beyond the grain-elevator-beyond the blue
horizon's rim, quivering in the heat, and into regions where this crisp,
clear, life-giving, life-saving air never blew.

"You said you were coming right home from the shop
As soon as your day's work was done.
Come home--come home--"

He remembered when he had first heard this song in a play called 'Ten
Nights in a Bar-room', many years before, and how it had wrenched his
heart and soul, and covered him with a sudden cloud of shame and anger.
For his father had been a drunkard, and his brother had grown up a
drunkard, that brother whom he had not seen for ten years until--until--

He shuddered, closed his eyes, as though to shut out something that the
mind saw. He had had a rough life, he had become inured to the seamy
side of things--there was a seamy side even in this clean, free, wide
land; and he had no sentimentality; though something seemed to hurt and
shame him now.

"As soon as your day's work was done.
Come home--come home--"

The crowd was uproarious. The exhilaration had become a kind of
delirium. Men were losing their heads; there was an element of
irresponsibility in the new outbreak likely to breed some violent act,
which every man of them would lament when sober again.

Nettlewood Foyle watched the dust rising from the wheels of the stage,
which had passed the elevator and was nearing the Prairie Home Hotel far
down the street. He would soon leave behind him this noisy ribaldry of
which he was the centre. He tossed his cheroot away. Suddenly he heard a
low voice behind him.

"Why don't you hit out, sergeant?" it said.

He started almost violently, and turned round. Then his face flushed,
his eyes blurred with feeling and deep surprise, and his lips parted in
a whispered exclamation and greeting.

A girl's face from the shade of the sitting-room was looking out at him,
half-smiling, but with heightened colour and a suppressed agitation. The
girl was not more than twenty-five, graceful, supple, and strong. Her
chin was dimpled; across her right temple was a slight scar. She had
eyes of a wonderful deep blue; they seemed to swim with light. As Foyle
gazed at her for a moment dumfounded, with a quizzical suggestion and
smiling still a little more, she said:

"You used to be a little quicker, Nett." The voice appeared to attempt
unconcern; but it quivered from a force of feeling underneath. It was so
long since she had seen him.