ough, a college graduate and a man of
wide reading and great intelligence, but he had chosen to lead his own
life, which was that of a recluse.

Of a temperament similar in many ways to Presley's, there were
capabilities in Vanamee that were not ordinarily to be found in the
rank and file of men. Living close to nature, a poet by instinct, where
Presley was but a poet by training, there developed in him a great
sensitiveness to beauty and an almost abnormal capacity for great
happiness and great sorrow; he felt things intensely, deeply. He never
forgot. It was when he was eighteen or nineteen, at the formative and
most impressionable period of his life, that he had met Angele Varian.
Presley barely remembered her as a girl of sixteen, beautiful almost
beyond expression, who lived with an aged aunt on the Seed ranch back of
the Mission. At this moment he was trying to recall how she looked, with
her hair of gold hanging in two straight plaits on either side of her
face, making three-cornered her round, white forehead; her wonderful
eyes, violet blue, heavy lidded, with their astonishing upward slant
toward the temples, the slant that gave a strange, oriental cast to her
face, perplexing, enchanting. He remembered the Egyptian fulness of the
lips, the strange balancing movement of her head upon her slender neck,
the same movement that one sees in a snake at poise. Never had he seen a
girl more radiantly beautiful, never a beauty so strange, so troublous,
so out of all accepted standards. It was small wonder that Vanamee had
loved her, and less wonder, still, that his love had been so intense, so
passionate, so part of himself. Angele had loved him with a love no
less than his own. It was one of those legendary passions that sometimes
occur, idyllic, untouched by civilisation, spontaneous as the growth of
trees, natural as dew-fall, strong as the firm-seated mountains.

At the time of his meeting with Angele, Vanamee was living on the Los
Muertos ranch. It was there he had chosen to spend one of his college
vacations. But he preferred to pass it in out-of-door work, sometimes
herding cattle, sometimes pitching hay, sometimes working with pick
and dynamite-stick on the ditches in the fourth division of the ranch,
riding the range, mending breaks in the wire fences, making himself
generally useful. College bred though he was, the life pleased him. He
was, as he desired, close to nature, living the full measure of life, a
wo