k, work.' And so--"

"You'll paint again!" she cried. "Oh, and I shall keep house for you!
You may not believe it, but I'm a splendid cook. But I've got to have
salt. You must earn enough to buy salt!"

"I'll try."

At that he rose, and went again to the cabinet from which he had
brought the photograph, and returned with his hands behind his back.

"What do you suppose I've got for our mantelpiece--if we have such a
thing in our attic?"

"What in the world, Philip?"

"Shut your eyes, please!"

She obeyed, and in the middle of the table he set down the tattered
and grimy little boot that he had carried away from the cave.

"Now open!" he commanded.

"Oh!" she cried, staring at the eloquent memento.

Then she flung back her head, with a quick indrawing of her breath,
and looked up at him through a bright mist that gathered in her eyes.
And her face was radiant.

He went quickly to her, and leaned down to kiss her hair, her eyes,
her lips; and her arms crept once more around his neck.

CHAPTER XXXI

SANGRE DE CRISTO

Late October in the San Luis, and the raw day near its close. Across
the melancholy flats the north wind's plaintive note rose at intervals
into a wailing cry. The thin grasses bent before it, the sagebrush
took on new and fantastic shapes, and danced like demons to the tune.
In gray-brown desolation the sand dunes rolled away to the foothills,
far and violet and dim. All was cold and bleak and forbidding, and the
sun itself appeared to be retiring eagerly from a scene so dreary and
disheartening.

Then came magic. Sangre de Cristo, sharp against the eastern sky,
began to change its hue. A pink flush came into the gleaming white. It
grew deeper, darker, more vivid; it spread, and ran in richer and
richer tints along the range. Now it was rose, and now vermilion, and
at last a deep and living scarlet, staining the snowy slopes, and
flowing like new blood down the gulches and ravines. The foothills
caught the color, and the violets became purple and then red; the sand
dunes caught it, and their gray-browns were overlaid with crimson; the
flats too caught it, and the sagebrush bending low, and the grass
quivering in the wind were touched with some reflection of that
far-reaching hue. From the green along the river the color swept,
indefinable and dim at first, then by degrees intensified upon the
flats, across the sand dunes, among the hills until at length it was
passionate and deep