and go into
camp, and tomorrow evening I'll come up for your answer from Slavens.
It's about twenty miles from here to his claim, and you can make it
there and back easy if you'll start early in the morning. So it's all up
to you, and the quicker the sooner, as the man said."

With that, Boyle rode away. According to her newly formed habit, Agnes
gathered her wood and made a fire in the little stove outside her tent,
for the day was wasting and the shadow of the western hills was reaching
across the valley.

Life had lost its buoyancy for her in that past unprofitable hour. It
lay around her now like a thing collapsed, which she lacked the warm
breath to restore. Still, the evening was as serene as past evenings;
the caress of the wind was as soft as any of the south's slow breathings
of other days. For it is in the heart that men make and dismantle their
paradises, and from the heart that the fountain springs which lends its
color to every prospect that lies beyond.

Boyle's dust had not settled before Smith came by, jangling a
road-scraper behind his team. He was coming from his labor of leveling a
claim, skip one, up the river. He drew up, his big red face as refulgent
as the setting sun, a smile on it which dust seemed only to soften and
sweat to illumine. He had a hearty word for her, noting the depression
of her spirit.

After passing the commonplaces, a ceremony which must be done with Smith
whether one met him twice or twenty times a day, he waved his hand down
the river in the direction that Boyle had gone.

"Feller come past here a little while ago?" he asked, knowing very well
that Boyle had left but a few minutes before.

"He has just gone," she told him.

"Jerry Boyle," nodded Smith; "the Governor's son. He ain't got no use
for me, and I tell you, if I had a woman around the place----"

Smith hung up his voice there as if something had crossed his mind. He
stood looking down the valley in a speculative way.

"Yes?" she inquired, respectfully recalling him.

"Yes," repeated Smith. "If I had a woman around the house I'd take a
shot at that feller as quick as I would at a lobo-wolf!"

Smith jangled on, his scraper making toadish hops and tortoise-like tips
and amblings over the inequalities in the way. She looked after him, a
new light shining from her eyes, a new passion stirring her bosom, where
his words had fallen like a spark upon tinder.

So that was the estimation in which men held Jerry