must stay."

"_Si_!" said Firio, resuming his impassiveness, and slipped around the
corner of the house.

"He does care!" Jack cried with a smile, which, however, was not the
smile of gardens, of running brooks, and of song. "I am glad--glad!"

He picked up his crutches and went out to the three steeds of
trail memory:

"And _you_ care--_you_ care!" he repeated to them.

He drew a lugubrious grimace in mockery at Wrath of God. He tickled the
sliver of the donkey's ear, whereat Jag Ear wiggled the sliver in
blissful unconsciousness that he had lost any of the ornamental equipment
of his tribe.

"You are like most of us; we don't see our deformities, Jag Ear," Jack
told him. "And if others were also blind to them, why, we should all be
good-looking!"

His arm slipped around P.D.'s neck and he ran a finger up and down P.D.'s
nose with a tickling caress.

"You old plodder!" he said. "You know a lot. It's good to have the love
of any living thing that has been near me as long as you have."

This preposterous being was preposterously sentimental over a pair of
ponies and an earless donkey. When Mrs. Galway, who had watched him from
the window, came out on the porch she saw that he was on his way through
the gate in the hedge to the street.

"Look here! Did the doctor say you might?" she called.

"No, my leg says it!" Jack answered, gaily. "Just a little walk!
Back soon."

It was his first enterprise in locomotion outside the limits of Jim
Galway's yard since he had been wounded. He turned blissful traveller
again. Having come to know the faces of the citizens, now he was to look
into the faces of their habitations. The broad main street, with its rows
of trees, narrowed with perspective until it became a gray spot of desert
sand. Under the trees leisurely flowed those arteries of ranch and
garden-life, the irrigation ditches. Continuity of line in the
hedge-fences was evidently a municipal requirement; but over the hedges
individualism expressed itself freely, yet with a harmony which had been
set by public fashion.

The houses were of cement in simple design. They had no architectural
message except that of a background for ornamentation by the genius of
the soil's productivity. They waited on vines to cover their sides and
trees to cast shade across their doorways. One need not remain long to
know the old families in this community, where the criterion of local
aristocracy was the size of your plums or the