nothing but ourselves and our children. We won't have
time to be unhappy. Are you willing to try with me?"

He stroked her soft hair lovingly and smiled up into her eyes. "DeVoe
was right, there _is_ a Power. I shall pray God every day to spare me,
sweetheart, for now I want to live."

TOLD IN THE STORM

The front room of the roadhouse was deserted save for the slumbering
bartender, back-tilted in a corner, his chin upon his chest, and one
other man who sat in the glare of a swing lamp playing solitaire. It
was, perhaps, three hours after midnight. The last carouser had turned
in. There was no sound save the scream of the black night and the cry of
the salt wind. At intervals only, when the storm lulled, there came from
the back room the sound of many men asleep.

I stumbled out from the rear room, heavy-eyed, half clad, and of a
vicious temper, dressing in sour silence beside the stove.

"Did they wake you up?" the card-player inquired.

"Yes."

"Me, too. I'd rather bunk in with a herd of walrus in the mating
season."

He was a long, slim man, with blue-black hair and a gas-bleached face of
startling pallor from which glittered two wild and roving eyes that
flitted in and out of my visual line toward, to, and past me with a
baffling elusive glimmer like that of jet spangles. His hands were
slender and bony and colorless, but while he talked they worked, each
independently. They performed queer, wizard antics with the
cards--one-handed cuts, rapid, fluttering shuffles and "frame-ups,"
after each pass leaving the pile of pasteboards as square-edged and even
as before. While he observed me over his shoulder one hand wandered to
some scattered poker-chips which clicked together beneath his touch into
a solid-ivory column as if separately magnetized. He shuffled and dealt
and cut the disks and made them do odd capers like the cards.

"I slept in a menagerie tent once," said he, "but these people have got
it on the animals." He nodded toward the sleeping-quarters.

"The open life seems to make a Pan's pipe out of the human nose," said
I, with disgust.

My indignation was intense and underlaid with a sullen fury at losing my
rest. I seized the stranger and led him with me to the open door,
saying, roughly, "Listen to that."

The room was large and low, dim-lighted and walled with tiers of
canvas-bottomed "standees" three high. The floor was a litter of boots,
the benches piled with garments. Every b