d led her out to inspect a
washing-machine, run by the Pelton wheel, which really worked and
really washed clothes.

Dede and Ferguson, between them, after a patient struggle, taught
Daylight poetry, so that in the end he might have been often seen,
sitting slack in the saddle and dropping down the mountain trails
through the sun-flecked woods, chanting aloud Kipling's "Tomlinson,"
or, when sharpening his ax, singing into the whirling grindstone
Henley's "Song of the Sword." Not that he ever became consummately
literary in the way his two teachers were. Beyond "Fra Lippo Lippi"
and "Caliban and Setebos," he found nothing in Browning, while George
Meredith was ever his despair. It was of his own initiative, however,
that he invested in a violin, and practised so assiduously that in time
he and Dede beguiled many a happy hour playing together after night had
fallen.

So all went well with this well-mated pair. Time never dragged. There
were always new wonderful mornings and still cool twilights at the end
of day; and ever a thousand interests claimed him, and his interests
were shared by her. More thoroughly than he knew, had he come to a
comprehension of the relativity of things. In this new game he played
he found in little things all the intensities of gratification and
desire that he had found in the frenzied big things when he was a power
and rocked half a continent with the fury of the blows he struck. With
head and hand, at risk of life and limb, to bit and break a wild colt
and win it to the service of man, was to him no less great an
achievement. And this new table on which he played the game was clean.
Neither lying, nor cheating, nor hypocrisy was here. The other game
had made for decay and death, while this new one made for clean
strength and life. And so he was content, with Dede at his side, to
watch the procession of the days and seasons from the farm-house
perched on the canon-lip; to ride through crisp frosty mornings or
under burning summer suns; and to shelter in the big room where blazed
the logs in the fireplace he had built, while outside the world
shuddered and struggled in the storm-clasp of a southeaster.

Once only Dede asked him if he ever regretted, and his answer was to
crush her in his arms and smother her lips with his. His answer, a
minute later, took speech.

"Little woman, even if you did cost thirty millions, you are sure the
cheapest necessity of life I ever indulged in.