ll hunt up something for
you together." As Jim received the proposition with a kind of gloomy
embarrassment, he added lightly, with a glance at the farmhouse, "It
might be near HERE, you know; and you'd have pleasant neighbors, and
even eager listeners to your old adventures."

"You'd better come in a minit before you go," said Jim, clumsily evading
a direct reply. Clarence hesitated a moment, and then yielded. For an
equal moment Jim Hooker was torn between secret jealousy of his old
comrade's graces and a desire to present them as familiar associations
of his own. But his vanity was quickly appeased.

Need it be said that the two women received this fleck and foam of
a super-civilization they knew little of as almost an impertinence
compared to the rugged, gloomy, pathetic, and equally youthful hero of
an adventurous wilderness of which they knew still less? What availed
the courtesy and gentle melancholy of Clarence Brant beside the
mysterious gloom and dark savagery of Red Jim? Yet they received him
patronizingly, as one who was, like themselves, an admirer of manly
grace and power, and the recipient of Jim's friendship. The farmer alone
seemed to prefer Clarence, and yet the latter's tacit indorsement of Red
Jim, through his evident previous intimacy with him, impressed the man
in Jim's favor. All of which Clarence saw with that sensitive perception
which had given him an early insight into human weakness, yet still had
never shaken his youthful optimism. He smiled a little thoughtfully, but
was openly fraternal to Jim, courteous to his host and family, and,
as he rode away in the faint moonlight, magnificently opulent in his
largess to the farmer,--his first and only assertion of his position.

The farmhouse, straggling barn, and fringe of dusty willows, the white
dome of the motionless wagon, with the hanging frying pans and kettles
showing in the moonlight like black silhouettes against the staring
canvas, all presently sank behind Clarence like the details of a dream,
and he was alone with the moon, the hazy mystery of the level, grassy
plain, and the monotony of the unending road. As he rode slowly along he
thought of that other dreary plain, white with alkali patches and brown
with rings of deserted camp-fires, known to his boyhood of deprivation,
dependency, danger, and adventure, oddly enough, with a strange delight;
and his later years of study, monastic seclusion, and final ease
and independence, with a