ent his way, but Curtis spent the remainder of the day in the
commissioner's office, putting together his defence of the Tetongs,
compiling figures, and drawing maps to show the location of grass and
water. He did not rise from his work till the signal for closing came,
and even then he gathered his papers together and took them home to his
room in the club in order to put the finishing touches to them.

While dressing for his dinner with Lieutenant Kirkman, a classmate and
comrade, he began to wonder how soon he could decently make his
dinner-call on the Brisbanes. It was shameful in him, of course, but he
had suddenly lost interest in the Kirkmans. The day seemed lost because
he had not been able to see Elsie. There was a powerful longing in his
heart, an impatience which he had not experienced since his early
manhood. It was a hunger which had lain dormant--scotched but not
killed--for now it rose from its mysterious lair with augmented power to
break his rest and render all other desires of no account.

That night, after he returned from the Kirkmans', where he had enjoyed
an exquisite little dinner amid a joyous chatter reviving old-time
memories, he found himself not merely wide-awake, but restless. His
brain seemed determined to reveal itself to him completely. Pictures of
his early life and the faces and homes of his friends in the West came
whirling in orderless procession like flights of swift birds--now a
council with the Sioux; now a dinner of the staff of General Miles;
visions of West Point, a flock of them, came also, and the faces of the
girls he had loved with a boy's fancy; and then, as if these were but
whisks of cloud scattering, the walls of great mountain ranges appeared
behind, stern and majestic, sunlit for a moment, only to withdraw
swiftly into gray night; and when he seized upon these sweeping
fragments and attempted to arrange them, Elsie's proud face, with its
dark, changeful eyes and beautiful, curving lips, took central place,
and in the end obscured all the rest.

The Kirkman home, the cheer, the tenderness of the husband towards his
dainty little wife, the obvious rest and satisfaction of the man,
betokening that the ultimate of his desires had been reached, also came
in for consideration by the restless brain of the soldier-mountaineer.
"I shall never be at peace till I have wife and child, that I now
realize," he acknowledged to himself in the deep, solitary places of his
thought.