pride and his
determination to keep him from becoming what he had seen many men in this
country become--dissolute irresponsibles, drifting like ships without
rudders--had brought into Trevison's heart a great longing. He was like a
man who for a long time has been deprived of the solace of good tobacco,
and--to use a simile that he himself manufactured--he yearned to capture
someone from the East, sit beside him and fill his lungs, his brain, his
heart, his soul, with the breath, the aroma, the spirit of the land of his
youth. The appearance of Miss Benham at Manti had thrilled him. For ten
years he had seen no eastern woman, and at sight of her the old hunger of
the soul became acute in him, aroused in him a passionate worship that
made his blood run riot. It was the call of sex to sex, made doubly
stirring by the girl's beauty, her breeziness, her virile, alluring
womanhood--by the appeal she made to the love of the good and the true in
his character. His affection for Hester Keyes, he had long known, had been
merely the vanity-tickling regard of the callow youth--the sex attraction
of adolescence, the "puppy" love that smites all youth alike. For Rosalind
Benham a deeper note had been struck. Its force rocked him, intoxicated
him; his head rang with the music it made.

During the three weeks of her stay at Blakeley's they had been much
together. Rosalind had accepted his companionship as a matter of course.
He had told her many things about his past, and was telling her many more
things, as they sat today on an isolated excrescence of sand and rock and
bunch grass surrounded by a sea of sage. From where they sat they could
see Manti--Manti, alive, athrob, its newly-come hundreds busy as ants with
their different pursuits.

The intoxication of the girl's presence had never been so great as it was
today. A dozen times, drunken with the nearness of her, with the delicate
odor from her hair, as a stray wisp fluttered into his face, he had come
very near to catching her in his arms. But he had grimly mastered the
feeling, telling himself that he was not a savage, and that such an action
would be suicidal to his hopes. It cost him an effort, though, to restrain
himself, as his flushed face, his burning eyes and his labored breath,
told.

His broken wrist had healed. His hatred of Corrigan had been kept alive by
a recollection of the fight, by a memory of the big man's quickness to
take advantage of the banker's foul tric