orning. Work, food, and
sleep, all life reduced to its bare essentials, uncomplex, honest,
healthy. They were strong, these men, with the strength of the soil they
worked, in touch with the essential things, back again to the starting
point of civilisation, coarse, vital, real, and sane.

For a brief moment immediately after the meal, pipes were lit, and
the air grew thick with fragrant tobacco smoke. On a corner of the
dining-room table, a game of poker was begun. One of the drivers, a
Swede, produced an accordion; a group on the steps of the bunk-house
listened, with alternate gravity and shouts of laughter, to the
acknowledged story-teller of the gang. But soon the men began to turn
in, stretching themselves at full length on the horse blankets in the
racklike bunks. The sounds of heavy breathing increased steadily, lights
were put out, and before the afterglow had faded from the sky, the gang
was asleep.

Vanamee, however, remained awake. The night was fine, warm; the sky
silver-grey with starlight. By and by there would be a moon. In the
first watch after the twilight, a faint puff of breeze came up out
of the south. From all around, the heavy penetrating smell of the
new-turned earth exhaled steadily into the darkness. After a while, when
the moon came up, he could see the vast brown breast of the earth turn
toward it. Far off, distant objects came into view: The giant oak tree
at Hooven's ranch house near the irrigating ditch on Los Muertos, the
skeleton-like tower of the windmill on Annixter's Home ranch, the clump
of willows along Broderson Creek close to the Long Trestle, and, last of
all, the venerable tower of the Mission of San Juan on the high ground
beyond the creek.

Thitherward, like homing pigeons, Vanamee's thoughts turned
irresistibly. Near to that tower, just beyond, in the little hollow,
hidden now from his sight, was the Seed ranch where Angele Varian
had lived. Straining his eyes, peering across the intervening levels,
Vanamee fancied he could almost see the line of venerable pear trees
in whose shadow she had been accustomed to wait for him. On many such
a night as this he had crossed the ranches to find her there. His mind
went back to that wonderful time of his life sixteen years before
this, when Angele was alive, when they two were involved in the sweet
intricacies of a love so fine, so pure, so marvellous that it seemed to
them a miracle, a manifestation, a thing veritably divine, put in