it!"

"No, ma'am," replied a gigantic riverman who was working near at hand,
"that ain't nothin'. Ordinary, however, we travel that way on the river.
At night we have the cookee pass us out each a goose-ha'r piller, and
lay down for the night."

Carroll looked at him in reproof. He grinned slowly.

"Don't git worried about me, ma'am," said he, "I'm hopeless. For
twenty year now I been wearin' crape on my hat in memory of my departed
virtues."

After the rear had dropped down river from Redding, Carroll and Orde
returned to their deserted little box of a house at Monrovia.

Orde breathed deep of a new satisfaction in walking again the streets of
this little sandy, sawdust-paved, shantyfied town, with its yellow hills
and its wide blue river and its glimpse of the lake far in the offing.
It had never meant anything to him before. Now he enjoyed every brick
and board of it; he trod the broken, aromatic shingles of the roadway
with pleasure; he tramped up the broad stairs and down the dark hall of
the block with anticipation; he breathed the compounded office odour
of ledgers, cocoa matting, and old cigar smoke in a long, reminiscent
whiff; he took his seat at his roll-top desk, enchanted to be again in
these homely though familiar surroundings.

"Hanged if I know what's struck me," he mused. "Never experienced any
remarkable joy before in getting back to this sort of truck."

Then, with a warm glow at the heart, the realisation was brought to him.
This was home, and over yonder, under the shadow of the heaven-pointing
spire, a slip of a girl was waiting for him.

He tried to tell her this when next he saw her.

"I felt that I ought to make you a little shrine, and burn candles to
you, the way the Catholics do--"

"To the Mater Dolorosa?" she mocked.

He looked at her dark eyes so full of the sweetness of content, at her
sensitive lips with the quaintly upturned corners, and he thought of
what her home life had been and of the real sorrow that even yet must
smoulder somewhere down in the deeps of her being.

"No," said he slowly, "not that. I think my shrine will be dedicated to
Our Lady of the Joyous Soul."

The rest of the week Orde was absent up the river, superintending in a
general way the latter progress of the drive, looking into the needs
of the crews, arranging for supplies. The mills were all working now,
busily cutting into the residue of last season's logs. Soon they would
need more.

At the