n of the last year. Nearly all the other springs had dried
completely, while Mission Creek on Derrick's ranch was nothing better
than a dusty cutting in the ground, filled with brittle, concave flakes
of dried and sun-cracked mud.

Presley climbed to the summit of one of the hills--the highest--that
rose out of the canyon, from the crest of which he could see for thirty,
fifty, sixty miles down the valley, and, filling his pipe, smoked lazily
for upwards of an hour, his head empty of thought, allowing himself to
succumb to a pleasant, gentle inanition, a little drowsy comfortable in
his place, prone upon the ground, warmed just enough by such sunlight
as filtered through the live-oaks, soothed by the good tobacco and the
prolonged murmur of the spring and creek. By degrees, the sense of his
own personality became blunted, the little wheels and cogs of thought
moved slower and slower; consciousness dwindled to a point, the animal
in him stretched itself, purring. A delightful numbness invaded his mind
and his body. He was not asleep, he was not awake, stupefied merely,
lapsing back to the state of the faun, the satyr.

After a while, rousing himself a little, he shifted his position and,
drawing from the pocket of his shooting coat his little tree-calf
edition of the Odyssey, read far into the twenty-first book, where,
after the failure of all the suitors to bend Ulysses's bow, it is
finally put, with mockery, into his own hands. Abruptly the drama of
the story roused him from all his languor. In an instant he was the
poet again, his nerves tingling, alive to every sensation, responsive
to every impression. The desire of creation, of composition, grew big
within him. Hexameters of his own clamoured, tumultuous, in his brain.
Not for a long time had he "felt his poem," as he called this sensation,
so poignantly. For an instant he told himself that he actually held it.

It was, no doubt, Vanamee's talk that had stimulated him to this
point. The story of the Long Trail, with its desert and mountain, its
cliff-dwellers, its Aztec ruins, its colour, movement, and romance,
filled his mind with picture after picture. The epic defiled before his
vision like a pageant. Once more, he shot a glance about him, as if in
search of the inspiration, and this time he all but found it. He rose to
his feet, looking out and off below him.

As from a pinnacle, Presley, from where he now stood, dominated the
entire country. The sun had beg