iolin by the neck and crushed it to
splinters across his knee, and to Asa Skinner the sound was like the
shackles of sin broken audibly asunder.

II

For more than two years Eric Hermannson kept the austere faith to which
he had sworn himself, kept it until a girl from the East came to spend
a week on the Nebraska Divide. She was a girl of other manners and
conditions, and there were greater distances between her life and Eric's
than all the miles which separated Rattlesnake Creek from New York City.
Indeed, she had no business to be in the West at all; but ah! across
what leagues of land and sea, by what improbable chances, do the
unrelenting gods bring to us our fate!

It was in a year of financial depression that Wyllis Elliot came to
Nebraska to buy cheap land and revisit the country where he had spent
a year of his youth. When he had graduated from Harvard it was still
customary for moneyed gentlemen to send their scapegrace sons to rough
it on ranches in the wilds of Nebraska or Dakota, or to consign them to
a living death in the sagebrush of the Black Hills. These young men did
not always return to the ways of civilized life. But Wyllis Elliot had
not married a half-breed, nor been shot in a cowpunchers' brawl, nor
wrecked by bad whisky, nor appropriated by a smirched adventuress. He
had been saved from these things by a girl, his sister, who had been
very near to his life ever since the days when they read fairy tales
together and dreamed the dreams that never come true. On this, his
first visit to his father's ranch since he left it six years before, he
brought her with him. She had been laid up half the winter from a sprain
received while skating, and had had too much time for reflection during
those months. She was restless and filled with a desire to see something
of the wild country of which her brother had told her so much. She was
to be married the next winter, and Wyllis understood her when she
begged him to take her with him on this long, aimless jaunt across the
continent, to taste the last of their freedom together. It comes to all
women of her type--that desire to taste the unknown which allures and
terrifies, to run one's whole soul's length out to the wind--just once.

It had been an eventful journey. Wyllis somehow understood that strain
of gypsy blood in his sister, and he knew where to take her. They had
slept in sod houses on the Platte River, made the acqua