he sat apathetically smoking
through the wide green lushness of the middle west. Only when the
cultivated lands gave way to barren hills and faint blue mountains peeping
over far horizons did he turn to the window and forget his misery and his
weariness. How it spoke to his heart, this country of his own! He who
loved no man, who had gone to women with desire and come away with
bitterness, loved a vast and barren land, baking in the sun. The sight of
it quickened his pulses, softened and soothed his spirit. Like a good
liquor it nursed and beautified whatever mood was in him. When he had come
back to it a year before, it had spoken to him of hope, its mysterious
distances had seemed full of promise and hidden possibility. And now that
he came back to it with hopes broken, weary in mind and body, it seemed
the very voice of rest. He thought of long cool nights in the mountains
and of the lullaby that wind and water sing, of the soothing monotony of
empty sunlit levels, of the cool caress of deep, green pools, of the sweet
satisfaction that goes with physical weariness and a full belly and a bed
upon the ground.

But when on the last morning of his journey he waked up within a hundred
miles of home, and less than half that far from his own mountain lands,
his new-found comfort quickly changed to a keen anxiety. For he saw at a
glance that the country was under the blight of drought. The hills that
should have borne a good crop of gramma grass at this time of the year, if
the rains had been even fair, were nothing but bare red earth from which
the rocks and the great roots of the _pinion_ trees stood out like the
bones of a starving animal. Here and there on the hillsides he could see a
scrubby pine that had died, its needles turned rust-red--the sure sign of a
serious drought.

During the half month that he had been gone he had thought not once of his
affairs at home. The moment had absorbed him completely. Now it all came
back to him suddenly. When he had left, the promise of the season had been
good. It had not rained for more than a week, but everyone had been
expecting rain every day. It was clear to him that the needed rain had
never come. And he knew just what that meant to him. It meant that he had
lost lambs and ewes, that he would have no money this year with which to
meet his notes at the bank. He sank deep in despair and disgust again. Not
only was the assault on his fortunes a serious one, but he felt little