e were learning. I jerked her
out of that town, and she went to sheep-herding with me. In four years,
winter and summer, cold and heat, rain, snow, and frost, and all the
rest, we never slept under a roof, and we were moving camp all the time.
You ought to have seen the change--brown as berries, lean as Indians,
tough as rawhide. When we figured we were cured, we pulled out for San
Francisco. But we were too previous. By the second month we both had
slight hemorrhages. We flew the coop back to Arizona and the sheep. Two
years more of it. That fixed us. Perfect cure. All her family's dead.
Wouldn't listen to us.

"Then we jumped cities for keeps. Knocked around on the Pacific coast
and southern Oregon looked good to us. We settled in the Rogue River
Valley--apples. There's a big future there, only nobody knows it. I got
my land--on time, of course--for forty an acre. Ten years from now it'll
be worth five hundred.

"We've done some almighty hustling. Takes money, and we hadn't a cent
to start with, you know--had to build a house and barn, get horses and
plows, and all the rest. She taught school two years. Then the boy came.
But we've got it. You ought to see those trees we planted--a hundred
acres of them, almost mature now. But it's all been outgo, and the
mortgage working overtime. That's why I'm here. She'd 'a' come along
only for the kids and the trees. She's handlin' that end, and here I am,
a gosh-danged expensive millionaire--in prospect."

He looked happily across the sun-dazzle on the ice to the green water of
the lake along the farther shore, took a final look at the photograph,
and murmured:

"She's some woman, that. She's hung on. She just wouldn't die, though
she was pretty close to skin and bone all wrapped around a bit of fire
when she went out with the sheep. Oh, she's thin now. Never will be fat.
But it's the prettiest thinness I ever saw, and when I get back, and
the trees begin to bear, and the kids get going to school, she and I
are going to do Paris. I don't think much of that burg, but she's just
hankered for it all her life."

"Well, here's the gold that will take you to Paris," Smoke assured him.
"All we've got to do is to get our hands on it."

Carson nodded with glistening eyes. "Say--that farm of ours is the
prettiest piece of orchard land on all the Pacific coast. Good climate,
too. Our lungs will never get touched again there. Ex-lungers have to be
almighty careful, you know. If you'r