ring like newly lighted lamps,
growing steadier and more golden as the sky darkened and the land
beneath them fell into complete shadow. It was a cool, restful darkness
that was not black or forbidding, but somehow open and free; the night
of high plains where there is no moistness or mistiness in the
atmosphere.

Ray lit his pipe. "I never get tired of them old stars, Thee. I miss 'em
up in Washington and Oregon where it's misty. Like 'em best down in
Mother Mexico, where they have everything their own way. I'm not for any
country where the stars are dim." Ray paused and drew on his pipe. "I
don't know as I ever really noticed 'em much till that first year I
herded sheep up in Wyoming. That was the year the blizzard caught me."

"And you lost all your sheep, didn't you, Ray?" Thea spoke
sympathetically. "Was the man who owned them nice about it?"

"Yes, he was a good loser. But I didn't get over it for a long while.
Sheep are so damned resigned. Sometimes, to this day, when I'm
dog-tired, I try to save them sheep all night long. It comes kind of
hard on a boy when he first finds out how little he is, and how big
everything else is."

Thea moved restlessly toward him and dropped her chin on her hand,
looking at a low star that seemed to rest just on the rim of the earth.
"I don't see how you stood it. I don't believe I could. I don't see how
people can stand it to get knocked out, anyhow!" She spoke with such
fierceness that Ray glanced at her in surprise. She was sitting on the
floor of the car, crouching like a little animal about to spring.

"No occasion for you to see," he said warmly. "There'll always be plenty
of other people to take the knocks for you."

"That's nonsense, Ray." Thea spoke impatiently and leaned lower still,
frowning at the red star. "Everybody's up against it for himself,
succeeds or fails--himself."

"In one way, yes," Ray admitted, knocking the sparks from his pipe out
into the soft darkness that seemed to flow like a river beside the car.
"But when you look at it another way, there are a lot of halfway people
in this world who help the winners win, and the failers fail. If a man
stumbles, there's plenty of people to push him down. But if he's like
'the youth who bore,' those same people are foreordained to help him
along. They may hate to, worse than blazes, and they may do a lot of
cussin' about it, but they have to help the winners and they can't dodge
it. It's a natural law, like wh