ly left her; then he had, as deliberately, and without saying
a word, gone down into that place. The little gully was as steep,
almost, as a grave, deep, long, and narrow. Her eyes turned toward its
gloomy shape. What could he be doing down there? What thinking? She
could hear her watch tick. A meaningless _baa_ broke out in the corral
and went round in changing tones among the sheep. While she is so
standing, let us take a look at affairs in the gully.

Mr. Brown, upon arriving at the bottom, proceeded to cast a burden from
his breast--first, a stone which he had been saving for an opossum, a
rawhide thong, a newspaper which had done duty over and over, and which
he kept in hope that it might yield up some further bit of news, and
finally, the rabbit, all of which he dropped on the ground beside his
hat; and then, getting down on his knees, he washed his face. Having
spluttered vigorously into double-handfuls of water from the little
stream and put the towel back on its bush, he turned his attention to
his twelve-dollar boots--for in the country of boots and saddles the
leatherwork is the soul of appearances. He removed the mud with his
knife and brushed off the dust with the rabbit. Finding that this
latter operation promised finer results, he damped the boots with the
tips of his fingers, and taking hold of the long ears and hind legs he
worked the rabbit back and forth so industriously that a fair polish
came forth. With a careless twirl he threw the rabbit away. It was
probably as well for Janet that she had no knowledge of what he was
doing down there; she would have been terrified by these too evident
indications of his intentions. Having combed his hair and brushed his
clothes with the palms of his hands, he felt generally renovated and
pulled together; he took his hat in hand and straightened up in
readiness to make his appearance. Then he sat down.

Before him was the spring with night already in its depths. The little
stream murmured of its flowing in the overhanging grass, and caught the
color of the sunset as it ran out into the open. A little farther on
it emptied its reflections into a pool of gold. Steve Brown, having in
his mind's eye a vision lovelier than this, and much more interesting,
rested his gaze on a dark spot which was the spring. At first, her
presence at his firehole had seemed unreal; and yet perfectly natural.
It was very much as if she had just stepped down out of the s