long furrow that cut
the skyline on the rise.

It was shadowy and uncertain, but one thing was clear to him, and that
was that he could not stay at Silverdale. At first, he had almost
hoped he might do this, for the good land and the means of efficiently
working it had been a great temptation. That was before he reckoned on
Maud Barrington's attractions, but of late he had seen what these were
leading him to, and all that was good in him recoiled from an attempt
to win her. Once he had dared to wonder whether it could be done, for
his grim life had left him self-centered and bitter, but that mood had
passed, and it was with disgust he looked back upon it. Now he knew
that the sooner he left Silverdale the less difficult it would be to
forget her, but he was still determined to vindicate himself by the
work he did, and make her affairs secure. Then, with or without a
confession, he would slip back into the obscurity he came from.

While he worked the soft wind rioted about him, and the harbingers of
summer passed north in battalions overhead--crane, brant-goose, and
mallard, in crescents, skeins, and wedges, after the fashion of their
kind. Little long-tailed gophers whisked across the whitened sod, and
when the great plow rolled through the shadows of a bluff, jack
rabbits, pied white and gray, scurried amidst the rustling leaves.
Even the birches were fragrant in that vivifying air, and seemed to
rejoice as all animate creatures did, but the man's face grew more
somber as the day of toil wore on. Still, he did his work with the
grim, unwavering diligence that had already carried him, dismayed but
unyielding, through years of drought and harvest hail, and the stars
shone down on the prairies when at last he loosed his second team.

Then, standing in the door of his lonely homestead, he glanced at the
great shadowy granaries and barns, and clenched his hand as he saw what
he could do if the things that had been forced upon him were rightfully
his. He knew his own mettle, and that he could hold them if he would,
but the pale, cold face of a woman rose up in judgment against him, and
he also knew that because of the love of her, that was casting its
toils about him, he must give them up.

Far back on the prairie a lonely coyote howled, and a faint wind, that
was now like snow-cooled wine, brought the sighing of limitless grasses
out of the silence. There was no cloud in the crystalline ether, and
something in