as he would to keep his feet to earth. Many were the tricks he
used to this end: vain tricks to forget the miracle of his going, of
going so soon, of going with her.

Ben Crider would not help him forget. When snatches of warning from
"Traps and Pitfalls" grew stale, Ben coined advice of a large and
general character.

"Want to be an artist, hey? Ask me? Go down to Durango--let that
professor learn you in ten lessons. Make yer five t' eight dollars a day
canvassin' fur enlargements. Gold frame throwed in. Yes, sir! Ask me?
Durango's fur enough. New York's too gosha-mighty fur!"

It was not possible to forget under the droppings of this counsel.
Wherefore his spirit tossed in tumult.

When Ben called him on the morning of the start it was still dark. He
lay a moment, his nerves tightening. This was the last time he would lie
in that bed--for how long? Well, on some unmarked night in the pregnant
future, lying there again, he would look back to this moment and tell
himself all the wonderful things that had come to him--tell his
ignorant, puzzled, excited self, who would, somehow, be waiting and
wondering there.

Juggling this conceit, he groped for matches and a candle. He could
hear the singing of the kettle in the outer room. Through the window he
saw a lantern swinging, and knew that Ben would be bringing around the
horses. It was a time to be cool, a time to gird himself.

He had breakfast on the table when Ben came in, and they ate by the
light of a smoky lamp, tacitly pretending that no miracle was afoot.
Saving the early hour, it was a scene they enacted whenever they drove
to Pagosa for supplies, up to the point when, the meal finished, they
carried two trunks from the studio out to the wagon. But they managed
this carelessly enough, with only a casual, indignant word or two about
the excessive weight of full trunks.

Only the faintest hint of light showed in the east as the chilled horses
stumbled awkwardly down the hill. A half hour they rode in a silence
broken but once, and then only by Ben's hoarse threat to "learn" the off
horse something needful but unspecified which it appeared not to know.

The light glowed from gray to rose and day was opened by the bark of a
frantic squirrel that ran half-way down a tree trunk, threatening
attack, in alarm for its store of spruce cones at the foot of the tree.
A crested jay at the same moment mocked them harshly from a higher
branch of the tree.

Ewing exhal