Courant leaned near her and laid his hand on hers.

"If there's a clergyman here we can be married," he said quietly.

She drew her hand away and with its fellow covered her face. Courant
looked across the fire and said:

"Go and get him, Daddy John. He can do the reading over us now."

END OF PART IV

PART V

The Promised Land

CHAPTER I

In the light of a clear September sun they stood and looked down on
it--the Promised Land.

For days they had been creeping up through defiles in the mountain
wall, crawling along ledges with murmurous seas of pine below and the
snow lying crisp in the hollows. On the western slope the great
bulwark dropped from granite heights to wooded ridges along the spines
of which the road wound. Through breaks in the pine's close ranks they
saw blue, vaporous distances, and on the far side of aerial chasms the
swell of other mountains, clothed to their summits, shape undulating
beyond shape.

Then on this bright September afternoon a sun-filled pallor of empty
space shone between the tree trunks, and they had hurried to the summit
of a knoll and seen it spread beneath them--California!

The long spurs, broken apart by ravines, wound downward to where a flat
stretch of valley ran out to a luminous horizon. It was a yellow
floor, dotted with the dark domes of trees and veined with a line of
water. The trail, a red thread, was plain along the naked ridges, and
then lost itself in the dusk of forests. Right and left summit and
slope swelled and dropped, sun-tipped, shadow filled. Slants of light,
rifts of shade, touched the crowded pine tops to gold, darkened them to
sweeps of unstirred olive. The air, softly clear, was impregnated with
a powerful aromatic scent, the strong, rich odor of the earth and its
teeming growths. It lay placid and indolent before the way-worn trio,
a new world waiting for their conquering feet.

The girl, with a deep sigh, dropped her head upon her husband's
shoulder and closed her eyes. She weakened with the sudden promise of
rest. It was in the air, soft as a caress, in the mild, beneficent
sun, in the stillness which had nothing of the desert's sinister quiet.
Courant put his arm about her, and looking into her face, saw it drawn
and pinched, all beauty gone. Her closed eyelids were dark and seamed
with fine folds, the cheek bones showed under her skin, tanned to a dry
brown, its rich bloom withered. Round her forehead and ears