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?”