is was the last touch
they had of her hand. Her place was up on the driver's seat between Abe
and Mr. Craig, who held little Marjorie on his knee. The rest of the
guard of honour were to follow with Graeme's team. It was Winton's
fine sense that kept Graeme from following them close. 'Let her go out
alone,' he said, and so we held back and watched her go.

She stood with her back towards Abe's plunging four-horse team, and
steadying herself with one hand on Abe's shoulder, gazed down upon us.
Her head was bare, her lips parted in a smile, her eyes glowing with
their own deep light; and so, facing us, erect and smiling, she drove
away, waving us farewell till Abe swung his team into the canyon road
and we saw her no more. A sigh shuddered through the crowd, and, with a
sob in his voice, Winton said: 'God help us all.'

I close my eyes and see it all again. The waving crowd of dark-faced
men, the plunging horses, and, high up beside the driver, the swaying,
smiling, waving figure, and about all the mountains, framing the picture
with their dark sides and white peaks tipped with the gold of the rising
sun. It is a picture I love to look upon, albeit it calls up another
that I can never see but through tears.

I look across a strip of ever-widening water, at a group of men upon the
wharf, standing with heads uncovered, every man a hero, though not a man
of them suspects it, least of all the man who stands in front, strong,
resolute, self-conquered. And, gazing long, I think I see him turn again
to his place among the men of the mountains, not forgetting, but every
day remembering the great love that came to him, and remembering, too,
that love is not all. It is then the tears come.

But for that picture two of us at least are better men to-day.

CHAPTER XIII

HOW NELSON CAME HOME

Through the long summer the mountains and the pines were with me. And
through the winter, too, busy as I was filling in my Black Rock sketches
for the railway people who would still persist in ordering them by the
dozen, the memory of that stirring life would come over me, and once
more I would be among the silent pines and the mighty snow-peaked
mountains. And before me would appear the red-shirted shantymen or
dark-faced miners, great, free, bold fellows, driving me almost mad with
the desire to seize and fix those swiftly changing groups of picturesque
figures. At such times I would drop my sketch, and with eager brush
seize a group