for half a mile or so upon a
rising ground. In front of the house, not far from the lake, a man was
lying asleep upon the ground, a rough felt hat drawn over his eyes.

Like the house, the man seemed dilapidated also: a slovenly,
ill-dressed, demoralised figure he looked, even with his face covered.
He seemed in a deep sleep. Wild ducks settled on the lake not far from
him with a swish and flutter; a coyote ran past, veering as it saw the
recumbent figure; a prairie hen rustled by with a shrill cluck, but he
seemed oblivious to all. If asleep, he was evidently dreaming, for now
and then he started, or his body twitched, and a muttering came from
beneath the hat.

The battered house, the absence of barn or stable or garden, or any
token of thrift or energy, marked the man as an excrescence in this
theatre of hope and fruitful toil. It all belonged to some degenerate
land, some exhausted civilisation, not to this field of vigour where
life rang like silver.

So the man lay for hour upon hour. He slept as though he had been upon a
long journey in which the body was worn to helplessness. Or was it that
sleep of the worn-out spirit which, tortured by remembrance and
remorse, at last sinks into the depths where the conscious vexes the
unconscious--a little of fire, a little of ice, and now and then the
turn of the screw?

The day marched nobly on towards evening, growing out of its blue and
silver into a pervasive golden gleam; the bare, greyish houses on the
prairie were transformed into miniature palaces of light. Presently a
girl came out of the woods behind, looking at the neglected house with a
half-pitying curiosity. She carried in one hand a fishing rod which
had been telescoped till it was no bigger than a cane; in the other she
carried a small fishing basket. Her father's shooting and fishing camp
was a few miles away by a lake of greater size than this which she
approached. She had tired of the gay company in camp, brought up for
sport from beyond the American border where she also belonged, and she
had come to explore the river running into this reedy lake. She turned
from the house and came nearer to the lake, shaking her head, as though
compassionating the poor, folk who lived there. She was beautiful. Her
hair was brown, going to tawny, but in this soft light which enwrapped
her, she was in a sort of topaz flame. As she came on, suddenly she
stopped as though transfixed. She saw the man--and saw also a trag