watched the auroral bands gather and grow in a cold
green sky, straight to the north of us, and then waver and deepen
until they reached the very zenith, where they hung, swaying curtains
of fire. No wonder the redskins call that wild pageantry of color the
ghost-dance of their gods. Even as we watched them, opal and gold and
rose and orange and green, we could see them come wheeling down on our
little world like an army of angels with incandescent swords. It made
one imagine that the very heavens were aflame, going up in quivering
veils of white and red and green. And when it was over I listened to a
long argument about the Aurora Borealis, or the Aurora Polaris, as
Gershom insisted it should be called.

Dinky-Dunk contended that one could _hear_ these Northern Lights
overhead, on a clear night. He described the sound as sometimes a
faint crackling, like that of a comb drawn through your hair, and
sometimes as a soft rustling noise, like the rustling of a silk
petticoat heard through a closed door, coming closer and closer as the
display wavered farther and farther toward the south.

Gershom was disposed to dispute this, so our old Klondiker, Whinstane
Sandy, was called in to give evidence. He did so promptly and
positively, saying he'd heard the Lights many a night in the Far
North. Gershom is still unconvinced, but intends to look up his
authorities on the matter. He attributes them to sun-spots and asserts
it's a well-known fact they often put the telephone and telegraph
wires out of commission. He has proposed that we sit up and study them
some night, through his telescope, which he is disinterring from the
bottom of his trunk....

My lord and master is going about with a less clouded eye, for he has
succeeded in selling the Harris Ranch, and selling it for thirty-five
hundred dollars more than he had expected. It is to go, eventually, to
some tenderfoot out of the East, to some tenderfoot who can have very
little definite knowledge of land-values in this jumping-off place on
the edge of the world. But may that tenderfoot, whoever he is, be
happy in his new home! Dinky-Dunk is now forever figuring up what he
will get for his grain. He's preoccupied with his plans for branching
out in the business world. His heart is no longer in his work here. I
sometimes feel that we're all merely accidents in his life. And that
feeling leaves me with a heart so heavy that I have to keep busy, or
I'd fall to luxuriating in tha