n. He longed to sink
somewhere out of sight.

The preacher was talking again; the old, old story of the Prodigal Son
and how God's arms are always ready to take in a mother's lost boy.
The room swam before Job's eyes. The crowds were flocking to the
altar, the people were shouting, the boys were punching him and
saying. "Yer dursn't go!" Heaven, hell, sin and Christ were very real
to him all of a sudden.

"All the fitness he requireth
Is to feel your need of him."

How it happened he never knew, but just as Dan said, "Now, let's see
Job get religion," he rose, and, striding down the long aisle, he
rushed to the altar, and there, just where he had taken his first
drink on that awful Sunday, he threw himself in tears, a big,
heart-broken boy, with the thought of his evil life throbbing through
his brain.

It was late that night when Job left the camp ground, flung himself
across Bess' back and started home. The stars never looked down on a
happier boy. The burden, the hate, the bitterness in his heart, were
all gone. A holy love, an exaltation of soul, an awakening of all that
is best in a manly life, stirred him. The past was gone; "old things
had passed away and all things had become new." The world was the
same. Dan, with all his meanness, was in it. The saloon doors were
open, the gamblers still sat at midnight at the Monte Carlo. Grizzly
county had not changed, but he had. A new life was his.

As he galloped down the road, far away he heard them singing:

"Palms of victory, crowns of glory, I shall wear,"

and a strange feeling came over him. He took up the refrain, and,
looking up at the stars, he seemed to see his mother's face afar off
among the flashing worlds. The tears stole down his cheeks, tears of
joy, as, galloping on through the night toward home, again he sang:

"Palms of victory, crowns of glory, I shall wear."

CHAPTER VI.

THE DEANS.

It was a little, long, low, unpainted shanty, with a rude doorstep,
almost hid amid a jungle of vines and overarching trees at the end of
a long lane, where Marshall Dean lived. A sallow-faced, thin
Kentuckian, he had come up here from the plains after his sister
married Andrew Malden, in the hope that being near a rich relative
would save him from unnecessary labor. Andrew Malden had given him a
good place at the mill, but he found it too hard on his muscles, and
so decided to "ranch it." Malden had then given him the old Jones
ran