oe had shirked saying good-by to him and Fay. And the Indian had gone
out of Shefford's life as he had come into it.

What these two men represented in Shefford's uplift was too great for
the present to define, but they and the desert that had developed them
had taught him the meaning of life. He might fail often, since failure
was the lot of his kind, but could he ever fail again in faith in man or
God while he had mind to remember the Indian and the Mormon?

Still, though he placed them on a noble height and loved them well,
there would always abide with him a sorrow for the Mormon and a
sleepless and eternal regret for that Indian on his lonely cedar slope
with the spirits of his vanishing race calling him.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Willow Springs appeared to be a lively place that morning. Presbrey was
gay and his sweet-faced wife was excited. The teamsters were a jolly,
whistling lot. And the lean mustangs kicked and bit at one another. The
trader had brought out two light wagons for the trip, and, after the
manner of desert men, desired to start at sunrise.

Far across the Painted Desert towered the San Francisco peaks,
black-timbered, blue-canyoned, purple-hazed, with white snow, like the
clouds, around their summits.

Jane Withersteen looked at the radiant Fay and lived again in her
happiness. And at last excitement had been communicated to the old
gun-man.

"Shore we're goin' to live with Fay an' John, an' be near Venters an'
Bess, an' see the blacks again, Jane.... An' Venters will tell you, as
he did me, how Wrangle run Black Star off his legs!"

All connected with that early start was sweet, sad, hopeful.

And so they rode away from Willow Springs, through the green fields of
alfalfa and cotton wood, down the valley with its smoking hogans and
whistling mustangs and scarlet-blanketed Indians, and out upon the bare,
ridgy, colorful desert toward the rosy sunrise.

EPILOGUE

On the outskirts of a little town in Illinois there was a farm of
rolling pasture-land. And here a beautiful meadow, green and red in
clover, merged upon an orchard in the midst of which a brown-tiled roof
showed above the trees.

One afternoon in May a group of people, strangely agitated, walked down
a shady lane toward the meadow.

"Wal, Jane, I always knew we'd get a look at them hosses again--I shore
knew," Lassiter was saying in the same old, cool, careless drawl. But
his clawlike hands shook a little.

"Oh! wi