ded long that it's worn a groove in my
brain.

"Here you see me tonight, a piece of driftwood at thirty-five, and all
for the want of money enough to buy an automobile and take the
darned-fool world by storm on its vain side! You can't scratch it with a
diamond on its reasoning side--I've scratched away on it until my nails
are gone.

"I've failed, I tell you, I've botched it all up! And just for want of
money enough to buy an automobile! Brains never took a doctor
anywhere--nothing but money and bluff!"

"I wonder," she speculated, "what will become of you out here in this
raw place, where the need of a doctor seems to be the farthest thing in
the world, and you with your nerve all gone?"

It would have reassured her if she could have seen the fine flush which
this charge raised in his face. But she didn't even look toward him, and
couldn't have noted the change if she had, for the moonlight was not
that bright, even in Wyoming.

"But I haven't lost my nerve!" he denied warmly.

"Oh, yes, you have," she contradicted, "or you wouldn't admit that
you're a failure, and you wouldn't talk about money that way. Money
doesn't cut much ice as long as you've got nerve."

"That's all right from your view," said he pettishly. "But you've had
easy going of it, out of college into a nice home, with a lot of those
pink-faced chaps to ride you around in their automobiles, and opera and
plays and horse-shows and all that stuff."

"Perhaps," she admitted, a soft sadness in her voice. "But wait until
you've seen somebody drunk with the passion of too much money and crazy
with the hunger for more; wait until you've seen a man's soul grow black
from hugging it to his heart, and his conscience atrophy and his manhood
wither. And then when it rises up and crushes him, and all that are his
with it----"

He looked at her curiously, waiting for her to round it out with a
personal citation. But she said no more.

"That's why you're here, hoping like the rest of us to draw Number
One?"

"Any number up to six hundred will do for me," she laughed, sitting
erect once more and seeming to shake her bitter mood off as she spoke.

"And what will you do with it? Sell out as soon as the law allows?"

"I'll live on it," dreamily, as if giving words to an old vision which
she had warmed in her heart. "I'll stay there and work through the hope
of summer and the bleakness of winter, and make a home. I'll smooth the
wild land and plant trees