"Silly," she said; "any man could carry me across the stream--but only
you could write that chapter in the middle of the book."

"You liked it?" he cried, radiantly.

"Like it?" she asked. "I read it once, and then I read it again--on my
knees."

Her voice seemed to drop away breathless. Behind them Otto Brand
tramped, whistling; but he might have been a tree, or the sky, or the
distant hills, for all the thought they took of him.

"I wanted to beg your pardon," the girl went on, "for what I said the
other day--it is a great thing to write a book like that--greater than
fighting a battle or saving a life, for it saves people's ideals;
perhaps in that way it saves their souls."

"Then I may sleep in the canopy bed?" His voice was calm, but inwardly
he was much shaken by her emotion.

Her eyes, as she turned to him, had in them the dawn of that for which
he had hoped.

"Why not?" she said, quickly. "You are greater than your
grandfather--you are--" She stopped and laughed a little, and, in this
moment of her surrender, her beauty shone like a star.

"Oh, little great man," she said, tremulously, "your head touches the
skies!"

SANDWICH JANE

I

"No man," said O-liver Lee, "should earn more than fifteen dollars a
week. After that he gets--soft."

"Soft nothing!"

O-liver sat on a box in front of the post-office. He was lean and young
and without a hat. His bare head was one of the things that made him
unique. The other men within doors and without wore hats--broad hats
that shielded them from the California sun; or, as in the case of Atwood
Jones, who came from the city, a Panama of an up-to-the-minute model.

But O-liver's blond mane waved in every passing breeze. It was only when
he rode forth on his mysterious journeys that he crowned himself with a
Chinese straw helmet.

Because he wore no hat his skin was tanned. He had blue eyes that
twinkled and, as I have said, a blond mane.

"Fifteen dollars a week," he reaffirmed, "is enough."

Fifteen dollars was all that O-liver earned. He was secretary to an
incipient oil king. As the oil king's monarchy was largely on paper he
found it hard at times to compass even the fifteen dollars that went to
his secretary.

The other men scorned O-liver's point of view and told him so. They were
a rather prosperous bunch, all except Tommy Drew, who dealt in a
dilettante fashion in insurance, and who sat at O-liver's feet and
worshiped him.

It was S