a
root overhanging the depths of the canyon. He was cleaning Jesse's rifle,
and I surprised him in a fit of angry laughter.

"Billy," I shouted, "come in off that root before you fall!"

He obeyed, with sulky patience at my whims.

"Why are you not at work? What are you doing with my husband's rifle?"

"I'm at work," he answered sulkily,--then with an odd vagueness of
manner, "I'm cleaning the durned thing."

Being a woman, and cursed at that with the artistic temperament, I could
not help being moved by this lad's extraordinary beauty,--the curly
red-gold hair, skin with the dusty block of a ripe peach, the poise of
easy power and lithe grace, the sense he gave me of glowing color
veiling rugged strength. As an artist studies a good model, I had
observed very closely the moods of Billy's temperament.

His mother was right. That vagueness of manner was abnormal, and the lad
was fey.

"But why are you cleaning his rifle?"

"It kicks when it's foul," he said absently.

"You're off hunting?"

"Goin' to shoot Jesse, thet's all."

"I'm sure," I said, "he cleaned it yesterday. Look here," and I took the
rifle to show him it was clean. "See." I put my little finger nail in
the breech while he looked down the barrel. "Come," said I, and told him
that in my sewing-machine there was a bottle of gun oil. The rifle was
in my possession, safe.

Then he heard Jesse coming. "Whist! Hide the gun!" he said, and as
though we were fellow conspirators, I placed it behind a tree, so that
my man saw nothing to cause alarm.

Jesse came, it seemed, in search of Billy.

"Hello, Kate," he said in greeting. "Say, youngster, when you sawed off
that table leg to make your mother's limb, what did you do with the
caster?"

CHAPTER XII

EXPOUNDING THE SCRIPTURES

I wonder how many persons live in Jesse's body? On the surface he is the
rugged whimsical stockman, lazy, with such powers in reserve as would
equip a first-class volcano. Sing to him and another Jesse emerges, an
inarticulate poet, a craftless artist, an illiterate writer, passionate
lover of all things beautiful in art and nature. And beneath all that is
Jesse of the Sabbath, in bleak righteousness and harsh respectability,
scion of many Smiths, the God-fearing head of his house, who reads and
expounds the Scriptures on Sunday evenings to sullen Billy, the morose
widow, and my unworthy self. Hear him expound in the vindictive mood:--

"When I survey the past