of the
dying year, when even the crickets and locusts have ceased to sing.

Clinging in silence to the long, soft ears of his motionless bunny, the
timid little game-bearer sat there alone, big-eyed and dumb with wonder
and childish alarm. He could see not far, unless it might be up the
hill, for the sage-brush grew above his head and circumscribed his
view. Miles and miles away, however, the mountains, in majesty of rock
and snow, were sharply lifting upward into blue so deep and cloudless
that its intimate proximity to the infinite was impressively manifest.
The day was sweet of the ripeness of the year, and virginal as all that
mighty land itself.

With two of the rabbits across his lap, the tiny hunter made no effort
to rise. It was certainly secure to be sitting here in the sand, for
at least a fellow could fall no farther, and the good, big mountain was
not so impetuous or nervous as the pony.

An hour went by and the mere little mite of a man had scarcely moved.
The sun was slanting towards the southwest corner of the universe. A
flock of geese, in a great changing V, flew slowly over the valley,
their wings beating gold from the sunlight, their honk! honk! honk! the
note of the end of the year.

How soon they were gone! Then indeed all the earth was abandoned to
the quiet little youngster and his still more quiet company of rabbits.
There was no particular reason for moving. Where should he go, and how
could he go, did he wish to leave? To carry his bunny would be quite
beyond his strength; to leave him here would be equally beyond his
courage.

But the sun was edging swiftly towards its hiding place; the frost of
the mountain air was quietly sharpening its teeth. Already the long,
gray shadow of the sage-brush fell like a cooling film across the
little fellow's form and face.

Homeless, unmissed, and deserted, the tiny man could do nothing but sit
there and wait. The day would go, the twilight come, and the night
descend--the night with its darkness, its whispered mysteries, its
wailing coyotes, cruising in solitary melancholy hither and thither in
their search for food.

But the sun was still wheeling, like a brazen disk, on the rim of the
hills, when something occurred. A tall, lanky man, something over
forty years of age, as thin as a hammer and dusty as the road itself--a
man with a beard and a long, gray, drooping mustache, and with drooping
clothes--a man selected by shiftlessness to be