me. I can take care of her and make her happy, I know."

"You know, huh! Yet you remember Elsa's home. All its luxury?"

"Yes, I remember Elsa's home and I remember that Elsa and her mother
were high class, unpaid servants in that home."

Papa Wolf jumped to his feet. Ernest laid a hand on his arm.

"Wait now, Papa. You've got the top layer off your chest. Now I'm going
to tell you the inside story of what has happened in this desert in the
seven or eight months. Light your pipe, Papa. It's going to be a long
story."

"Pipe! Pipe! I will not light my pipe!"

"Why not? Nobody's married yet. You've got days and weeks if you wish to
argue about that and you'll be liking Dick better all the time you're
arguing. Now Elsa's marriage isn't the important matter you've to decide
down here, at all. Light your pipe. Papa dear! You always did give me
good advice, except about coming down here. Here, take a fresh box of
matches."

Papa Wolf, established once more, Ernest took a turn or two up and down
the room, coming finally to a stop before the empty fire place. Roger,
looking at his chum closely, realized suddenly that Ernest had aged in
the past few months. There were lines around his eyes and his lips.
Ernest looked from his father to his mother with a little smile.

"Roger and I, in spite of our thirty years, were unsophisticated kids
when we came into this country. I think we're grown up now. I think
we're pretty certain to go a straight and decent trail to the end. But
that I came mighty near to going a forbidden trail as Roger calls it, is
your fault, Papa--and yours, Dean Erskine."

He paused and although the Dean and Ernest's father looked at each other
in amazement, neither interrupted and the younger man went on.

"I never saw death until I came down here--I never knew love. I never
knew real work. But here I have learned all three. We have lived here
with an intensity as great as the heat. The--the primal passions have
shaken us, Papa--and burned us clean--You know some creeds speak of
Christ's hours between the Last Supper and His death as the passion of
the cross. Sometimes I feel as if I could call my months down here my
passion of the desert."

Again Ernest paused, and those who had lived with him through these
months of passion--passion of joy, of fear, of sorrow, of love, of
personal grief and of world pain, listened with astonishment that
jovial, easy-going Ernest should have felt as deeply as they.