ver arrived at the express office. He was a neighbor
always at home in the Ewold house. The Doge revelled in their
disputations, yet never was really intimate or affectionate as he was
with Jim Galway, who knew not the Pitti, the Prado, nor the Louvre, and
could not understand the intoning of Dante in the original as Jack could,
thanks to his having been brought up in libraries and galleries.

The town, which was not supposed to ask about pasts, could not help
puzzling about his. What was the story of this teller of stories? The
secluded little community was in a poor way to find out, even if the
conscientious feeling about a custom had not been a restraint that kept
wonder free from inquiring hints. They took him for what he was in all
their personal relations; that was the delightful way of Little Rivers,
which inner curiosity might not alloy. His broader experience of that
world over the pass which stretched around the globe and back to the
other range-wall of the valley, seemed only to make him fall more easily
into the simple ways of the fellow-ranchers of the Doge's selection, who
were genuine, hall-marked people, whatever the origin from which the
individual sprang. He knew the fatigue of productive labor as something
far sweeter than the fatigue that comes from mere exercise, and the
neophyte's enthusiasm was his.

"I'm sitting at the outer edge of the circle," he told Jim Galway.
"But when my first crop is harvested I shall be on the inside--a
real rancher!"

"You've already got one foot over the circle," said Jim.

"And with my first crop of dates I'll be in the holy of holies of
pastoral bliss!"

"Yes, I should say so!" Jim responded, but in a way that indicated
surprise at the thought of Jack's remaining in Little Rivers long enough
for such a consummation.

When his alfalfa covered the earth with a green carpet Jack was under a
spell of something more than the never-ending marvel of dry seeds
springing into succulent abundance without the waving of any magic wand.

"I made it out of the desert!" he cried. "It laughs in triumph at the
bare stretches around it, waiting on water!"

"That is it," said Jim; "waiting on water!"

"The promise of what might come!"

"It will come! Some day, Jack, you and I will ride up into the river
canyon and I will show you a place where you can see the blue sky between
precipitous walls two hundred feet high. The abyss is so narrow you can
throw a stone across it."