pure, immutable in their calm; stars that
came down at night and hung just over your head, making the darkness
alive with their bright presence; a little cottage hunched against a
hill, a candle winking cheerily through the window at the stars; the
cries of night birds, the drone of insects, the distant howling of a
coyote; far away on the boundary of your possessions, a fence of barbed
wire stretching through a hollow and up over a hill; distance and quiet
and calm, be it day or night. And Helen May coming through the sunlight,
riding a gentle-eyed pony; Helen May with her deep-gold hair tousled in
the wind, and with health dancing in her eyes that were the color of a
ripe chestnut, odd contrast to her hair; Helen May with the little red
spots gone from her cheek bones, and with tanned skin and freckles on her
nose and a laugh on her lips, coming up at a gallop with the sun behind
her, and something more; with sickness behind her and the drudgery of
eight hours in an office, and poverty and unhappiness. And Vic--yes, Vic
in overalls and a straw hat, growing up to be the strong man he never
would be in the city.

Like many another commonplace man of the towns, for all his colorless
ways and his thinning hair and his struggle against poverty, Peter was
something of a dreamer. And like all the rest of us who build our dreams
out of wishes and hopes and maybes, Peter had not a single fact to use in
his foundation. Arizona, New Mexico or Colorado--to Peter they were but
symbols of all those dear unattainable things he longed for. And that he
longed for them, not for himself but for another who was very dear to
him, only made the longing keener and more tragic.

CHAPTER TWO

IN WHICH PETER DISCOVERS A WAY OUT

We are always exclaiming over the strange way in which events link
themselves together in chains; and when the chains bind us to a certain
condition or environment, we are in the habit of blandly declaring
ourselves victims of the force of circumstances. By that rule, Peter
found himself being swept into a certain channel of thought about which
events began at once to link themselves into a chain which drew him
perforce into a certain path that he must follow. Or it may have been his
peculiar single-mindedness that forced him to follow the path; however
that may be, circumstances made it easy.

If Helen May worried about her cough and her failing energy, she did not
mention the fact again; but that was He