a roll of brown hair and a pair of gray
eyes that look straight at you. My boy, when the principles of law are
back and under that kind of a page illustration, they are hard to get,
and you don't forget them when they're yours. It wasn't hard to learn
things in Princeton. It's the things out of college that are hard to
learn.

"Well, you know how that is. A fellow lives because this physical
machine of ours is wound up for threescore years and ten, and unless
the powers of evil get their fingers in the works, it runs. Well, one
time, after I was admitted to the bar back there, I was sitting one
night reading Chitty on Pleading. That was the worst of all the books.
Contracts, notes and bills, torts, replevin, and ejectment--all those
things were easy. But when I got to Chitty, the girl's face would
always get on the page and stick there. So one night, seeing that I
was gone, I took Chitty on Pleading, girl's face and all, and screwed
it shut, tight and fast in the letter-press. I allowed she couldn't
get out of there! Then I pulled my freight. I punched a burro into
Heart's Desire, two hundred miles, just as you did. I have lived here,
just as you have. No life, no trouble, no woman--why, you know, this
is Heart's Desire!"

"It was," said I; "God bless it."

"And amen! We'd all have been in the Army, or burglary, or outlawry,
if it hadn't been for Heart's Desire. God bless it."

"But she got out," said I. "Some one unscrewed the press?"

"Yes," said Dan Anderson. "She's out. They're out. I tell you,
they're out, all over the world!

"We were three hundred men here, and it was Heaven. One vast commune,
and yet no commune. Everything there was if you asked for it, and
nothing you could take if you didn't ask. Not a church, because there
wasn't a woman. Not a courthouse, because there wasn't any crime, and
that because there wasn't a woman. Not a society--not a home--and I
thank God for it. I knew what it was back there--every man suspicious,
every man scared, every man afraid of his own shadow--not a clean, true
note in all the world; and incidentally a woman behind every tree, in
every corner, whichever way you turned. Life in the States was being a
_peon_ with a halter around your neck. But it was never that way
here. There never was any crime in Heart's Desire. It's no crime to
shoot a man when he's tired of living and wants you to kill him. Why,
this was Heart's Desire until--"

"