"No. I found you then--and myself--and thought it was too late!"

Later, across the table, when Slim Jim had brought in the after-dinner coffee, Haig looked at her gravely, and said:

"May I become very practical for a minute, Marion?"

"Yes, but not too practical."

"Well, it's like this: I've got--"

He paused to reach for her hand, to clasp it on the cloth.

"_When_, Marion?" he asked, leaning toward her.

"Oh, we must talk with Claire about that, mustn't we?" she protested, blushing. Then softly: "She's the only mother I've got, you see. And besides, there's no--"

"No, not even a justice of the peace!" he said, laughing. "We might strap on our old snowshoes, and go to Tellurium."

"The idea!"

"Well, listen. Do you know what I've been thinking?"

She shook her head.

"Paris."

"Paris?" she repeated, a little startled, after all that he had revealed to her.

"Yes. I've got a little money in the bank in Tellurium, and I--"

"You needn't be so proud of it!" she retorted. "So have I, in New York. So you needn't think it's your money I'm after, sir!"

They laughed, and then he had both her hands across the table.

"It isn't much, I a.s.sure you," he went on. "But it will do for a while in Paris. I mean--if you will go with me--to find my old master, or another. You know, Marion, he said to me many times: 'You're going to be a painter some day, _mon pet.i.t_; you're going to do big things, if you'll work, work, work.' And so--"

"You'll paint again!" she cried. "Oh, and I shall keep house for you!

You may not believe it, but I'm a splendid cook. But I've got to have salt. You must earn enough to buy salt!"

"I'll try."

At that he rose, and went again to the cabinet from which he had brought the photograph, and returned with his hands behind his back.

"What do you suppose I've got for our mantelpiece--if we have such a thing in our attic?"

"What in the world, Philip?"

"Shut your eyes, please!"

She obeyed, and in the middle of the table he set down the tattered and grimy little boot that he had carried away from the cave.

"Now open!" he commanded.

"Oh!" she cried, staring at the eloquent memento.

Then she flung back her head, with a quick indrawing of her breath, and looked up at him through a bright mist that gathered in her eyes.

And her face was radiant.

He went quickly to her, and leaned down to kiss her hair, her eyes, her lips; and her arms crept once more around his neck.

CHAPTER x.x.xI

SANGRE DE CRISTO

Late October in the San Luis, and the raw day near its close. Across the melancholy flats the north wind's plaintive note rose at intervals into a wailing cry. The thin gra.s.ses bent before it, the sagebrush took on new and fantastic shapes, and danced like demons to the tune.

In gray-brown desolation the sand dunes rolled away to the foothills, far and violet and dim. All was cold and bleak and forbidding, and the sun itself appeared to be retiring eagerly from a scene so dreary and disheartening.

Then came magic. Sangre de Cristo, sharp against the eastern sky, began to change its hue. A pink flush came into the gleaming white. It grew deeper, darker, more vivid; it spread, and ran in richer and richer tints along the range. Now it was rose, and now vermilion, and at last a deep and living scarlet, staining the snowy slopes, and flowing like new blood down the gulches and ravines. The foothills caught the color, and the violets became purple and then red; the sand dunes caught it, and their gray-browns were overlaid with crimson; the flats too caught it, and the sagebrush bending low, and the gra.s.s quivering in the wind were touched with some reflection of that far-reaching hue. From the green along the river the color swept, indefinable and dim at first, then by degrees intensified upon the flats, across the sand dunes, among the hills until at length it was pa.s.sionate and deep and indescribable on the Sangre de Cristo peaks.

A cowboy, searching for lost mavericks, rode slowly to the top of a low sand dune, reined up his pony, and sat silent in the midst of this solemn spectacle. He was not emotional. He was looking for calves, and "sore" at not finding them, and hungry, and far from the X bar O; and night was coming on. But he sat still in his saddle, removed his flopping sombrero, and looked toward the east. Bareheaded, the wind stinging his cheek and flinging dry sand in his eyes, he gazed and wondered at the familiar but never negligible mystery of Sangre de Cristo.

But suddenly he rose in his stirrups, and shaded his eyes with his hand to make out what it was that had caught his vision in that flood of red among the dunes. Again it came, a flash of yellow in the red.

It was there, and gone. And then it came and lingered, as if inviting him, like a jewel in the sand, or rather, like a challenge and a taunt.

"So you're back, are you?" cried Larkin, of the X bar O. "Well, you c'n jest stay there. I'm done with you. You ain't no horse at all, d.a.m.n you! You're a devil! But I wonder--"

Then Sunnysides was gone. At the same time the light paled on the distant peaks. The wind blew colder, and swept the color off the dunes. The flats darkened under the advancing shades of night. And Larkin, muttering, put spurs to his pony, and galloped away toward supper and bed.

THE END

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