n
her and what? . . . Was it the drive of those wheels of which he was a
cog? But when she looked across the desk, the eyes had no appeal, the
Search Light had turned on him.

"You must excuse me if you heard what I was saying, when you came in,
Miss Eleanor; but it was a G-- doggon lie! I had been angered: I had
been angered very much; and that's a bad thing on a hot day." He was
slipping back to the usual suavity.

CHAPTER XIX

BALLOTS FOR BULLETS

It was Calamity, who had carried the trouble-making coat across from
the Mission Library to the MacDonald Ranch House. Eleanor had found it
in the big living room that day after she had read the note saying he
was setting out "on the Long Trail, the trail this Nation will have to
follow before Democracy arrives; the trail of the Man behind the
Thing." Somehow, she lost interest in her reading and her driving, and
spent the most of that first week after the funeral in the steamer
chair on the Ranch House piazza. Were the topaz gates of the sunset
still ajar to a new infinite life; or did satyr faces haunt the shadows
of the trail, satyr faces of the Greed that had plotted the bloody
villainy of the Rim Rocks? She had thought she knew joy before, joy
that rapt her from life in a race reverie. Now, she knew joy, tense as
pain; and the consciousness never left her. It was there; beside,
inside, above, all round, an enveloping atmosphere to everything she
thought and said and did. She could not read; for while her eyes
passed _over_ the lines, that consciousness danced in flames _between_
the lines. She tried to forget herself in her work--in the sorting of
the littered shelves, in the mending for the ranch hands absent with
her father in the Upper Pass; but It was there just the same, at her
elbow; in behind the commonplace weaving rainbow mists, a shadowy deity
of thought all pervasive as ether. Before, she had been as one
standing in front of the up-lifted veil. Now, she knew she had passed
in behind the veil, and could not if she would come out to the former
place. Life symbols empty of meaning before, suddenly became
allegorical of eternity--the bridal veil, the orange wreaths, the ring
typical of the infinite, the vows of service, the angel of the drawn
sword on the back trail. Yet she knew she had promised to keep him
resolute, standing strong to his work, unflinching because of her.

It was, perhaps, typical of those ancestral traits that fear