uch on to facts. And I tell you I'm more
plumb beat about it's having that elder brother, and him being angry,
down in black and white two thousand years ago, than--than if I'd seen
a man turn water into wine, for I'd have knowed that ain't so. But the
elder brother is facts--dead-sure facts. And they knowed about that, and
put it down just the same as life two thousand years ago!"

"Well," said the bishop, wisely ignoring the challenge as to miracles,
"I am a good twenty years older than you, and all that time I've been
finding more facts in the Bible every day I have lived."

Lin meditated. "I guess that could be," he said. "Yes; after that yu've
been a-readin', and what I know for myself that I didn't know till
lately, I guess that could be."

Then the bishop talked with exceeding care, nor did he ask uncomfortable
things, or moralize visibly. Thus he came to hear how it had fared with
Lin his friend, and Lin forgot altogether about its being a parson he
was delivering the fulness of his heart to. "And come to think," he
concluded, "it weren't home I had went to back East, layin' round them
big cities, where a man can't help but feel strange all the week. No,
sir! Yu' can blow in a thousand dollars like I did in New York, and
it'll not give yu' any more home feelin' than what cattle has put in
a stock-yard. Nor it wouldn't have in Boston neither. Now this country
here" (he waved his hand towards the endless sage-brush), "seein' it
onced more, I know where my home is, and I wouldn't live nowheres else.
Only I ain't got no father watching for me to come up Wind River."

The cow-puncher stated this merely as a fact, and without any note of
self-pity. But the bishops face grew very tender, and he looked away
from Lin. Knowing his man--for had he not seen many of this kind in his
desert diocese?--he forbore to make any text from that last sentence the
cow-puncher had spoken. Lin talked cheerfully on about what he should
now do. The round-up must be somewhere near Du Noir Creek. He would
join it this season, but next he should work over to the Powder River
country. More business was over there, and better chances for a man to
take up some land and have a ranch of his own. As they got out at Fort
Washakie, the bishop handed him a small book, in which he had turned
several leaves down, carefully avoiding any page that related of
miracles.

"You need not read it through, you know," he said, smiling; "just
read where I ha