d the
splendid dining-room, into which the sunlight was pouring. Suddenly he
broke forth: "Ye _must_ stay here, darlin'--never mind me. 'Tis a sin
and a shame to ask ye to lave all this to go with a poor old--"

"Stop that!" she called, sharply. "I won't listen to any such talk," and
he said no more.

They decided to go down about ten o'clock, when the daily tide of his
life rode highest. This hour suited his own plan, for a train left for
the mountains not long after, and he had resolved to make his escape
while Bertha was with Ben in the office. "There will be no need of any
change in the house," he thought, "but 'twill do no hurt for them to
talk it all over."

For an hour or two he hobbled about the yard and garden, taking a final
look at the horses and dogs, and his face was very lax and gray and his
voice broken as he talked with his men, who had learned of the doctor's
orders, and were awkwardly silent with sympathy. He soon grew tired and
came back to the porch to rest and wait for the hour of his departure.
Settling into his accustomed chair, which faced directly upon the
mountains over which the sun, wearing to the south, was beginning to
hang its vivid shadows, he sat like a man of bronze. The clouds which
each day clothed the scarred and naked peaks with a mantle of ermine and
purple, were already assembling. The range assumed a new and
overpowering grandeur in his eyes, for it typified the Big Divide, which
lay between him and the country of the soundless, dawnless night.

Up that deep fold which lay between the chieftain and his consort to the
north ran the western way--a trail with no returning footprints; and the
thought made his heart beat painfully, while a sense of the wonder and
the terror of death came to him. He was going away as the wounded
grizzly crawls to the thicket to die, unseen of his kind, even of his
mate.

To never return! To mount and mount, each league separating him forever
from the mansion he had come to enjoy, the wife he loved better than his
own life. "I cannot believe it," he whispered, "and yet I must make it
so."

Then he began to wonder, grimly, just when his heart would fail, just
where it would burst like a rotten cinch. "Will it be on the train?
Suppose I last to the coal-switch, then I must climb to the mine.
Suppose I live to reach the mine, then what? Oh, well, 'tis easy to slip
from the cliff."

Meanwhile, out under the trees, the gardener was spading turf, the