n. Ah, yes, I thought you would like it!"

From the summit of the Tigmore Ridge, on which they had stopped, there
spread out an endless stretch of country, with small cleared spaces
where the wheat and corn could grow, and with trout glens gleaming here
and there through the trees, and with bosky places and woodsy places in
between.

"Oh, it's wonderful," said Steering.

"This is the best view in the Tigmores," said the girl. "From here you
can imagine that you see the Boston Mountains on a clear day. And away
off down there run the Kiamichi--you will have to take my word for it,
you can't see them. Cowskin Prairie, where the three States and the
Territory come together, is off that way, too."

The big Missouri loneliness hung over it all, shutting them in, shutting
the world out. "Psha! there isn't any world outside," said Steering,
and drew his horse nearer to hers. "There isn't any world outside. This
is all there is to it, and just you and I in it. Don't you believe me?"

"We will play that's the way of it," she said, the spell of the land
upon her, too, the spell of the day upon her, her own heart's red spell
upon her.

"Oh, me! Oh, me!" He brought his horse up closer, his eyes finding hers,
and pleading with them.

"Well?" she cried, "well?" a wavering, waiting smile on her lips. Even
like that, even leaning toward him she had a splendid self-trust; she
was confidential, but a little remote.

Suddenly the man beside her clamped his jaws together harshly and held
his tongue imprisoned behind his teeth. His chest lifted and shook as he
sucked down a deep breath. There, near her, the glory of the hills
outrolled before him, the keen snap of the elixir of love, the
deathless, in his blood, life seemed hard, brutally hard. Everything was
hard, and wrong. He had come down here for practical purposes, he had
come needing every ounce of his energies for those purposes, yet, day
by day, and minute by minute, he was being confronted by psychic or
moral crises, of one kind and another, that used up all the force in
him. Here and now the demand upon him was terrific. His love for Sally
Madeira had grown upon him daily, hourly, engaging all that was best in
him, pulling him away beyond his old best, inspiring, and remaking him.
To have to fight it, even for her sake, even because he must protect her
from so hard a fate as fate with him promised to be, was like sacrilege.
The force of his self-conflict took all the col