IRE

_This being the Story of a Sheepherder, Two Warm Personal Friends, and
their Love-letter to a Beautiful Queen_

CHAPTER XXV

ROMANCE AT HEART'S DESIRE

_The Pleasing Recountal of an Absent Knight, a Gentle Lady, and an
Ananias with Spurs_

CHAPTER XXVI

THE GIRL AT HEART'S DESIRE

_The Story of a Surprise, a Success, and Something Else Very Much
Better_

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Frontispiece: "He looked up--to see _her_ standing at his door!"

"'The umpire decides that you've got to check your guns during the
game.'"

"A voice which sang of a face that was the fairest, and of a dark blue
eye."

"'Something has got to be did, and did mighty blame quick.'"

HEART'S DESIRE

CHAPTER I

THE LAND OF HEART'S DESIRE

_This being in Part the Story of Curly, the Can of Oysters, and the
Girl from Kansas_

"It looks a long ways acrost from here to the States," said Curly, as
we pulled up our horses at the top of the Capitan divide. We gazed out
over a vast, rolling sea of red-brown earth which stretched far beyond
and below the nearer foothills, black with their growth of stunted
pines. This was a favorite pausing place of all travellers between the
county-seat and Heart's Desire; partly because it was a summit reached
only after a long climb from either side of the divide; partly,
perhaps, because it was a notable view-point in a land full of noble
views. Again, it may have been a customary tarrying point because of
some vague feeling shared by most travellers who crossed this
trail,--the same feeling which made Curly, hardened citizen as he was
of the land west of the Pecos, turn a speculative eye eastward across
the plains. We could not see even so far as the Pecos, though it
seemed from our lofty situation that we looked quite to the ultimate,
searching the utter ends of all the earth.

"Yours is up that-a-way;" Curly pointed to the northeast. "Mine was
that-a-way." He shifted his leg in the saddle as he turned to the
right and swept a comprehensive hand toward the east, meaning perhaps
Texas, perhaps a series of wild frontiers west of the Lone Star state.
I noticed the nice distinction in Curly's tenses. He knew the man more
recently arrived west of the Pecos, possibly later to prove a
backslider. As for himself, Curly knew that he would never return to
his wild East; yet it may have been that he had just a touch of the
home feeling which is so hard to lose, even in a hom