g for their invasions, with the
echoes ready to fling back his exultant voice when he called to her or
sang for her or laughed at her; ready to imitate enviously her voice
when she laughed back at him. He wanted that day to come soon, and so
with days and hours and minutes he became a miser and would not spend
them in the luxury of a visit to her. It seemed to him that his
longing for her measured itself by the enormous appetite he had for
work, that summer.

Week followed week as he followed that thin, fluctuating streak of pay
gravel along the ledge. Sometimes it was rich enough to set the pulse
pounding in his temples; sometimes it was so poor that he was disgusted
to the point of abandoning the work. But every day he worked, it
yielded him something--though there was a week when he averaged about
fifty cents a day and lived with a scowl on his face--and he kept at it.

He went out in June and bought a mower and rake and then spent precious
days getting them into his valley. There was no road, you see, and he
was compelled to haul them in a wagon, through country where nature
never meant four wheels to pass. He hired a man for a month--one of
those migratory individuals who works for a week or a month in one
place and then wanders on till his money is spent--and he drove that
man as relentlessly as he drove himself. Together they accomplished
much, while the goldpan lay hidden under a buck brush and Ward's waking
moments were filled with an uneasy sense of wasted time. Still, it was
for the good of his ranch and his cattle and his air-castle that he
toiled in the gulch, and it was necessary that he should put up what
hay he could. There would be calves to feed next winter, he hoped; and
when the hardest storms came, his horse would need a little. The rest
of the stock would have to rustle; and that was why he had chosen this
nook among the hills, where the wind would sweep the high slopes bare
of snow, and the gulches would give shelter with their heavy thickets
of quaking aspens and willow and alder.

He was thankful when the creek bottom was shaved clean of grass, and
the stack beside his corral was of a satisfying length and height. The
summer had been kind to the grass-growth, and his hay crop was larger
than he had expected. A few days had remained of the month, and Ward
had used them to extend his fence so as to give more pasturage to his
calves in mild weather. After that he paid the man, direct