ankled his resentment against
this woman. Who was she, he asked himself, that she should fix her hold on
level-headed Foster? But he knew her kind. Feversham had called her a
"typical American beauty," but there were many types, and he knew her
kind. She was a brunette, of course, showing a swarthier trace of Mexican
with the Spanish, and she would have a sort of personal magnetism. She
might prove dramatic if roused, but those Spanish-California women were
indolent, and they grew heavy early. Big, handsome, voluptuous; just a
splendid animal without a spark of soul.

He had stopped near the table, and his glance fell on the package in the
ring of light from the shaded lamp. After a moment he lifted it and,
drawing up a chair, seated himself and removed the wrapper. It covered a
tin box such as he was accustomed to use in the wilderness for the
protection and portage of field notes and maps. He raised the lid and took
from the top a heavy paper, which he unfolded and spread before him. It
was Weatherbee's landscape plan, traced with the skill of a draughtsman
and showing plainly the contour of the tract in eastern Washington and his
method of reclamation. The land included a deep pocket set between spurs
of the Cascade Mountains. The ridges and peaks above it had an altitude of
from one to six thousand feet. He found the spring, marked high in a
depressed shoulder, and followed the line of flume drawn from it down to a
natural dry basin at the top of the pocket. A dam was set in the lower rim
of this reservoir and, reaching from it, a canal was sketched in, feeding
cross ditches, distributing spillways to the orchards that covered the
slopes and levels below. Finally he traced the roadway up through the
avenues between the trees, over the bench, to the house that commanded the
valley. The mission walls, the inside court, the roomy, vine-grown
portico, all the detail of foliage here had been elaborated skilfully,
with the touch of an artist. The habitation stood out the central feature
of the picture and, as a good etching will, assumed a certain personality.

How fond David would have been of a home,--a home and children! Tisdale
folded the plan and sat holding it absently in his hands. His mind ran
back from this final, elaborated copy to the first rough draft Weatherbee
had shown him one night at the beginning of that interminable winter they
had passed together in the Alaska solitudes. He had watched the drawing
and