t, was slowly
climbing into the northwestern sky, partially obscuring the last tints
of the sunset. The wind had ceased. The air was hot, oppressive, laden
with the scents of dry earth. Sounds carried far in the stillness. The
stamp of a horse in a stall, the low, throaty notes of a cow nuzzling
her calf, the far-off evening wail of a coyote--all seemed strangely
near at hand, borne by some telephonic quality in the atmosphere.

"How still it is!" said Clyde. "One can almost feel the darkness
descending."

"Electrical storm coming, I fancy. No such luck as rain."

"I don't suppose it affects you," she remarked, "but out here when
night comes I feel lonely. And yet that's scarcely the right word. It's
more a sense of apprehension, a realization of my own unimportance. The
country is so vast--so empty--that I feel dwarfed by it. I believe I'm
afraid of the big, lonely land when the darkness lies on it. Of course,
you'll laugh at me."

"No," he assured her. "I know the feeling very well. I've had it
myself, not here, but up where the rivers run into the Polar Sea. The
vastness oppressed. I wanted the company of men and to see the things
man had made. I was awed by the world lying just as it came from the
hand of God. The wilderness seemed to press in on me. That's what
drives men mad sometimes. It isn't the solitude or the loneliness
exactly. It's the constant pressure of forces that can be felt but not
described."

"I think I understand."

"The ordinary person wouldn't. There are no words to express some
things."

"I'm glad of it; I don't want the things I feel the most cheapened by
words."

"Something in that," he agreed. "Words are poor things when one really
_feels_. Providence seems to have arranged that we should be more or
less tongue-tied when we feel the most."

"Is that the case?"

"I think so--with men, at any rate. It's especially so with most of us
in affairs of love and death."

"But some men make love very well, you know," she smiled.

"I defer to your experience," he laughed back.

"Oh, my experience!" She made a wry face. "And what do you know of my
experience?"

"Less than nothing. But from some slight observation of my fellow men I
am aware that a very pretty and wealthy girl is in a position to
collect experience of that kind faster than she can catalogue it."

"Perhaps she doesn't want to do either."

"Referring further to my fellow man, I beg to say that her wishes cut
very litt