verything.
And since then, twelve years before, she had seen generations of lovers
pass into the land they thought delectable; and their children flocked to
her, hung about her, were carried off by her to the ranch, and kept for
days, against the laughing protests of their parents. Flood Rawley called
her the Pied Piper of Jansen, and, indeed, she had a voice that fluted and
piped, and yet had so whimsical a note that the hardest faces softened at
the sound of it; and she did not keep its best notes for the few. She was
impartial, almost impersonal; no woman was her enemy, and every man was
her friend--and nothing more. She had never had an accepted lover since
the day her Playmates left her. Every man except one had given up hope
that he might win her; and though he had been gone from Jansen for two
years, and had loved her since the days before the Playmates came and
went, he never gave up hope, and was now to return and say again what he
had mutely said for years--what she understood, and he knew she
understood.

Tim Denton had been a wild sort in his brief day. He was a rough diamond,
but he was a diamond, and was typical of the West--its heart, its courage,
its freedom, and its force; capable of exquisite gentleness strenuous to
exaggeration, with a very primitive religion, and the only religion Tim
knew was that of human nature. Jansen did not think Tim good enough--not
within a comet shot--for Laura Sloly; but they thought him better than any
one else.

But now Laura was a convert to the prophet of the Healing Springs, and
those people who still retained their heads in the eddy of religious
emotion were in despair. They dreaded to meet Laura; they kept away from
the "protracted meetings," but were eager to hear about her and what she
said and did. What they heard allayed their worst fears. She still smiled,
and seemed as cheerful as before, they heard, and she neither spoke nor
prayed in public, but she led the singing always. Now the anxious and the
sceptical and the reactionary ventured out to see and hear; and seeing and
hearing gave them a satisfaction they hardly dared express. She was more
handsome than ever, and if her eyes glistened with a light they had never
seen before, and awed them, her lips still smiled, and the old laugh came
when she spoke to them. Their awe increased. This was "getting religion"
with a difference.

But presently they received a shock. A whisper grew that Laura was in love
with