ond. The mountain stuck its nose into the
clouds and was whitecapped.

It was this view at the back which O-liver faced when he sat at his
machine. When he rested he liked to fix his eyes on that white mountain.
O-liver had acquired of late a fashion of looking up. There had been a
time when he had kept his eyes on the ground. He did not care to
remember that time. The work that he did was intermittent, and between
his industrious spasms he read a book. He had a shelf at hand where he
kept certain volumes--Walt Whitman, Vanity Fair, Austin Dobson, Landor's
Imaginary Conversations, and a rather choice collection of Old Mission
literature. He had had it in mind that he might some day write a play
with Santa Barbara as a background, but he had stopped after the first
act. He had ridden down one night and had reached the mission at dawn.
The gold cross had flamed as the sun rose over the mountain. After that
it had seemed somehow a desecration to put it in a painted scene.
O-liver had rather queer ideas as to the sacredness of certain things.

Tommy Drew, who had a desk in the same office, read Vanity Fair and
wanted to talk about it. "Say, I don't like that girl, O-liver."

"What girl?"

"Becky."

"Why not?"

"Well, she's a grafter. And her husband was a poor nut."

"I'm afraid he was," said O-liver.

"He oughta of dragged her round by the hair of her head."

"They don't do it, Tommy," O-liver was thoughtful. "After all a woman's
a woman. It's easier to let her go."

An astute observer might have found O-liver cynical about women. If he
said nothing against them he certainly never said anything for them. And
he kept strictly away from everything feminine in Tinkersfield, in spite
of the fact that his good looks won him more than one glance from
sparkling eyes.

"He acts afraid of skirts," Henry had said to Tommy on one occasion.

"He?" Tommy was scornful. "He ain't afraid of anything!"

Henry knew it. "Maybe it's because you can't do much with women on
fifteen a week."

"Well, I guess that's so," said Tommy, who made twenty and who had a
hopeless passion.

His hopeless passion was Jane. Jane lived with her mother in a small
rose-bowered bungalow at the edge of the town. She and her mother owned
the bungalow, which was fortunate; they hadn't a penny for rent. Jane's
father had died of a weak lung and the failure of his oil well. He had
left the two women without an income. Jane's mother was delicate and