discipline. He had been ploughing all day, and brooding, presumably, over his tribulations, and there was a techy look in his dark eyes as he seated himself at the foot of the well-spread table, ppreside over by Mrs. Cullum, impassive and dumb as usual. The six girls were ranged on either side.

        "Well, ma," began Tobe, with assumed gayety, turning up his plate, "what for a day have you had?"

        Sissy looked through and beyond him with fixed, unresponsive gaze, and said never a word.

        Then, as Mr. Cullum afterwards said, "Ole Satan swep' an' garnisheed him an' tuk possession of him." He seized the heavy teacup in front of him and hurled it at his unsuspecting spouse; she gasped, paling slightly, and dodged. The missile, striking the brick chimney-jamb behind her, crashed and fell shivering into fragments on the hearth. The saucer followed. Then, Tobe's spirits rising, plate after plate hurtled across the table; the air fairly bristled with flying crockery. Mrs. Cullum, after the first shock of surprise, continued calmly to eat her supper, moving her head from right to left or ducking to avoid an unusually well-aimed projectile.

        Little Sis scrambled down from her high chair at the first hint of hostilities, and dived, screaming, under the table; the others remained in their places, half paralyzed with terror.

        In less time than it takes to tell it, Mr. Cullum,

reaching out his long arms, had cleared half the board of its stone and glass ware. Finally he laid a savage hand upon a small old-fashioned blue pitcher left standing alone in a wide waste of table-cloth.

        At this Sissy surrendered unconditionally. "Oh, Tobe, for Gawd's sake!" she cried, throwing out her hands and quivering from head to foot. "I give in! I give in! Don't break the little blue china pitcher! You fetched it to me the day little Bud was born! An' he drunk out'n it jest afore he died! Fer Gawd's sake, Tobe, honey! I give in!"

        Tobe set down the pitcher as gingerly as if it had been a soap-bubble. Then, with a whoop which fairly lifted the roof from the cabin, he cleared the intervening space between them and caught his wife in his arms.

        Minty, with ready tact, dragged Little Sis from under the table, and driving the rest of the flock before her, fled the room and shut the door behind her. On the dark porch she ran plump upon Jack Carter.

        "Why, Jack!" she cried, with her tear-wet face tucked before she knew it against his breast, "what are you doing here?"

        "Oh, just hanging around," grinned Mr. Carter.

        "Gawd be praised!" roared Tobe, inside the house.

        "Amen!" responded Jack, outside.

        "An' Tobe Cullum," announced Joe Trimble

at Bishop's the next day, "have ordered tip the fines' set o' chiny in Waco fer Sissy."

        "It beats me," said Newt Pinson; "but I allers did say that the women o' Jim-Ned, ez wives, air the outbeatenes' critters in creation!"

THE GROVELLING OF JINNY TRIMBLE

        MRS. TRIMBLE paused half-way down the cotton row and looked over towards the house, where Joe sat on the rickety porch. He was playing a hymn tune. His blond head was laid lovingly against the neck of his fiddle, his eyes were closed, and a beatific smile hovered about his handsome mouth. He accompanied the droning notes with a steady pat of his foot on the floor, and an occasional mellow burst of song.

        "Joe Trimble shore can make the fiddle talk!" exclaimed his wife, admiringly. "Git up from there, Lodelia!" she added, with sudden sharpness, to a tow-headed little girl in the adjacent row, who had slipped the half-filled cotton-sack from her neck and was squatted upon it. "Git up from there this minit! An' don't you, ner Little Joe, dassen to stop tell them las' rows is picked - ner Randy nuther! It's nigh about sundown, an' yo' pappy'll be plumb outdone waitin' for his supper."

        Thus admonished, the children went sullenly

to work, the four-year-old Randy snuffling audibly, and she herself with an involuntary sigh of weariness stooped again over the stunted stalks.

        The straggling cotton-patch was all but clean - a few down-hanging bolls only showing here and there along the outer rows. The year's crop - flocculent, snow-white - was heaped in a couple of big rail-pens behind the smoke-house, protected by a few planks from the heavy night dews and the rare October rains.

        When Mrs. Trimble, with the last bulging sackful on her shoulder, hurried past the porch, Mr. Trimble looked up. "Hi, oh, Jinny!" he cried, affectionately. "I knowed in reason you'd git done ter-day. I'll haul ter the gin fust thing termorrer. By jing! th' ain't no sech crap this year up ner down Jim-Ned. Fo' bales ef it's a poun'!" And with an air of triumph he struck anew into "Amazing grace."

        Mrs. Trimble fetched in wood, made a fire in the open fireplace, and set about getting supper, while Lodelia milked the cow, with Little Joe to hold off the calf.

        "Triflin'," his neighbors along Jim-Ned Creek were used without scruple to call Joe Trimble. The air of dilapidation about his small farm more than justified the epithet. The rail fences were rotting visibly; the lop-sided shed, which served at once as barn and stable, threatened to succumb to the breath of the first genuine norther; the cow-pen gate was propped upon a broken hoe-handle; the one-roomed cabin itself, with its ill-built chimney and sagging roof, was, as Mrs.

Newt Pinson said over her snuff-bottle to Granny Carnes: "A plumb sight. An' Jinny Trimble is fair druv to keep Joe hissef fum drappin' ter pieces. Cert'n'y ef she wa'n't so po'-sperrited she wouldn't stand it - ner him."

        But Jinny had stood both with apparent equanimity for a matter of ten years or thereabouts. She might, indeed, be said to share in the general demoralization going on around her. Time was when the pretty, saucy, jimp coquette, Jinny Leggett had, in Jim-Ned vernacular, "kicked" every marriageable young man in the county for - the sake of Joe Trimble's blue eyes and wheedling ways, be it understood. Now the wifely drudge - thin, sallow-faced, hollow-eyed - had hardly spunk enough left to borrow a pair of quilting-frames. As to the cooking, washing, and ironing, the wood-chopping and water-drawing, tending the ash-hopper and the cattle, grinding the coffee and the axe - all this was as much a matter of course as taking care of the successive babies and making soft soap. So, for aught known to the contrary, was the rougher farm-work, which yearly fell more and more to her hand, while her lazy, good-looking lord rode about the country swapping stories and drinks across his neighbors' gates, or sat on his own porch playing the fiddle.

        "It's ez much," said Mrs. Pinson, in a mighty pucker about Jinny, "ef Joe Trimble hez picked for poun's out'n them fo' bales he's braggin' 'bout. It's scan'lous! But Jinny hez lost her backbone!"

        Mrs. Trimble at that moment was putting the supper on the table, and as the aromatic smell of coffee and bacon greeted her husband's nostrils, he hastened to hang up his fiddle and fall to.

        "Jinny, honey," he said, leaning back in his chair when he had finished, "I wisht you'd go out ter the lot an' shake down some feed for them steers."

        On a crisp November morning ten days later Mr. Trimble took a boisterously affectionate leave of his family and started with his cotton, ginned and baled, for the nearest market-town, something like a hundred miles distant.

        "Don't werry concernin' the childern's Chris'mus, Jinny," he called, gayly, over his shoulder, as he tucked his fiddle into the feed-trough and picked up the long whip; "I'm goin' ter fetch back truck fum Waco ez'll make yo' eyes bug out'n yo' head - loaf-sugar an' bear-grease an' pep'mint, an' sech. I ain't fergittin' yo' silk dress nuther, honey, ner yo' side-combs."

        The children raced after him down the hard road. Mrs. Trimble with reddened eyes watched the brand-new unpaid-for wagon until it disappeared in a mesquite thicket beyond the field. It was drawn by two fine yoke of oxen - great, wide-horned brutes that she had herself raised from calves; the four trim, compact bales were piled upon it; a skillet and coffee-pot swung beneath the hinder axle. Mr. Trimble walked beside the team cracking his whip. Spot, the lean old hound, trotted at his master's heels.

        "Th' ain't a laklier man ner a better fiddler on Jim-Ned," murmured the little woman; "ner a studdier church-member - ef he do sometime take a leetle drap too much!"

        Anticipation ran high in the Trimble household as the days drifted by and the time drew near for the return of its lawful head. Marvellous stories of past Christmases kept little Joe and Randy awake o' nights, up betimes o' mornings, they perched the livelong day on the fence, their bare red feet tucked under them, their eyes fixed eagerly on the turn of the road, impatient for the first glimpse of Morg's and Mike's well-known, wide-spread, shining horns. Lodelia ran back and forth frantically, her small soul fairly rent in twain betwixt continual false alarms without-doors and maternal reprimand within. Mrs. Trimble's own excitement was overlaid by a flustered presence of indifference.

        A sort of incredulous consternation succeeded this expectant rapture when Christmas came and went without any sign of the absent husband and father. The lank, empty stockings depended unnoticed from the chimney, while the frightened children huddled in the falling dusk about their mother's knees. "Somp'n must ha' happened to Joe! Oh, I know somp'n turrible has happened!" she moaned, visions of Joe's blond curls all dabbled in blood swimming before her eyes.

        But, a little later, Mr. Pinson dropped in to allay his neighbor's probable fears. He said,

squirming awkwardly in his chair, and with his eyes on the floor, that he had seen Joe a few days before in Waco, whither he had hauled his own cotton. Ye-es, Joe were well. Joe had sold his cotton. Joe talked like he mought stay awhile down ther. "An', an', don't you be oneasy, Mis' Trimble, Joe's all right. In fac', Joe was fiddlin' like a cherry-bin at the wagin-yard the night afore I lef'."

        "It's scan'lous!" cried Mrs. Pinson, when Newt reported at home how Mrs. Trimble "took" the news. "She orter up an' part fum sech a out-beaten, triflin' houn' - stidder thankin' the Lord that he ain't on the road som'er's, dead! Jinny shore is a po'-sperrited creeter!"

        Vague rumors of Joe's gay cuttings-up in the far-away town floated out to Jim-Ned during the next few months. If they reached his wife's ears she made no sign. She sat on Sundays, more forlorn-looking and hollow-eyed than ever, in her accustomed place in Ebenezer Church, and passed the time of day meekly with the neighbors on coming out. But she shrank from their well-meant attempts at consolation. And divining with innate courtesy that she wished to be alone, even Mrs. Pinson presently forbore to intrude upon her. The front door of the Trimble cabin was rarely opened, save when its mistress appeared there for a moment, shading her eyes with her hand and gazing wistfully down the road. Randy and little Joe had long abandoned their lookout on the fence. A pitiful air of desolation brooded over the place, the farm and

its belongings running, if possible, still further down at the heel.

        Suddenly one morning - it was when the short, sharp winter had fairly broken, the first spring rains had softened the ground, and the pink of peach blossoms was making splashes of color everywhere - Mrs. Trimble appeared in her field walking behind a plough and driving Joe's old sorrel horse, Baldy. She seemed at first to be rather dragged by the plough-handles than to guide them. But she held on with grim determination; and by the time the garden-patch was turned under, the passers-by admitted that the rows were run ding straight, for a woman.

        "Yes," she said, slowly, with her eyes turned away from the questioner's face and a faint flush on her cheek, "me en' the childern has concluded to make the crop 'gins' the time Joe comes back."

        Upon this, offers of help poured in upon her. Jim-Ned to a man - and woman - stood by her until her crop was planted. Thereafter, early and late, through the showery spring and the long hot summer, her slight, spare form could be seen, hoe in hand, moving up and down corn or cotton row, accompanied by Lodelia and the two little boys - all patiently and manfully heaping or levelling the brown soil, digging, ditching, fighting grass and tie-vine. There were such tinkerings, too, between times, at fences and gates and pens that towards the end of September it is doubtful whether Joe, had he presented himself, would have recognized his own freehold. The

corn was gathered and cribbed, and the fodder stacked; the cotton-patch, green and healthy under a favoring sky, was dotted with blooms, amid which the bolls were bursting, white and thick as pop-corn.

        And Joe all this time? Fiddling in the Waco wagon-yards at night by the freighters' campfires - fiddling, and swapping stories, and taking blithely, in season and out of season, that leetle drap too much which, away from home in particular, was one of his besetting sins; selling his cotton for a sum far beyond his expectation; laying in groceries and dry-goods enough to run a sto', by jing! bragging and swaggering about the streets one day, and waking out of a drunken sleep the next, to find his wagon rifled of its contents and his money gone. An epic, indeed, might be written concerning Mr. Trimble's three-quarters of a year "in town." One goodly steer after another passed from his possession into the hands of the unscrupulous sharpers who were fattening upon him; and then the brand-new, unpaid-for wagon, with its bows and sheets; even the old gun, belt, and cartridge-box - everything except the beloved fiddle, with which he continued to make merry, and old Spot, who followed his disreputable master from one drinking-shop and gambling-hell to another, regarding him with eyes which had in them something of the wistfulness that dwelt in Jinny's own.

        But all things sooner or later come to an end, and at last, one day, this lazy, rollicking,

good-humored prodigal bethought himself of Mis' Trimble and the childern.

        The Ebenezer School had just been dismissed. Mr. Tolliver, the old teacher, was standing on the door-step in the sunset glow, brooding with habitual depression over the scant desire for learning exhibited by the freckled, sunburned, whooping urchins of both sexes at that moment scurrying gayly homeward. "Truly," he sighed, "the fruit of knowledge does not tempt the youth of James-Edward" - for the old pedagogue's classic tongue repudiated the commonly accepted name of the district in which he labored. He turned to fasten the door. But a tumultuous and prolonged burst of laughter drew his attention to the high-road which ran across a shine-oak prairie in front, and curved around the corner of the school-house. A noisy rabble of men and boys, some mounted, some on foot, surged forward in pell-mell disorder. A nearer approach disclosed the cause of their mirth.

        "Bless my soul!" said Mr. Tolliver, from his post of observation on the school-house steps. "I believe that is Joseph Trimble!"

        It was in truth that home-returning hero. An axle and a single pair of cart-wheels, dragged by a small, gaunt, slab-sided ox, served as a support for a barrel lying upon its side, and braced by a couple of stanchions. Astride of the barrel, clad in mud-bespattered rags, and hatless, sat Joe himself - enthroned as it were - fiddle in hand. It was not a hymn tune whose notes rang out

on the still afternoon. A tipsy smile illuminated the player's red face as the bow frisked and capered over the strings, and his bare heels against the sides of the barrel kept time to the profane strains of "Granny, will yo' dog bite?" A tin cup swung from the spigot in the bung, and an unmistakable smell of whiskey pervaded the air around.

        "Bless my soul!" ejaculated Mr. Tolliver again, as the cavalcade swept by, "this is a survival of the ancient Bacchic festival!"

        "How 'bout Mis' Trimble, Joe?" demanded Mr. Pinson, during one of their frequent convivial halts, and he winked slyly at the crowd as he took a pull at the tin cup.

        "Mis' Trimble? Jinny?" shouted Joe, looking down with a fatuous smile. "Don't you fret yo' gizzard 'bout Jinny Trimble! Jinny's goin' ter be so ding glad ter see me thet she'll fair grubble at my feet!"

        And the train, augmented at every cross-road by some laughter-loving crony, moved noisily on.

        At the moment they emerged from the mesquite thicket, and came in sight of Joe's reconstructed estate, Mrs. Trimble was at the woodpile cutting wood for the supper fire; Randy was picking up chips in his blue cotton apron; Lodelia and Little Joe were tending the ash-hopper. The sound of horses' feet, mingled with the hilarious uproar, borne on the mild wind, came floating across the level fields. She lifted her head, pushing back her sun-bonnet, and stared with

out-starting eyes. Her arm dropped nerveless at her side; her lips quivered; her knees shook beneath her. She moved mechanically towards the front gate, followed by her three children.

        The procession had halted in the road there. A sudden shamed silence fell upon the crowd - hurried on thus far partly by a spirit of fun, partly by sincere rejoicing in the return of their jovial gossip - at sight of the patient and courageous though poor-spirited little woman coming across the field, her head drooped upon her breast, the heavy axe grasped unconsciously in her hand.

        "Hello, Jinny!" called Mr. Trimble, with jaunty assurance, from his perch on the whiskey barrel. "Here I am onct mo'! Safe an' soun'. Pervided with a bar'l o' ginooine rye! Onloose the latch-string, honey, an' look out fer a rip-roarin' celerbation of these here joyful percedences -"

        His maudlin laugh was suddenly checked; his jaws dropped; he gazed at 0a wife with dilating eyes. She stood in the open gateway confronting him; her dark eyes, fixed full upon his, were blazing; her lips were firmly set; a scarlet spot burned in either sunken cheek; she looked dangerously like the imperious, high-spirited Jinny Leggett, of whom Joe in his courting days had been mortally afraid.

        "Joe Trimble," she said, with terrifying calmness, "shet yo' mouth and git off'n that whiskey barrel!"

        Mr. Trimble meekly obeyed, scrambling down

with what grace he could muster, and casting sheepish glances at his followers, huddled breathless and abashed on the farther side of the road.

        "Stand out'n the way with yo' onchristian, hell-temptin' fiddle," Mrs. Trimble added, stepping forward.

        Joe slunk to one side like a whipped hound; old Spot, after an uncertain, appealing glance around, crept after him.

        She lifted the axe.

        It was not for naught that the down-trodden wife had chopped wood - aye, and split rails into the bargain, during all these years. The muscles stood out like thongs on the skinny little arm; the wrist was as firm and hard as iron. The axe, poised an instant in the air, caught on its keen edge a gleam of sunlight, then it descended with a sidewise telling blow on the head of the barrel; it rose and fell again, and the seasoned wood splintered and crashed inward; a small deluge of amber-colored liquor gushed over the axle, and ran in a foamy, ambrosial rivulet across the road.

        The lean ox turned his head to gaze with mild, surprised eyes at the wrack behind him, then whisked his tail, and resumed his abstracted ruminations.

        An involuntary murmur of applause ran through the spectators; every man and boy of them took off his hat. Regret over the waste of so much ginooine rye was lost for the moment in admiration of Mis' Trimble's spunk.

        Mrs. Trimble, did not acknowledge their

presence by so much as a look. "Lodelia," she ordered, "kiss yo' poppy, an' onhitch that pore creeter from them wheels, an' give it some feed. Come erlong, Joe, an' min' you fasten the gate a'ter you."

        Mr. Trimble, completely sobered, mute, and dumfounded, lifted Randy in his arms, and walked after his wife towards the cabin, with little Joe and Spot tagging at his heels.

        "Ding my hide, this beats me!" exclaimed Newt Pinson. And clapping spurs to his horse, he galloped down the road, the demoralized squad clattering and padding behind him. "This beats me!" he cried again, turning in his saddle to look back.

        Mrs. Trimble was nowhere visible.

        Joe was at the wood-pile chopping wood.

        The next day, and for many a long day thereafter, Mr. Trimble, with a cotton-sack hung about his neck, dragged on his knees through the cotton-patch, reaping, as Mrs. Pinson sarcastically observed, where he had not sowed. His was now the hand that shook down feed for Baldy and the solitary steer. He it was who turned the windlass at the deep well and packed in the wood; he tended the ash-hopper and set the clothes-lines; he even went so far as to get up of mornings and make the fire.

        He seemed, moreover, pitiably anxious lest he should by accident leave some of these unaccustomed tasks undone. Jim-Ned looked on, shaking its head, not knowing what to make of this extraordinary transformation, and momentarily

expecting, if the truth were told, a fall from grace.

        Joe's old exuberance of spirit, too, had given place to a kind of timid humility; his merry eyes were downcast and dull; his contagious laugh was hushed; his fiddle hung unused on the cabin wall, gathering cobwebs on its crooked neck.

        Mrs. Trimble, though outwardly calm, was inwardly exultant. "It's good fer so' eyes," she said to herself, watching Joe pass the porch with the cotton slung over his shoulder, and remembering all her own pains and mortifications. The men made way for her with marked deference when she took her place in the Amen corner of Ebenezer Church, with Mr. Trimble, dashed and browbeaten, at her elbow. The women gazed at her in hushed wonder. "Yes, it's good fer so' eyes!" she repeated again and again in the first transport of her freedom.

        But, as time passed, a vague feeling of discomfort crept into her secret soul. Something was missing. What was it? Was it the old-time, half-contemptuous, wholly cordial regard of her neighbors, who now held respectfully aloof, eyeing her askance as if afraid of her ? Was it the strange silence around her own fireside at night, where Joe sat with his head hanging and his eyes fixed vacantly on the flames, and the children cowered in the corner, dumbly questioning, first his dull face and then her own?

        One night Mr. Trimble, coming in with an armful of firewood, found his wife sitting alone by the hearth. The children were abed. She

had her apron to her eyes and was crying silently.

        "Gawd-a-mighty, Jinny!" he cried, throwing down the wood and running to her in alarm, "what hev I done? Ain't the wood chopped ter suit ye? Ain't the wash-kittle filled? I b'leeve in my soul I've fergot them clo's-lines. I'll go an' prop 'em this minit!"

        "'T-t'ain't the lines," whimpered Jinny.

        "Ain't the ash-hopper sot? Ain't -"

        "Oh-h, Joe!" sobbed his wife, "I don't keer nothin' 'bout the ash-hopper! I want to hear you laugh onct mo'! I want to see you cavort roun' Jim-Ned like you used to! I'm plumb tired o' havin' them fool men look at me like I wuz wearin' the britches! I'm sick o' hearin' Mis' Pinson an' Granny Carnes talk like you didn't have spunk enough to spank Randy! I wisht ter the Lord I hadn't of made no crop! I'm so lonesome! Oh, Joe!"

        And she jumped up and hid her face on his breast.

        "Lord, Jinny!" he exclaimed, blushing red with delight, and as bashful as ever he was in his courting days. "Lord, honey, them women folks ain't wuth shucks, nohow. I don't keer nothin' 'bout Mis' Pinson an' Granny Carnes! But ef Newt Pinson er any of that gang hez dast ter look cross-eyed at you, I'll tek the hair off'n the'r hide afore mornin'." And his eyes grew suddenly sombre.

        "Oh no, no!" she cried, clinging to him. "Not that-a-way! Not that-a-way!"

        The result of their long conference was that Joe, the next morning, leaving the few scattering unpicked bolls in the field to Lodelia and Little Joe, mounted Baldy, and rode the length and breadth of Jim-Ned, inviting his neighbors to a play-party at his house the following night. And the neighbors came, bubbling over with good-humor and curiosity.

        And so it was that in the presence of the Ebenezer congregation Jinny Trimble "grubbled" at her husband's feet! She took the fiddle from the wall with her own hands and gave it to him. She consulted him audibly, and in a tone of deep humility, concerning the disputed steps of "Peeping at Susan"; she fetched him his pipe, and hovered over him, radiant, while he lighted it; she ran out when the fire in the big fireplace burned low, and came in, ostentatiously carrying a heavy back-log, her head lifted defiantly and her dark eyes dancing.

        Joe's blue eyes shone back at her. He fiddled like one inspired; his gay laugh rang out above the shuffling feet of the young men and women winding the mazes of "Weev'ly Wheat."

        Never had Mr. Trimble been so hilarious or so masterful.

        Never was Mrs. Trimble so abject.

        "Verily," observed old Mr. Tolliver to Mr. Pinson, "the Prodigal of James-Edward hath the fatted calf, and a ring upon his finger!"

        "Jinny hev drapped back," said Mrs. Pinson to Granny Carnes out in the brush-arbor, where they were overseeing the supper. "Her spunk

hev died a natch'l death. She cert'n'y hev grubbled!"

        All the same, the next day, when Mr. Trimble hinted that he shore orter haul them five bales of cotton o' his'n to Waco, Jinny put her foot down.

II
FLYING THREADS

THE SONG OF THE OPAL

        JOHN DENE stood for a moment in the squat doorway of his rock hut, his slouch hat brushing the heavy lintel, and his square shoulders almost touching the rough framework on either side; then, mounting the short outer flight of steps that led to the flat roof above, he seated himself on the rude parapet and bared his forehead to the crisp October night wind. He breathed into his lungs with conscious delight the aromatic perfume of the "rosum" weed, whose yellow blossoms, faintly visible in the starlight, overlaid the abrupt slopes and wide levels of the prairie stretching away to his right. On his left, the mountains, a mile or so away, were banked like a semicircle of soft dark cloud against the clear sky. There was a fire-fly or two astir among the late-blooming flowers, whose faint odor came up to him in little balmy puffs from the garden patch about the cabin door; and a night bird now and then flitted on stealthy wing from one clump of trees in the hollow below to another. But it was very still, so still that he could hear the musical drip-drop of the water falling from

the spring into the reedy pool at the head of the hollow; the howl of a coyote somewhere on Quarry Mountain rang so distinctly on his ear that he clutched his rifle and threw it instinctively to his shoulder. But he smiled and laid it on his knee again as the echo of a burst of laughter, familiar, cheery, prolonged, came floating across the valley from the store over in Logan's Gap.

        They were in truth talking about him there. Or, to be more accurate, old Uncle Dicky Crawls, tilted back against the chimney jamb, in a rawhide-bottomed chair, with a cob pipe between his toothless gums, was talking, and "the boys" were listening respectfully. A handful of gnarled and knotted mesquite roots blazed in the wide fireplace by way of a light, the dingy kerosene-lamp on one end of the counter barely illuminating with its dim circle the greasy pages of the ledger wherein Joe Matthews, the storekeeper, was perfunctorily recording the business of the day. The boys, long, lank, and middle-aged for the most part, with grave faces and keen, humorous eyes, sat in an irregular semicircle about the hearth. The store door was open; the flat-topped mountain on the farther side of the Gap seemed to stand squarely across it in the luminous darkness; the wire fence, zigzagging along the hard, smooth road, gleamed like a strand of silver thread where the out-streaming firelight found and touched it. Half a dozen horses, whose high-pommelled saddles were adorned with hairy, many-coiled lariats,

were hitched to the saplings on the wind-sheltered side of the store, and as many dogs lounged on the steps or dozed under their owners' chairs within.

        "When I seen him come a-ridin' up to the Gap las' C'rismus a year," Uncle Dicky was saying, "I knowed lak a shot thet he wuz a-hidin' out. Some o' you boys 'lowed ez how he looked mighty biggaty; en' thet this here pre-cink wa'n't a-goin' to hol' him mo'n a week 'thout a interview with a rope an' a lim'. But yo' unk Dicky ain't off'n mistakened, an' yo' unk Dicky tuk him by the han' at oncet. An' now they ain't no man nowher's roun' the Gap who hez mo' the respeck of his feller-citizens than Jack Dene. Naw, sir! I hadn't no doubt whatsomedever thet he hez killed his man wher' he come fum. An' I don't no mo' b'leeve his name air Jack Dene than I b'leeve Billy Pitt thar hed that wrestle with a catamount t'other day over on Jim-Ned."

        Billy Pitt drew a playful bead on Uncle Dicky with his stubby but unerring rifle, and joined in the good-natured laugh at his own expense - that resonant laugh which, echoing across the still valley, found John Dene a-dreaming on his house-top.

        "I ain't keerin' what his name mought be," he said, when the laugh subsided; "he's mighty fa'r an' squar', Jack is."

        "Thet's so," assented Matthews, looking up from his ledger, but keeping an inky finger on his column of figures; "an' he's nigh 'bout the contrivinest pusson I ever seen. Thet thar rock

house o' his'n, which he hev quayried the rock en' put up hisse'f, I 'low it's the beatenes' house in creation. Made out'n rock, ever' bit, sir, chimbly an' all, an' a reg'lar chimbly-she'f over the fireplace! It's 'stonishin' how thet rock do cut, anyhow," he concluded, meditatively.

        "He 'ain't teched the ole quayry, hez he?" asked Red Nabers from his corner of the fireplace.

        "God-a-mighty, naw!" cried Uncle Dicky, bringing his chair down to the floor with a jerk. "Thet ole quayry were here when I come to Comanche County; an' thet wuz befo' the Injuns lef'. I heered the tales 'bout them Digger people fum a chief hisse'f. An' thet ole quayry ain't a-goin' to be teched - not to git rock out'n - whilse my head air hot."

        "Co'se not, Unk Dicky, co'se not," said Matthews, to whom the old quarry really belonged, in a soothing tone. "Jack Dene 'ain't teched the ole quayry. Didn't I he'p him haul ever' las' one o' them slabs thet his cabin air made out'n? Howsomedever, he does bogue roun' thar mighty studdy a-s'archin' for them turkles Uncle Dicky's been a-noratin' 'bout ever sence I were born."

        "Thet's all fa'r an' squar'," said the old man, tilting his chair back and resuming his pipe. "He air welcome to dig for them leetle turkles ez much ez he pleases. I don't keer. I wisht to the Lord he could mek out what them Digger people wuz a'ter."

        "Is it p'intedly yo' 'pinion, Unk Dicky," inquired

Green Nabers, the stalwart twin of Red, "thet the ole quayry hes been dug for di'mon's?"

        "Waal, ez to di'mon's," replied Uncle Dicky, deliberately, "I ain't sho in my min'. But what air sho air thet oodles o' time ago thet ole quayry wuz dug by somebody fer somepn. An' thet somepn wa'n't buildin' rock, nuther. Thar's the quayry, an' thar's them turkle-shape rocks all scattered roun' the aidge o' the pit; an' ever' las' one of them turkles hev been busted open. 'Tain't one in a bushel, 'cordin' to my calkilation, ez hed anything inside. But I hev foun' 'em myse'f with a holler in the middle, an' I hain't no doubt whatsomedever thet in thet holler them Digger people foun' - min' yer, I don't edzackly say di'mon's, but somepn of nigh 'bout ekal vally. I 'ain't nuver come 'crost a whole turkle yit, an' ef Jack Dene kin fine one whilse he air a-hidin' out an' a-puttin' in o' his time, I'll be pow'ful rej'iced."

        John Dene, sitting alone on the roof of his odd little hut, would have laughed outright had he known that the chief reason for his popularity in Logan Gap Precinct was due to a belief that he was in hiding for a crime - a murder, perhaps - committed "wher' he come fum." Yet his neighbors would have sympathized in a hardly less degree with the real cause of his presence among them. Restless themselves, nomads by instinct, wrought of the stuff from which pioneers are moulded, they at least would have understood that nameless feeling, so inexplicable to

the conservatism of his family, which had made of him - John Dene, of Dene Place - a wanderer, and, the more pious among his kindred did not scruple to add, a vagabond on the face of the earth. He had it, perhaps - who knows? - this strain of lawlessness - from the beautiful savage woman whom his far-away ancestor had married somewhere over seas, and brought to his stately home in England to die. She had sent down to him too, they said, glancing at her portrait, her bright tawny hair, and the soft, yellowish brown eyes with their curious-shifting lights, and her firm, slim hands, and lithe, straight body. Anyway, concluded the prim, angular Denes, with a touch of scorn in their dry voices, it was not the Dene blood that had sent him when a mere lad gypsying about green English lanes; and later, when the vast estate came into his own hands, drove him irresistibly from its power and responsibility into barbarous and unknown countries.

        He sighed a little in the darkness now, as a memory of that fair, far-away home of his boyhood came to him with a breath of the English flowers abloom in his garden patch. But he laid his hand, palm downward, upon the giant slab that roofed his hut, and at the touch a curious sense of freedom and content seemed to thrill along his arm and expand his heart.

        "They manage well enough without me there," he said to himself; and a smile, which was not in the least cynical, curled the lip under his long, brown mustache, as he thought

of the upright and respectable Dene who managed Dene Place, while its owner, the vagabond Jack, loafed away his existence on the frontier of Texas.

        He gathered his rifle into the hollow of his arm and stood up, casting, as was his wont, a last look over the valley before going down into his cabin. He uttered a sudden exclamation, startled by the glimmer of a light over the crest of Quarry Mountain. It seemed to be moving along the upper edge of the old quarry, now dipping out of sight, now twinkling like a star against the dark blue of the sky, as if the hand that held it were lifted high above the owner's head. Jack frowned; he was almost as jealous of the old quarry as Uncle Dicky himself. "Who can be prowling around there this time of night, I wonder?" he muttered.

        He followed the movements of the flickering torch until it vanished suddenly in the neighborhood of the burned thicket. "Some of Crawls's boys hunting wild-cat," he decided, finally, as he turned to descend the stone stairway.

        It was not yet sunrise the next morning when he started across the valley for his daily walk to the mountains. The pale disk of the harvest-moon hung yet in the vaporous sky, with one slowly fading star at its side. But a rosy light was shimmering along the edges of the eastern horizon, and a brisk west wind was lifting the misty shadows from the hollows. His own step was as elastic and springy as the brown turf beneath his feet. A dispassionate observer watching

him as he made his way between the ragged cotton-rows, with the shaggy retriever at his heels, might have conceded that the Denes did well to be angry. This tall figure, supple and erect, which appeared to such advantage in the simple frontier dress; this manly, handsome face, with its careless air of independence and content - what credit would not these have reflected upon the family in general had their owner but seen fit to follow the traditions of the family!

        He dipped a wooden bucket in the reed-fringed pool below the spring, and carried it brimming to Roland his horse, stabled in a rude shed on the farther side of the field, then strode whistling on his way. He followed the little trail which he had himself made up the steep face of the mountain. On the level top he paused and looked back. The valley below was steeped in a soft grayish shadow, but the outlying prairie in its yellow mantle was already agleam with the morning sun. Beyond stretched a chain of pyramidal, flat-topped hills, cut at almost regular intervals by clean gaps, through which glowed purple inner distances. From the cabins dotted about the prairie thin spirals of blue smoke were rising; and in the fields about them, white with bursting cotton-bolls, he could see the figures of women and children mooving to and fro. A few horse were hitched already to the saplings around the store in the Gap, and a mover's wagon, with dingy cover, was creeping slowly townward along the white road.

        He gazed a moment at the familiar picture

spread out beneath him, and went leisurely on across the rock-strewn ridge. The wild thyme crushed by his feet filled all the air with heart-some fragrance; the thickets of prickly- pear were ablaze with the red and gold of ripening fruit; the dwarf shine-oaks, loaded with clusters of dark, shining acorns, were overlaid here and there with a fine, filmy net-work of love-vine, which was radiant with dew-drops; a mockingbird sang in the red-haw tree near the mouth of the new quarry; a squirrel, with bushy tail curled over his back, ran slowly across an open space beyond, defying the weaponless hunter. When he came around the point of burned thicket so plainly visible from his own house-top he stopped abruptly; the dog uttered a low growl, instantly hushed at an imperious gesture from his master. A woman was sitting on the edge of the old quarry. Her face was turned away from him, but the outlines of her form were young and gracious in the close-fitting black gown she wore; her throat arose full and white from the kerchief knotted loosely about it; her bare head, crowned with a wavy coil of golden-bronze hair, was small and shapely. Her hands were lying idly in her lap, and he saw, as he drew nearer, that in one of them she held a short, thick, almost grotesque-looking hammer. A little pile of stones lay in a heap by her side. He continued to advance noiselessly while noting these details, and he stood quite near her on the ledge of gray rock before she seemed aware of his presence. When she turned her head with a faint, startled cry, he was

not surprised to find her beautiful and young. He had expected, somehow, just this delicate, oval face, with its velvety, magnolia-leaf pallor; these golden-brown eyes, with their phosphorescent depths, the long curling lashes, the slender dark brows, the scarlet lips, and round girlish chin. Speech failed him utterly for the second during which they gazed into each other's eyes; she with her first look of surprise changing visibly from frowning inquiry to a kind of troubled delight; he with a strange, confused stopping and starting of his pulses that thrilled him from head to foot.

        "Pray, do not let me disturb you," he stammered at length. "I - I was only passing by."

        "Are you come from far?" was her unexpected response. Her voice was singularly low and musical; the flavor of her speech was distinctly foreign, though the words were pronounced correctly and with a kind of quaint precision.

        He had taken off his hat, and he made a gesture with it towards his cabin, whose flat roof gleamed whitely in the valley below. "There is my home," he said; then catching, as if by inspiration, her real meaning, he added: "Yes. I come from England."

        "From England." She repeated the words after him slowly; and another question rose into her eyes and trembled perceptibly on her lips; but she lowered her eyelids suddenly and remained silent.

        "Are you searching for the jewel?" he asked,

with a smile and a significant glance at the hammer in her lap.

        Her colorless face grew a shade paler; her fingers tightened their grasp about the clumsy handle of the hammer. "Yes," she replied, gravely, after a momentary pause. But, springing to her feet, she shook the fragments of stone and moss from her skirts, and went on, in a lighter tone, "It is a foolish old legend; but I suppose everybody who hears it comes up and tries to find the opal - and so I come too."

        She drew a black woollen scarf over her head as she spoke, and gathered its folds under her chin; then, with a slight formal gesture of adieu, she stepped into the path and went rapidly down the mountain-side, bounding from ledge to ledge with the grace and fleetness of a young fawn. When she had at last disappeared from his sight, Dene walked deliberately to a rocky recess near by, and drew from its hiding-place his own hammer. He looked at it curiously a moment, turning it over and over in his hand; then, with a quick upward jerk of his elbow, he sent it spinning into the air, and watched its downward course as it leaped clanging from point to point, and dropped heavily into a brier-grown ravine below. "I will never use it again," he said, with a whimsical laugh. "I have found the jewel of the old quarry. Who can she be?" he went on. "Where did she come from? Not from Logan Gap Pre-cink, surely. Ah! I will ask Uncle Dicky. Are you come from far? Now, why should she have asked me that? Have I

ever heard before that the jewel of the old quarry is an opal?"

        He threw himself at full length upon the ground, and took from the pocket of his blue flannel overskirt a little volume of Border Ballads. But the morning's adventure had gone to his head. With his eyes fixed steadily upon the printed page, he caught himself repeating mechanically, Are you come from far? Are you come from far?

        He closed the book with a snap, and got up. "I think I'll go down to the store and get my mail," he declared, aloud.

        The sunlight lay warm and quivering on the reaches of yellow flowers and the clumps of purple thistle abloom on the wind-swept ridges of the prairies. There was a twitter of nonpareils in among the feathery branches of the scattering mesquite bushes; and at almost every turn of the winding path a whir of wings sounded beneath his feet, and a covey of young partridges arose with shrill cries, and dropped and disappeared again under the warm shelter of the weeds. As he approached the store a horseman came riding swiftly down the Gap from the west. The silver ornaments of his bridle shone through the cloud of gray dust which enveloped him. A second horse, without saddle or bridle, followed a few paces behind him. He halted in front of the store, and was courteously asking of Matthews, as Dene came up, directions to Ranger's Spring, some two or three miles distant. The horse he bestrode was a fine, powerfully built iron-gray,

with black flowing mane and tail; the other, which had stopped in the shadow of the mountain, and was daintily cropping the short mesquite grass, was a small, beautifully formed bay mare, whose skin had the gloss and smoothness of satin. A genuine feeling of admiration stirred Dene at the sight of these two handsome animals, and he glanced up at their owner with the ready compliment of the frontiersman on his lips. But the greeting died in his throat, and he involuntarily fell back a step or two. The new-comer was a man long past middle-age - old in years, perhaps, though a look of almost brutal strength pervaded his whole person. His wrinkled face, half hidden by a bushy white beard which descended almost to his knees, was brown as time-stained parchment; his dark, deeply sunken eyes glowed like carbuncles beneath thick, bristly brows; his long, hooked nose was thin, with narrow nostrils that closed curiously with each indrawn breath. His legs, as he sat erect upon the tall horse, seemed much too short for his thick square body, and his powerful-looking arms much too long; his brown, vein-knotted hands were misshapen and large, the finger-nails claw-like in their length and sharpness. Altogether he was a sinister-looking personage, and Dene was sensible of something like a feeling of relief when he replaced his wide-brimmed hat upon his head and rode away. The mare threw up her pretty head in response to a low whistle, and galloped lightly after him.

        "What the d-l is he doin' roun' yer agin?" It was Uncle Dicky who spoke. He was standing

on the door-step, gazing after the stranger, his wrinkled old face expressing as much dislike as its genial outlines would permit. "He ain't a'ter no good, I'll lay. What the d-l does he want?"

        "A rope and a limb, I reckon," said Dene, good-naturedly, quoting one of Uncle Dicky's familiar sayings. "Who is he, anyhow, Uncle Dicky?"

        "Hello, Jack! howdy? He's a durn Mexican - thet's what he is. He useter call hisse'f Don Hosy. I d' know what he mought call hisse'f now. I 'ain't seen him sence '67, en' thet's nigh twenty year ago, jis a'ter I come home fum the wah. They wa'n't scarcely no white folks out yer then. Me an' Jim Crump wuz campin' down yonder at Ranger's Spring, an' this yer Don Hosy wuz layin' roun' yer a-doin' of the Lord knows what. He hed a gal long o' him which he purtended wuz his own chile. An' I don't no mo' b'leeve thet gal wuz Don Hosy's chile than I b'leeve -" The speaker's eyes wandered vaguely around the group of listeners.

        "No yer don't, Unk Dicky!"

        "I ain't a-honin ter be a eggsample."

        "'Light on Joe Crump; he's been a-braggin'."

        Uncle Dicky grinned. "Waal," he continued, "thet gal wuz here 'long o' the Mexican one day, an' the nex' day she wa'n't nowher's to be seen. An' ef I'd of had my way, Don Hosy'd of had a rope en' a lim' then. Durn his yaller hide! what's he purtendin' he don't know whar Ranger's Spring is for?"

        "Mighty fine hosses he's got," ventured one of the boys.

        "An' I'd swear on a stack o' Bibles high ez this sto' thet he stole 'em," retorted the old man, angrily.

        Dene followed Matthews into the store, and asked if there were any letters for him. Matthews went behind the counter, and took from under it the candle-box that served as a post-office, and grabbled among the miscellaneous contents. He handed out a package or two, a bundle of newspapers, and a thick square envelope bearing a foreign post-mark.

        "Hasn't that fishing-tackle of mine -" Dene began; he stopped abruptly. Uncle Dicky had returned to his seat by the fireplace, and Matthews was addressing him across the counter:

        "Hez that furrin gal got her school, Unk Dicky?"

        "Sech a fool time o' year ter git up a school," put in Red Nabers, from the doorway, "an' all the childern in the cotton-patch, an' the Lord knows when the crap'll be in. 'Sides, who's knowin' ef the gal air fitten to teach?"

        "Shet yo' mouth, Red," said Uncle Dicky, shortly. "She hev been tried by the school boa'd in the town o' Comanche -"

        "Eggsamined ye mean, Fink Dicky," corrected Billy Pitt.

        "She hev been tried by the school boa'd in the town o' Comanche," repeated the old man, ignoring the abashed young Billy, "an' Doc Hamilton hev giv' her her papers, an' I don't keer if ever'

blame chile in the pre-cink air in the cotton-patch. I nuver seen my ole woman an' Polly's gal childern tek sech a streak to anybody befo' in all my born days, an' thar in my house thet gal air goin' to stay, school er no school, long's we kin keep her."

        "She's kind o' furrin lak, ain't she?" asked Matthews, timidly.

        "I d' knaw, an' I don't keer. She kin speak United States, an' she kin keep Polly's gal childern out'n mis-cheef; an' I'll lay she air caperbul o' teacher ary voter in this here doggon settlement, much less the childern."

        "Co'se, Unk Dicky, co'se," admitted Matthews. "Hello, Jack! ye goin'? Ye mus' of come to git a chunk o' fire."

        Jack heard neither this nor the other friendly sarcasms which were flung after him as he quitted the store. She had come to stay, then. She felt evidently the same romantic interest in the legend of the old quarry that had stirred himself from the moment he had set foot in this remote little valley. She would be often there, no doubt; she would - He pulled himself together, with a short laugh, and set resolutely to work in his little field.

        "I cannot get that girl out of my head, and I am not going to try," he murmured that night, in a half-aggrieved tone; "and, by Jove! I'll take her some flowers to-morrow."

        He was walking impatiently up and down the narrow garden path in the odorous dusk. The few hardy roses glimmered palely on the

over-grown bushes; they were almost scentless. But there was a pungent perfume from the marigolds in the heart of the asparagus bed; by daylight these were a blaze of vivid orange. A straggling array of blue and white larkspur filled all one corner of the patch; a mass of brown gold-dusted nasturtiums shone against the sombre wall of the cabin, and the ragged mignonette clustered about the door-step was still in bloom. "Yes," he repeated, "to-morrow I will take her some flowers."

        He saw her the next morning long before he reached the foot of the mountain. She was coming down the winding path; her shawled head was bent upon her breast. He could see her slender form now clearly defined against the blue sky, now moving between gray masses of rock. Once she stopped and stooped; he felt sure that she was hiding her hammer in some fern-hung cleft.

        He waited for her by a lichen-covered bowlder jutting out from the abrupt curve of the mountain. He thought that a faint look of pleasure came into her eyes when she caught sight of him; and as she drew near he greeted her silently, holding out the flowers, a great awkward dewy posy. "I thank you, señor," she said, simply, taking them, and looking at him over them with wonderful shining eyes, golden brown as the nasturtiums themselves.

        He had meant to tell her of the garden-patch about his cabin door, and of the homely mother flowers he had planted there, but before he could bring himself to speak she was gone.

        The next day he was up betimes. A monotonous, windless rain was falling, the sort of rain through which the bob-whites call, and which seems to hush every other living thing on the prairie into silence. In spite of it he went up to the quarry, telling himself persistently that she could not possibly be there, yet wholly taken aback when he did not find her there.

        Twenty-four hours later the rain was over, and the October sun warmer and more golden still on the clean-washed boulders. She was there. He heard the little clicking sound of her hammer as he came up the trail. She received his flowers as before, with a kind of gentle gravity. And this time he found it easy enough to say: "They are all English flowers. I planted them around my cabin yonder when I first came. And you've no idea how they bloom. If the gardener - if some of the people at home who grow flowers could see them, they would turn green with envy."

        "Why did you come?" she demanded, abruptly.

        Again he divined the undercurrent of her thought. "Oh," he replied, a trifle embarrassed, "I can hardly say. I had a restless sort of feeling that seemed to drive me, and I drifted about the world until I found myself here. The place suited me, and so I have stayed on. I suppose I shall have to go back some day."

        "When you have found the opal?" Her tone was light, but a frown contracted her smooth forehead as she spoke.

        "Yes, when I have found the opal," he said, flushing at a sudden mental vision of his hammer flying out into space and dropping downward.

        "Do you know the tradition?" she asked. Her eyes were fixed on the little rock hut in the valley.

        "I know Uncle Dicky's version of it," he replied, smiling.

        "There is a beautiful and wonderful jewel - an opal - which may be found here -" she began, in measured monotone.

        "In a turtle-shaped stone. I know," he interrupted, gayly.

        "But it is not a jewel only," she went on, unheeding; "it is a talisman that brings to its possessor riches and power and - oh, I know not what beside." Surely a cold pallor was creeping over her lovely face. "They are very rare, those jewels. And they say that only a man or a woman of the slave people can find them."

        "Slave people!" he echoed, inquiringly.

        "I forgot that you do not know," she answered, turning her large eyes upon him and smiling wistfully. "A long, oh, a very long time ago, a people, a dark and terrible people, used to come here from - from another country to seek for those jewels. But they had not the power themselves to find them. And they brought with them the strange, beautiful white people whom they had conquered and made to be their slaves. And it was that of all the people in the whole world those slaves only might

find those jewels. So the masters sat and watched with eyes like coals of fire while the white slaves digged and brought up the little turtle-shaped stones from the quarry. And it was only once in a great while that an opal was found in the little stones; and then there was strife and bloodshed among the masters. And many slaves died to find one opal. Oh yes, the masters were dark and terrible, but the slaves were white and lovely. The men were tall and strong and beautiful" - she lifted her eyes that said like you to his, and then dropped them so that the long, silken lashes rested on her white cheek - "and the women were lithe and graceful -"

        "Like you," he breathed involuntarily.

        A faint flush passed over her face and died away along her full throat. "They say," she presently added, looking up suddenly, "that some of those slave people still live in that far country and elsewhere, and that if they came they might find the opal for their masters."

        "If they found it they would most likely keep it for themselves. I should," he declared, lightly.

        "Oh, you would not dare!" she cried, her voice sharpened by some inexplicable feeling; it sounded like terror. "But it is a foolish tale," she resumed, more naturally, rising and stepping down into the trail.

        He followed her hastily as she began the descent. She heard his footsteps behind her and paused, looking back at him over her shoulder.

        "Do you know," he found himself saying before he knew it - "do you know that I do not even know your name?"

        "My name is Atla," she replied, after a momentary hesitation. And she sped rapidly on her way.

        He returned to the quarry. Atla! It seemed to him as if he ought to have known it without the telling, that soft-syllabled name