the privation."

"Nobody ever made up a Paradise," said the girl fretfully, "but what the
Puritan in him set the road with sharp stones and bordered it with
thorns and stings.... Look, Ban! Here's the moon come back to us.... And
see what's laughing at us and our dreams."

On the crest of a sand-billow sprawled a huge organ-cactus, brandishing
its arms in gnomish derision of their presence.

"How can one help but believe in foul spirits with that thing to prove
their existence?" she said. "And, look! There's the good spirit in front
of that shining cloud."

She pointed to a yucca in full, creamy flower; a creature of unearthly
purity in the glow of the moon, a dream-maiden beckoning at the gates of
darkness to a world of hidden and ineffable beauty.

"When I saw my first yucca in blossom," said Banneker, "it was just
before sunrise after I had been riding all night, and I came on it
around a dip in the hills, standing alone against a sky of pearl and
silver. It made me think of a ghost, the ghost of a girl who had died
too young to know womanhood, died while she was asleep and dreaming
pale, soft dreams, never to be fulfilled."

"That's the injustice of death," she answered. "To take one before one
knows and has felt and been all that there is to know and feel and be."

"Yet"--he turned a slow smile to her--"you were just now calling
Experience bad names; a horrid hag, wasn't it?"

"At least, she's life," retorted the girl.

"Yes. She's life."

"Ban, I want to go on. The whole universe is in motion. Why must we
stand still?"

They reembarked. The grip of the hurrying depths took them past crinkly
water, lustrously bronze in the moonlight where the bank had given way,
and presently delivered them, around the shoulder of a low,
brush-crowned bluff, into the keeping of a swollen creek. Here the going
was more tricky. There were shoals and whirls at the bends, and plunging
flotsam to be avoided. Banneker handled the boat with masterly address,
easing her through the swift passages, keeping her, with a touch here
and a dip there, to the deepest flow, swerving adroitly to dodge the
trees and brush which might have punctured the thin metal. Once he cried
out and lunged at some object with an unshipped oar. It rolled and sank,
but not before Io had caught the contour of a pasty face. She was
startled rather than horrified at this apparition of death. It seemed an
accessory proper to the pattern of the bewitched nig