ission, it would have been worse than death to go
on caring for him. Perhaps she had been wise. Maybe he was "impossible."
But, if ever she suffered a moment's regret, now that they were parted,
and if he could yet find a way of happiness for both, better than cold
wisdom, was there no hope? It was of a way to reach her that he was
thinking to-night; and abruptly the big chair ceased to swing and creak.
"I'll go and see that chap they call the Dook!" Nick mumbled on a sudden
resolution, and knocked out the ashes from his pipe.

A minute later he was strolling through the hot purple twilight toward
Lucky Star City, one of the queerest little towns on earth. It had not,
however, the remotest conception that it was queer. On the contrary, it
thought itself a gay and pleasant place, singularly up-to-date, and
lacking nothing except water, which was now worth a good deal more than
the fortune-giving oil of which it had too much.

The rough, mostly unpainted, wooden houses, shops, and hotels composing
Lucky Star City were so near the great oil gusher which accounted for the
town's existence that the front rank of frame buildings was peppered all
over with a jetty spray. This disfigurement had come when the gusher was
at its highest, and its black, blowing spume had been borne by the wind
for long distances. The earth seemed to have gone into mourning and to be
spread with a pall almost as far as the boundary of the ranch which Nick
had retained for himself; yet there was a strong dividing-line. He had
kept some pasture land, for he loved cattle; but his great pleasure had
been in irrigation; and literally he had made the desert "blossom as a
rose." Even the smell was different when he turned his back upon his own
fragrant alfalfa fields, and drew in breaths laden with the fumes of crude
petroleum. But he was used to the scent of oil and hardly noticed it.

He skirted round the desert lake and steered clear of another lesser lake,
formed entirely of petroleum from the great gusher. By day its greasy
blackness glared in hideous contrast to the blue though brackish water;
but now night lent its ugliness a strange disguise. All the faint twilight
that remained glimmered on the gloss of its surface like phosphorus in
the palm of a negro's hand; and as Nick passed on toward the town, stars
shone out in its dark mirror. He could hear the thick splash of the gusher
that rose and fell, like the beating of a giant's heart, and from the