fear," and again the Convener smiled to himself. As he came to
the brow of the hill, where the trail dipped into the river bottom in
which the little town lay that constituted the nucleus of his parish,
he paused and, once more turning, looked after the diminishing
buckboard. "He won't look back, eh! All right, my man. I like you
better for it. It must have been a hard pull to leave that dear old
lady behind. He might bring her out. There are just the two of them.
Well, we will see. It's pretty close shaving."

He was thinking of the threatened cut in the already meagre salaries of
his missionaries, rendered necessary by the disproportion between the
growth of the funds and the expansion of the work.

"It's a shame, too," he said, turning and looking once more after Shock
in case there should be a final signal of farewell, which he would be
sorry to miss.

"They're evidently everything to each other." But it was an old problem
with the Convener, whose solution lay not with him, but with the church
that sent him out to do this work.

Meantime Shock's eyes were upon the trail, and his heart was ringing
with that last word of his Convener. "We expect you to get them. You
are our prospector, dig them up." As he thought of the work that lay
before him, and of all he was expected to achieve, his heart sank.
These wild, independent men of the West were not at all like the
degraded men of the ward, fawning or sullen, who had been his former
and only parishioners. A horrible fear had been growing upon him ever
since his failure, as he considered it, with the Convener's
congregation the night before. It helped him not at all to remember the
kindly words of encouragement spoken by the Convener, nor the sympathy
that showed in his wife's voice and manner. "They felt sorry for me,"
he groaned aloud. He set his jaws hard, as men had seen him when going
into a scrim on the football field. "I'll do my best whatever," he said
aloud, looking before him at the waving horizon; "a man can only fail.
But surely I can help some poor chap out yonder." His eyes followed the
waving foot-hill line till they rested on the mighty masses of the
Rockies. "Ay," he said with a start, dropping into his mother's speech,
"there they are, 'the hills from whence cometh my help.' Surely, I do
not think He would send me out here to fail."

There they lay, that mighty wrinkling of Mother Earth's old face, huge,
jagged masses of bare grey rock, patched he