wishes,
opening the way to their accomplishment, and then quietly lying back upon
his pillow and letting death take him beyond reach of protest.

For days Helen May was numb with the sudden dropping of Life's big
responsibilities upon her shoulders. She could not even summon energy
enough to call Vic to an accounting of his absences from the house. Until
after the funeral Vic had been subdued, going around on his toes and
looking at Helen May with wide, solemn eyes and lips prone to trembling.
But fifteen years is the resilient age, and two days after Peter was
buried, Vic asked her embarrassedly if she thought it would look right
for him to go to the ball game. He had to do _something_, he added
defensively.

"Oh, I guess so; run along," Helen May had told him absently, without in
the least realizing what it was he had wanted to do. After that Vic went
his way without going through the ceremony of asking her consent, secure
in the knowledge of her indifference.

The insurance company for which she had worked set in motion the wheels
that would eventually place in her hands the three thousand dollars for
which Peter had calmly given his life. She hated the money. She wanted to
tell her dad how impossible it was for her to use a cent of it. Yet she
must use it. She must use it as he had directed, because he had died to
open the way for her obedience. She must take Vic, against his violent
young will, she suspected, and she must go to that claim away off there
somewhere in the desert, and she must live in the open--and raise goats!
For there was a certain strain of Peter's simplicity in the nature of his
daughter. His last scrawled advice was to her a command which she must
obey as soon as she could muster the physical energy for obedience.

"What do I know about goats!" she impatiently asked her empty room one
morning after a night of fantastic dreams. "They eat tin cans and paper,
and Masonic candidates ride them, and they stand on high banks and look
silly, and have long chin whiskers and horns worn back from their
foreheads. But as to _raising_ them--what are they good for, for
heaven's sake?"

"Huh? Say, what are you mumbling about?" Vic, it happened, was awake, and
Helen May's door was ajar.

"Oh, nothing." Then the impulse of speech being strong in her, Helen May
pulled on a kimono and went out to where Vic lay curled up in the
blankets on the couch. "We've got to go to New Mexico, Vic, and, live on
that lan