he loved that boy! His wife looked on with wonder, for she
thought he knew not what stuff love was made of. It was not long. A
few short years, and the lad, who seemed so strangely merry for a son
of Andy Malden, grew pale and took the fever and died; and, where the
pine trees stoop to shade the mountain flowers in hot midsummer,
strange Yankee Sam and Andy, all alone, laid him to rest. There was no
clergyman. The "Gospel Peddlers," as the miners called them, had not
yet come to the hills to stay. Just as Sam was putting the soil over
the rough box, Andy stopped him and muttered something about the boy's
prayer. He must say it for him, and he whispered in a broken voice,
"Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep."

That was the last prayer Andrew Malden had uttered. Many years had
come and gone; more and more he had lived within himself. He used to
go to the boy's grave on holidays. Now he never went. For years his
wife had lived with him and kept his house and prepared his food, and
grown, like him, silent and apart from all around. She died at last
and he gave her a high-toned funeral; had a coffin from the city and a
preacher and all that. She had died of loneliness. He did not know it.
She did not realize it. He went on as if it was a matter of course.
The old house was kept up carefully; a Chinaman, as silent as himself,
kept it for him, and a corps of men kept him busy at the mill.

He was rich, the people said; he was mean and grinding, the men
muttered; and yet he prospered when others failed. Men envied, feared,
hated him. Now he was growing old and men were wondering who would
have his riches when he was gone. He had no kin this side the Ohio;
and, for aught he knew, nowhere. His wife's nephews and cousins,
pegging away in these hills, were beginning to build air-castles of
days when the Pine Tree mill should be theirs.

Such was the old man who drove along in the moonlight, past Mormon Bar
and over Chichilla Hill, holding a sleeping lad in his arms; and
feeling, for the first time in years, the heart within him.

It was nearer dawn than midnight when the tired team, which had been
slowly creeping up the mountain road for hours, turned into the lane
above the mill and waited for their owner to swing open the gate which
barred the way to the private road leading through the oak pasture to
Pine Tree Ranch and home. It was one of those matchless nights that
come only in the mountains, when