is memory and
let out all the trooping devils that lived there.

After that, though there was never any word of love between them, Billy
Louise, with the sure instinct of a woman innately pure, watched
unobtrusively for signs of those fits of bitter brooding; watched and
drove them off with various weapons of her own. Sometimes she
cheerfully declared that she was bored to death, and wasn't Ward just
dying for a game of "rob casino"? Sometimes she simply teased him into
retaliation. Frequently she insisted that he repeat the things he had
learned by heart, of poetry or humorous prose, for his memory was
almost uncanny in its tenacity. She discovered quite early, and by
accident, that she had only to shake her head in a certain way and
declaim: "Ah, Tam, noo, Tam, thou'lt get thy faring--In hell they'll
roast thee like a herring,"--she had only to say that to make him laugh
and repeat the whole of _Tam O'Shanter's Ride_ with a perfectly
devilish zest for poor Tam's misfortunes, and an accent which made her
suspect who were his ancestors.

Billy Louise meant only to wean him from his bitterness against Life,
and to convince him, by a somewhat roundabout method since at heart she
was scared to death of his aloofness, that he was not "old lady
Fortune's football" as he sometimes pessimistically declared. At
thirteen she had mixed him with her dreams and led him by difficult
trails to safety from the imaginary enemies that pursued him. At
nineteen she unconsciously mixed him with her life and led him--more
surely than in her dreams, and by a far more difficult trail, had she
only known it--safe away from the devils of memory and a distrust of
life that pursued him more relentlessly than any human foe.

She only meant to wean him from pessimism and rebuild within him a
healthy appetite for life. If she did more than that, she did not know
it then; for Ward Warren had learned, along with other hard lessons,
the art of keeping his thoughts locked safely away, and of using his
face as a mask to hide even the doorway to his real self. Only his
eyes turned traitors sometimes when he looked at Billy Louise; though
she, being a somewhat self-centered young person, never quite read what
they tried to betray.

She took him up the canyon and showed him her cave and Minervy's. And
she had the doubtful satisfaction of seeing him doubled over the
saddle-horn in a paroxysm of laughter when she led him to the
historical washou