y
something that took hold of a man and drew him into its larger life,
smoothed the wrinkles out of him, and stood him upright on his feet with
the breath deeper in him than it ever had gone before. He felt that he
never would be content to remain amongst the visible plentitude of that
fat, complacent, finished land again.

Give him some place that called for a fight, a place where the wind blew
with a different flavor than these domestic scents of hay and
fresh-turned furrows in the wheatlands by the road. In his vision he
pictured the place that he liked best--a rough, untrammeled country
leading back to the purple hills, a long line of fence diminishing in
its distance to a thread. He sighed, thinking of it. Dog-gone his melts,
he was lonesome--lonesome for a fence!

He rolled a cigarette and felt about himself abstractedly for a match,
in this pocket, where Grace Kerr's little handkerchief still lay, with
no explanation or defense for its presence contrived or attempted; in
that pocket, where his thumb encountered a folded paper.

Still abstracted, his head turned to save his cigarette from the wind,
he drew out this paper, wondering curiously when he had put it there and
forgotten it. It was the warrant for the arrest of Berry Kerr. He
remembered now having folded the paper and put it there the day the
sheriff gave it to him, never having read a word of it from that day to
this. Now he repaired that omission. It gave him quite a feeling of
importance to have a paper about him with that severe legal phraseology
in it. He folded it and put it back in his pocket, wondering what had
become of Berry Kerr, and from him transferring his thoughts to Grace.

She was still there on the ranch, he knew, although Kerr's creditors had
cleaned out the cattle, and doubtless were at law among themselves over
the proceeds by now. How she would live, what she would do, he wondered.
Perhaps Kerr had left some of the money he had made out of his
multimortgage transactions, or perhaps he would send for Grace and his
wife when he had struck a gait in some other place.

It didn't matter one way or another. His interest in her was finished,
his last gentle thought of her was dead. Only he hoped that she might
live to be as hungry for a friendly word as his heart had been hungry of
longing after her in its day; that she might moan in contrition and burn
in shame for the cruelty in which she broke the vessel of his friendship
and threw