e poise
of a desert-hawk before the downward lightning-swift swoop on his
quarry.

It was intolerable for Hare to sit there in the evenings, to try to play
with the children who loved him, to talk to August Naab when his eye
seemed ever drawn to the quiet couple in the corner, and his ear
was unconsciously strained to catch a passing word. That hour was a
miserable one for him, yet he could not bring himself to leave the room.
He never saw Snap touch her; he never heard Mescal's voice; he believed
that she spoke very little. When the hour was over and Mescal rose to
pass to her room, then his doubt, his fear, his misery, were as though
they had never been, for as Mescal said good-night she would give him
one look, swift as a flash, and in it were womanliness and purity, and
something beyond his comprehension. Her Indian serenity and mysticism
veiled yet suggested some secret, some power by which she might yet
escape the iron band of this Mormon rule. Hare could not fathom it.
In that good-night glance was a meaning for him alone, if meaning
ever shone in woman's eyes, and it said: "I will be true to you and to
myself!"

Once the idea struck him that as soon as spring returned it would be
an easy matter, and probably wise, for him to leave the oasis and go up
into Utah, far from the desert-canyon country. But the thought refused
to stay before his consciousness a moment. New life had flushed his
veins here. He loved the dreamy, sleepy oasis with its mellow sunshine
always at rest on the glistening walls; he loved the cedar-scented
plateau where hope had dawned, and the wind-swept sand-strips, where
hard out-of-door life and work had renewed his wasting youth; he loved
the canyon winding away toward Coconina, opening into wide abyss;
and always, more than all, he loved the Painted Desert, with its
ever-changing pictures, printed in sweeping dust and bare peaks and
purple haze. He loved the beauty of these places, and the wildness in
them had an affinity with something strange and untamed in him. He would
never leave them. When his blood had cooled, when this tumultuous thrill
and swell had worn themselves out, happiness would come again.

Early in the winter Snap Naab had forced his wife to visit his
father's house with him; and she had remained in the room, white-faced,
passionately jealous, while he wooed Mescal. Then had come a scene. Hare
had not been present, but he knew its results. Snap had been furious,
his fa