played frightened flashes of colour, the whisk of a cardinal's wing, the burnt-red plume of a fox-squirrel's tail. In the air there was a palpitancy that was to the dream senses what colour vibrations are to the eye.

The man took up the book and began to read from it, and this was the burden of the reading:

"'Nobody can pretend to explain in detail the whole enigma of first love. But a general explanation is suggested by evolutional philosophy,—namely, that the attraction depends upon an inherited individual susceptibility to special qualities of feminine influence, and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition,'" the man smiled gravely and repeated the last stave with questioning care, "'and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition?—a sudden wakening of that inherited composite memory which is more commonly called passional affinity.'—I have a notion that that may mean something or other, Piney?"

"Don't ast me."

The reader began again: "'Certainly if first love be evolutionally explicable, it means the perception by the lover of something differentiating the beloved from all other women,—something corresponding to an inherited ideal within himself, previously latent, but suddenly lighted and defined,'—an inherited ideal—something differentiating the beloved from all other women," murmured the reader earnestly. He put the book back upon his stomach, and there was a long silence in the woods, broken by a distant reverberation, short, sharp, suggestive. Piney jumped, like the highly strung, alert young animal that he was.

"Whut wuz it, Mist' Steerin'?"

"Uncle Bernique's blasts, Piney. He's on the trail." The silence remained unbroken for another long period.

"Mist' Steerin'," began Piney at last; he had a long spear of sere grass in his mouth and he chewed at it argumentatively, "d'you think,—I couldn't adzackly tell whut that writin' wuz a-aimin' at, but simlike f'm the way it goes on that ef the sort of thing it makes aout to happen happens onst, it oughtn't never to happen agin, hmh?" Piney's long drawn notes of rising inflection were musical. "Simlike, ef a man onst finds the right woman they oughtn't never to be no more right women, hmh?"

"There ought not to be, Piney, son."

"Well, but they gen'ly is, hmh?" Bruce straightened out one foot with an impatient kick. Ever since they had fallen into the habit of abstracted talks on this imponderable subject, Piney had seemed able, with a sort of elfin craft, to make Bruce remember Miss Elsie Gossamer's light, fleeting touch upon his life. He had never mentioned Miss Gossamer to Piney in all their mutual experience, yet the tramp-boy was constantly skirmishing up from afar with a generalisation, like a high-held transparency, that illuminated Miss Gossamer's memory for Bruce. Three hypotheses had presented to Bruce in the way of explanation: one, that he himself was possessed by a little embarrassed consciousness that he should have had any past at all in view of the present; another, that Miss Sally Madeira had just possibly set Piney on to worry him about Miss Gossamer; and the last, that Piney, divining that a man could hardly reach Bruce's age without some pages of romance behind him, was forever, out of his own perspicacity, trying to make Bruce re-read those pages, so that this new page, that had been turned under the hand of Sally Madeira, might not be written.

"Piney," Bruce answered at last regretfully, "it's a pagan world. Men make mistakes. I think it's largely because they want so much to love that they love somebody, anybody, till the right person comes along."

"Should think they 'ud wait," demurred Piney stubbornly.

"Well, n—o, that's the notion of a man who has met the right person exactly in the beginning; or it's a woman's notion; but it isn't the notion of a man who, with a sense for beauty and sweetness, waits, like a harp for its music, out in the open where beauty and sweetness beat down upon him. Out in the open a man gets blind. Lord!" went on Steering, remembering Miss Gossamer again, and trying to explain her to himself, "how can a man help loving prettiness! That's what a man loves often and always, Piney, prettiness, grace, vivacity—and then once in his life he loves a woman—Hah!" cried Steering, as though he had at last got the best of Miss Gossamer, "that's it—that sounds good."

"Well, d'you think," went on Piney, jerking his spear of grass viciously, "d'you think that a man cand fall in love with a lady rat off, just knowin' her a few weeks?" This was one of Piney's ways of manifesting the jealousy that disquieted him, slurring covertly, and with his lips flickering peculiarly, at Steering's brief acquaintance with Miss Madeira. He was always showing in innumerable ways the hold that Bruce had taken upon his young affections, but he could not help showing, too, the sore spot of his valuation of Steering's regard for Miss Madeira. Though they mentioned Miss Madeira between them only casually, Bruce knew for himself that Piney, in his crude but vehement way, was living through a boy's own high tragedy of love for a woman older than he and beyond his reach, and Piney knew for himself that Steering, in the most perfect flower of his capacity, had attained his destiny as a perfect lover, under circumstances most unpropitious. The fact that the woman who was the object of the boy's enraptured fancy had levied royal tribute upon the man's love in the same purple-mannered fashion brought boy and man close. Tacitly they recognised that the bond between them was strong enough to bear the weight of Piney's jealousy, and, both watching, they allowed the boy to depend from it, swing on it and strain it just enough to make both conscious that the bond was there.

"You know what I think, Piney," said Steering after a long wait, in which he had been busy remembering the fulness of one moment in the Bank of Canaan. "I think that if she is the right woman a man can fall in love in one minute. And I think that if she is the right woman all eternity will not give him time to fall out of love with her and no sort of hell of bad situations will ever be wide enough to keep his thoughts away from her." Steering spoke with a well-ordered restraint, but a sense of the combination of situations that he himself had come into lent a ringing, protesting resonance to his voice, and Piney forgot to be jealous and flashed him a long, keen look of delight. Steering realised that he sometimes put into words the things that Piney yearned toward and dreamed, but could not express; and he also realised, from the added satisfaction that he got out of his words because of Piney's satisfaction in them, that Piney sometimes enlivened and enriched his own emotions for him. Their romancing made boy and man delicately complementary to each other. Steering had taken Piney's love for the girl who was beyond him as a fine and simple thing, and, taken in that way, it played up to Bruce's love with the rich imageries and colours of youth, and made Bruce younger, quicker for it. Piney, on his side, had a keen, shy consciousness of immaturity and inexperience that made him attend upon Bruce's outbursts of passion as upon an illumination of what this thing of man's love could be and should be at its biggest and best.

"That's just exactly the truth," maintained Steering earnestly. It was remarkable how earnest he could be on this line of opinion. Miss Elsie Gossamer would have marvelled to hear him. Time was when he had agreed with Miss Gossamer that only people who had known each other a long time, as he and she had, could depend upon their attitude toward each other. The attitude between Miss Gossamer and him had seemed very reliable in those prehistoric days when congeniality of taste, a flower face and the probability of getting through life without much worry on your mind and a good cigar in your mouth had seemed sufficient to him. Things like that seemed pitifully insufficient now. He wheeled about restlessly and considered.

From where he and Piney were they could hear the sound of a steam-drill, thud-thud-thudding into the heart of a distant knob of the Canaan Tigmores. That notion of Carington's and his about getting into the hills had undeniably balled up into the veriest nonsense under the pressure of Crittenton Madeira's control of the Tigmores. Steering pounded on the ground with one fist and clenched his hands tightly about his knees. That was not the worst, and he might as well face the worst. There was also by now the bitterest sort of animosity toward him on Madeira's part. Old Bernique, who was very fond of Miss Madeira and loathed her father, had commented to Steering upon that being Madeira's way with everyone who promised to be too much for him to handle—bah! it made Steering angry to consider that Madeira should ever have tried to "handle" him. He loosed the clench of his hands about his knees and jumped to his feet. That was not the worst, and he might as well face the worst. Naturally enough the daughter had had to go with the father. That ride across the sunset glory of the Tigmores had been good-bye after all. It had been two weeks since he had stood with her on the spur above Salome Park, and he had seen her twice since; once at the post-office, where she had said, "Good-morning, Mr. Steering"; once on Main Street in front of her father's bank, where she had said, "Good-evening, Mr. Steering."

But for all these things, he was not done with Missouri yet. Even now he was waiting for old Bernique. When Bernique should come they would be off again on a long prospect. Bernique and he had been in the hills for two weeks, skirting the Grierson entail, picking, digging, sniffing for ore by day, sleeping long sleeps on forest leaves, heaped and aromatic, by night. He had that day ridden into Canaan for some clean clothes, and was beating back toward Old Bernique now, having picked up Piney down the river road.

"Well, Piney, son," Steering invaded the rush of his own thoughts ruthlessly, "I expect I ought to be toddling. Going to ride part of the way with me? I think we shall fall in with Uncle Bernique up-stream a mile or so."

"Why, yes," assented Piney, rising; he made a keen calculation of the time by the sun, as he got to his feet; "I'll go a-ways with you. I'd like to see Unc' Bernique—aint seen him simlike fer a long time."

Their horses were tethered in a little glade below them and they went into the glade as they talked. "We like Uncle Bernique, don't we, Piney?" suggested Steering, relishing Piney's reference to the old Frenchman.

"Best old man in the world," answered Piney, with the soft, sweet shyness, like a girl's, that was always in his voice when he let his affections find expression.

Before this Steering had heard, from old Bernique himself, the short story that had connected the affections of the tramp-boy and the wandering prospector. Piney, Old Bernique had said, was the child of a woman whom he had known in St. Louis in the old days. Old Bernique, who was only middle-aged Bernique then, had lived as a neighbour to the woman, whom he had loved very much. But the woman had married another man, and had gone away to the Southwest. And, later on, Old Bernique had followed. And in these later days, since the woman's death, it had been given him to keep watch and ward over her child, Piney. Piney's parents had not been Italians at all, so Old Bernique told Steering, just plain, everyday Americans, from up "at that St. Louis," quite poor and always on the move. The father had been known throughout the country-side as a "blame' good fiddler" and the mother had been, oh a vair' wonderful woman, if one could believe Old Bernique. But there was no Italian blood in Piney. His feeling for Italy had to be explained in another way. It was the great sweet note of poetry, music and beauty, of that far country, vibrating across the years and the miles, taken up as a memory in the Missouri hills by Old Bernique and, through him, reaching a Missouri boy's heart, all tuned and pitched for it. That was all there was to Piney's story. It was only a fragment.

Reaching their horses in the glade, Steering and Piney mounted and started up the river road. "Can't you come with us for the rest of the week, son?" asked Bruce, as they journeyed.

"Nope. Goin' trampin' by myse'f." It was Piney's habit to disappear for days, gipsy that he was. Perhaps the habit was growing upon him a little of late. He had no abiding place; sometimes he referred to one hill shanty, sometimes to another, as home; but the home-feeling with him was at its fullest and strongest when he was "trampin'." Ostensibly his vocation was that of a travelling farm-hand, but it was all ostentation. Piney would not work. Not while the pony could carry him from hospitable farm-house to hospitable farm-house. He was a knight of the saddle, the uncrowned king of the woods, and Bruce, riding along beside him now, regarding him, enjoying him, would not have exchanged comradeship with the boy's simple, high-tuned relish of life for comradeship with kings.

"Miss Madeira is going to Europe, I hear, Piney," adventured Steering.

"Yass." Piney said nothing more for some time. He looked very thoughtful. "Y'see," he went on after a bit, "I'm a-thinkin' abaout ridin' off—some'ere—over the Ridge,—bein' gone fer a long time."

"Oh, Lord!" groaned Steering. He very well knew what was taking Piney away. It was hard on him that the boy's plan for absence should pile up on Sally Madeira's plan, but he could understand that it would be harder on the boy to stay in the Tigmores with the inspiration of the Tigmores hushed and gone.

"Not thinking of going to Italy yet, Piney?" It had come to be an accepted joke with them, that penchant of Piney's for Italy. The boy was willing to laugh about it, but his eyes always sobered dreamily in the end, and invariably he wound up with, "but I'm a-goin', all righty, an' don't you fergit it." He did now. "But y'see, whilst I'm a-waitin' I git kinda tired the hills, Mist' Steerin'," he complained, trying to explain how it was with him without telling anything. "Lots er times I go off an' don't come back fer a long time." Not till Miss Madeira comes home, Bruce added out of his own intuition. "Git sorta tired the hills," repeated Piney stubbornly.

"Do they stop talking to you, the hills and the woods and the quiet?"

"Yass, they do, sometimes, when I'm pestered—not as I pester much," he laughed and broke off suddenly in his laughter, with a little sobbing shake in his breath, and passed on ahead of Steering, who looked away from him up the bridle road that cut into the Canaan Tigmores.

"There comes Uncle Bernique!" cried Steering then, glad of a chance to divert Piney. Gazing toward Bernique welcomingly, he was diverted himself. The old man made no answer to the shouts that Piney and Steering sent out to him. He peered straight toward them, through them, his eyes dry and brilliant. He seemed hardly able to sit on his horse, because of a sort of enervating restlessness; he paid no attention whatever to his bridle; both of his hands were in the pockets of the tattered old coat that covered his body.

"Hi there, Pard!" hallooed Piney, with a boy's rich assurance that recognises neither class nor age.

"Found!" the old man tried to speak, but made a dry, clicking sound instead. He took his hands from his pockets and held up in each hand a lump of mineral earth. As he came toward them in that way, both hands upheld, the wild fever light in his eyes, his thin body electrified with a strange new vitality, to Steering, who saw all at once what it meant, his movement was that of the last full strain of the miner's epic. "Found! Found!" he repeated, as though the sound was blessed, and he held up the rocks, as though the sight was heaven. When they reached him, trembling by now themselves, they had to help him from his horse and quiet and rest him by the roadside before he could tell his tale. Waiting nervously, Bruce took the nuggets and regarded them; beautiful specimens, one stratum opaque, and seaming on to that stratum another, reddish and glinting, like the spiked fire of gold; and on that stratum another, grey and silver-faceted.

"Pretty splendid," cried Steering, and sat down suddenly and weakly. It was not to be forgotten that Old Bernique had emerged from the bridle-path in the Canaan Tigmores.

"When did you make the find, Uncle Bernique?" he asked hoarsely.

"Thees minute," control was coming back to the old man, he raised his head from Piney's shoulder and leaned toward Bruce—"only thees minute! And for twenty year I have known that it must be here, the ore, lead and zinc, in the gr-r-eat quantity! For twenty year! And just thees minute have I found it!" At the wailing sound of time lost, life lost, in Bernique's voice, long lines of ghostly, bent-backed miners, with ghostly, unavailing picks and shovels, seemed to defile down the bridle-path from the Canaan Tigmores in historic illustration, conjured up by the hypnosis of the old man's words.

"The troub' has been," went on Bernique feverishly, "that we have not looked for the ore in that place where the ore is——"

"That's always the troub'," muttered Piney. He had got his composure back and he seemed now rather good-naturedly contemptuous. Piney's was not a nature to accommodate itself to the exaltation of an ore find.

"The mother lode runs through the Canaan Tigmores," went on Bernique hurriedly, "of that I am now convince', but it comes to the surface,—it comes to the surface,—ah, God above! I expire with it,—let us go to Choke Gulch, and I will show you where it comes to the surface!"

He was insistent, his breath had come back to him, and they let him have his way, following him up the bridle-path into the long shadow of the Canaan Tigmores. On the top of the first bluff they tied their horses again and took a foot trail where the bluff, having rolled back a mile from the river, tumbled precipitately into a deep yawning gully. From the timbered eminence the prospect below was as dank and gloomy as a paleolithic fern forest. Sodden, mossy, and almost impenetrable, the hill split and dropped into Choke Gulch. From far down within the black and tangled fastnesses came the solemn ripple of slow-running water. A veil of weird loneliness hung over the cavernous place and the air that shivered up to the three was cool and laden with damp, sweet odours. Old Bernique began to descend. As they proceeded, the old man's sense of something stupendous impressed itself more and more upon his companions. Farther on down, the solemn quiet of the Gulch became unbearable, but no one spoke. Little sunlight penetrated the dense curtain of brown and red leaves overhead, and what little flickered through had an electric brightness against the dead brown of the leaf-carpeted ground and the grey and hoary tree-trunks. Every bird that came to the tree-tops sang once, but it was only when he discovered his mistake, lifted his wings and careened away gladly into the upper light.

"Whayee!" Piney found a shivering voice at last, "ef I never git rich till I come down into an ugly hole fer riches I'll be mighty pore all my days." Bruce smiled absently at the boy's susceptibility, but threw a reassuring arm about his shoulder. He smiled again when presently Piney drew away. That was Piney's habit, as affectionate in instinct as a kitten, and as timid of manifestation as a wild doe.

Old Bernique called his little party to a halt at the bottommost dip of the Gulch, where a deep, clear and rock-bound spring wound murmurously over a rocky bed. Two red spots came out in the old man's cheeks, his eyes began fairly to flame again, his breath came in wheezy gasps, and his old face pinched up sharp and sensitive as a pointer's nose. He pointed to the dÉbris of shattered rock about the spring. "The wataire fell over a cap-rock here," he said brusquely, the nervous constriction of his throat making it hard for him to say anything. "The strata underneath were soft and had been worn away by the wataire. I put a duck-nest of dynamite in there this morning,—and—see—there!"

Anybody could see; the zinc and lead ores were disseminated, rich and warm, in the loose rocks of the out-cropping. "It's a vein thirty inches thick and it runs,—it runs str-r-aight through the Canaan Tigmores,—sometimes sinking many feet from the surface,—but always there,—I am vair' sure of that,—str-r-aight through the Canaan Tigmores——" The old man's breath began to jerk with a sick, sobbing sound.

"Well,"—Steering was not so unaccustomed a miner by now but what the sight there in the Gulch had its effect upon him,—"Well," he said gingerly, "if you are right, Uncle Bernique, if the face doesn't cut blind, why, Mr. Crittenton Madeira and old Grierson have a good thing, haven't they?"

"Urg-h-h!" Old Bernique made a gnashing sound and leaned his head listeningly. The thud of the stream-drill reached them faintly from its place afar in the Canaan Tigmores. "They come fas'!" he said mournfully.

"Wisht I wuz aouter this," interrupted Piney, shivering.

"I have been track' thees mother lode,"—began old Bernique again, his feverish gaze again seeking out Bruce,—"I think,"—he stopped and fell to musing,—"What you gawn do, Mistaire Steering," he queried suddenly, with his weary old head twisted to one side, "what you gawn do about thees?"

"Lord, Uncle Bernique, I can't do anything. You might do something for yourself. You might sell your rights of discovery, might not you?"

"Non! Non! There is othaire thing,—there is a most good possibilitee,—thees mother lode, Mistaire Steering, it come out,—I think it come out somewhere, eh?—Mistaire Steering, have you got leetle mawney?"

"That's exactly how much, Uncle Bernique, a little."

"Mistaire Steering, eef you got leetle mawney to buy leetle land, I think I know good land to buy."

"I have told you all along to consider my money your money, Uncle Bernique."

"We must be vair' quiet about all thees, Mistaire Steering,—Piney, you compr-r-ehend that we tr-r-us' you, as I have always tr-r-us' you, absolutement! We must be vair' quiet. Thees leetle piece land run down close to the rivaire, below Poetical, at those Sowfoot Crossing, and eet ees not vair' good land for the farming——"

Thud! Thud! The old man caught his temples with both hands. "I am 'most craze' by that steam-drill," he whispered. "Eet come so close to our secret. Let us get away. That sound cr-r-aze me. Found! Found! Vair' large lode, Mistaire Steering.—SacrÉ! The sound of that steam-drill is to me the most worse thing. That lode run through and come out by the rivaire, eef I am not mistake', Mistaire Steering. I go to buy that land to-night. You go back with Piney, please sair. Eef you come with me, you excite the question and the price. To me it will be sold without question. I am eccentrique, they say. You return to Canaan and have your mawney ready for me, Mistaire Steering. That bat Grierson, Mistaire Steering! When I think——"

Old Bernique was still throwing out riches of castigation at Grierson, Madeira, himself, fate, still half incoherent, when the three friends at last got back to their horses, and separated. Down at the foot of the bluff again, Steering, a little sore-headed with the ache of anticipation, hope, doubt, sat his horse in Piney's company and watched the old man ride off up the river unattended. Steering felt excited and exalted himself, but the old Frenchman was really, as he said, "craze'." Piney was the only sensible one left. Piney was not at all enthused and stayed very quiet until he parted with Bruce some distance out from Canaan. Bruce went on back to town to wait for Old Bernique at the hotel.

Piney took the path that led up to the bluff behind Madeira Place. As he came through the Madeira grounds Crittenton Madeira came out of the house and stood on the back porch, regarding him quizzically. Piney had a peculiar, poorly hidden dislike of Madeira that, taken with the boy's charm of personality, more or less amused the Canaan capitalist.

"Where have you been, young man?"

"In the woods."

"Look here, learning anything when you are out with that man Steering?"

"Yep."

"What, for instance?"

"Not to talk."

Madeira laughed carelessly. "You go and get Miss Madeira to sing, young Impudence," he said. "I'd just as soon hear the tenor, too. I am going to rest,"—he sighed deeply,—"I'm going to try to rest out here in the garden. I'd like some music."

Madeira went to the garden and stretched out on a bench, the smile that he had given Piney staying on his face, crinkling in automatically with the grievous strain that was about his eyes and mouth in these days. After a little he closed his eyes softly, enjoyingly. From the library came the carolling sweetness of Piney's tenor. And by and by, following it, soaring up with it, the glorious fulness of Salome Madeira's velvety soprano.

Bruce, far down the river road, heard, too.