tone over the great valley."

"What became of him?"

"I don't know. I became so busy with something else that I forgot all
about him, and he must have gone away in the twilight. An Indian in a
niche above me began firing arrows at me, and I had to stick close in a
little hollow in the stone so he couldn't reach me. If the Little Giant
hadn't come along, and made another of his wonderful shots I suppose I'd
be staying there for a week to come."

"Tom can shoot a little," said Boyd, divining the whole story from the
lad's few sentences, "and he also has a way of shooting at the right
time. Now, you sit down here, Will, and eat these steaks I'm broiling,
and I'll give you a cup of coffee, too, just one cup though, because
we're sparing our coffee as much as we can now."

Will ate and drank with a great appetite, and then he told more fully of
his adventure with the foe whom he had never seen until the Little
Giant's bullet sent him spinning into the void.

"He'd have got you," said Brady thoughtfully, "if Tom hadn't come
along."

"You know we wuz worried 'bout him stayin' so long," said the Little
Giant, "an' so I went out to look fur him. It wuz lucky that I took his
glasses along, or I might never hev seen him or the Sioux. I don't want
to brag, but that wuz one o' my happy thoughts."

"You had nothing to do with taking the glasses, Tom Bent," said Brady
seriously.

"Why, it wuz my own idee!"

"Not at all. The idea was in your head but it was not put there by your
own mind. It was put there by the Infinite, and it was put there because
Will's time had not yet come. You were merely an instrument, Tom Bent."

"Mebbe I wuz. I'm not takin' any credit to myself fur deep thinkin' an'
I 'low you know more 'bout these things than I do, Steve Brady, since
you've had your mind on 'em so much an' so long. An' ef I wuz used ez an
instrument to save Will, I'm proud that it wuz so."

Will, who was lying on the turf propped up by his elbow before the fire,
looked up at the skies, which were now a clear silver, in which
countless stars appeared to hang, lower and larger than he had ever seen
them before. It was a beautiful sky, and whether it was merely fate or
chance that had sent the Little Giant to his aid he felt with the poet
that God was in his heaven, and, for the time at least, all was right
with his world.

"You got a good sight of the Indian, did you, Tom?" asked Boyd.

"I saw him plain through the glasses. He