f knew it--something new
had been born in Sim Gage's heart. It troubled him. He lay there and
bent his mind upon the puzzle, intensely, wonderingly.

It had been bravado with him up to the time that he knew this girl was
coming out. After that, curiosity and a sense of fair play, mingled,
had ensued. Then a new feeling had come after he had met the girl
herself--pity, and remorse in regard to a helpless woman. Sim Gage did
not know the dangerous kinship that pity holds. He knew no proverbs
and no poetry.

But now, mixed also with his feeling of vague loss, his sense of rage,
there was now, as Sim Gage realized perfectly well, a new and yet more
powerful emotion in his soul. He was not the same man, now; he never
again would be. Pity and propinquity and the great law had done their
work! For the first and only time in all his life Sim Gage was in love!

Love dareth and endureth all things, magnifies and lessens, softens and
hardens, loosens and binds, establishes for itself new worlds,
fabricates for itself new values, chastens, humbles, makes weak, makes
strong. Sim Gage never before had known how merciless, how cruel all
this may be. He was in love. With all his heart and life and soul he
loved _her_, right or wrong. There had been a miracle in Two-Forks
Valley.

The two men were astir long before dawn. Wid Gardner first kicked off
his blankets. "I'll find me a horse," said he. "You git breakfast,
Sim, if you can." He went into the darkness of the starlit morning.

Sim Gage, his wounded leg stiff and painful enough, crawled out of his
bunk--the same where She but now had slept--and made some sort of a
light by means of matches and a stub of candle; found a stick and made
some shavings; made shift to start a fire. With a hatchet he found on
the floor he hacked off more of the charred woodwork of his own
door-frame, seeing that it must be ruined altogether. It was nothing
to him what became of this house. The only question in his mind was,
Where was She? What had happened to Her?

His breakfast was that of the solitary man in such surroundings. He
got a little bacon into a pan, chipped up some potatoes which he
managed to pare--old potatoes now, and ready to sprout long since. He
mixed up some flour and water with salt and baking powder and cooked
that in a pan.

The odors of the cooking brought new life into the otherwise silent
interior of Sim Gage's cabin. Sim felt something at his feet