ips as if to protest, to
demand, to dominate, to plead for a hearing; but no sound came. His
face, unobserved by either the man he had robbed, or the daughter who
had arraigned him, betrayed all these struggling, conflicting
emotions. He was whipped! He was beaten more certainly than by fists.
He was spiritually and physically powerless. Dazed, bewildered, he
stood for an instant, then his heavy hands, which for the first time
in his life had been held out in mute appeal, dropped to his sides.
Habit only asserted when he slammed the door behind him as he walked
out into the lonely darkness of the accusing night.

CHAPTER XIX

THE QUEST SUPREME

It was twilight again, and such a twilight as only the Blue
Mountains of that far divide may know. It barred the west with
golden bands, painted lavish purples and mauves in the hollows, and
reddened the everlasting snows on the summits. It deepened the
greens of the tamaracks, and made iridescent the foams of the
streams tearing downward joyously to the wide rivers below. It
painted the reddish-yellow bars of the cross on the peak above the
Croix d'Or, and rendered its outlines a glorified symbol. It lent
stateliness to the finger of granite beneath the base that told
those who paused that beneath the shaft rested one who had a loyal
heart. It swooped down and lingered caressingly on the strong, tender
face of the girl who sat on the wall surrounding the graves of
Bells Park and "the best woman that ever lived."

"For some reason," Joan said, speaking to the two men beside her, "the
ugliness of some of it has gone. There is nothing left but the good
and the beautiful. Ah, how I love it--all! All!"

Dick's arm slipped round her, and drew her close, and unresisting, to
his side.

"And but for you and Bill," he said softly, "it might never have ended
this way."

"Humph!" drawled the deep voice of the grizzled old miner. "Things is
just the way they have to be. Nobody can change 'em. The Lord Almighty
fixes 'em, and I expect they have to work out about as He wants 'em
to. Somehow, up here in the tops of the hills, where it's close to the
sky, He seems a heap friendlier and nearer than He does down on the
plains. 'Most always I feel sorry for them poor fellers that live down
there. They seem like such lonesome, forgotten cusses."

The youthful couple by him did not answer. Their happiness was too
new, too sacred, to admit of speech.

"Now," Bill went on argumenta