silence and of
patience. Then, where winter barred his visits to Bear Creek, and there
was for the while no ranch work or responsibility to fill his thoughts
and blood with action, he set himself a task much lighter. Often,
instead of Shakespeare and fiction, school books lay open on his cabin
table; and penmanship and spelling helped the hours to pass. Many sheets
of paper did he fill with various exercises, and Mrs. Henry gave him her
assistance in advice and corrections.

"I shall presently be in love with him myself," she told the Judge. "And
it's time for you to become anxious."

"I am perfectly safe," he retorted. "There's only one woman for him any
more."

"She is not good enough for him," declared Mrs. Henry. "But he'll never
see that."

So the snow fell, the world froze, and the spelling-books and exercises
went on. But this was not the only case of education which was
progressing at the Sunk Creek Ranch while love was snowbound.

One morning Scipio le Moyne entered the Virginian's sitting room--that
apartment where Dr. MacBride had wrestled with sin so courageously all
night.

The Virginian sat at his desk. Open books lay around him; a
half-finished piece of writing was beneath his fist; his fingers were
coated with ink. Education enveloped him, it may be said. But there was
none in his eye. That was upon the window, looking far across the cold
plain.

The foreman did not move when Scipio came in, and this humorous spirit
smiled to himself. "It's Bear Creek he's havin' a vision of," he
concluded. But he knew instantly that this was not so. The Virginian
was looking at something real, and Scipio went to the window to see for
himself.

"Well," he said, having seen, "when is he going to leave us?"

The foreman continued looking at two horsemen riding together. Their
shapes, small in the distance, showed black against the universal
whiteness.

"When d' yu' figure he'll leave us?" repeated Scipio.

"He," murmured the Virginian, always watching the distant horsemen; and
again, "he."

Scipio sprawled down, familiarly, across a chair. He and the Virginian
had come to know each other very well since that first meeting at
Medora. They were birds many of whose feathers were the same, and the
Virginian often talked to Scipio without reserve. Consequently, Scipio
now understood those two syllables that the Virginian had pronounced
precisely as though the sentences which lay between them had been fully
ex