t. He had--well, he had lost his head, to put it
charitably. And after a fashion he had lost his heart as well. For a
week he had dreamed of her at night and thought of her by day, had
wondered and longed and built air castles. Doubtless, had he seen her
again within the next year, the romance would have grown and flourished.
But at the end of that first week they had found gold. The intoxication
of success succeeded the intoxication of love, and in the busy months
that followed the vision of Evelyn Walton's face visited him less and
less frequently. At the end of a year she had become a pleasant memory,
a memory that never failed to bring a half-sad, half-joyous little
throb. That he had never actually forgotten her meant little, when you
think how very tiny and unimportant a thing must be to utterly escape
memory. He didn't want to forget her, for she represented the only
sentimental episode that had come to him since school days. He had been
much too busy to seek love affairs, and up in the mountains they don't
lie in wait for one. Therefore at twenty-eight Wade Herrick was
heart-whole. He wondered with a smile how long he was destined to remain
so unless that same meddling Fate removed either him or Evelyn Walton
from Eden Village.

Zephania went through the hall singing, on her way upstairs to
inaugurate her war of extermination against dirt. Wade roused himself
and lighted his pipe. After all, he had done nothing criminal and there
were ninety-nine chances in a hundred that the girl wouldn't connect him
for a moment with the astounding youth who had made violent love to her
for an ecstatic five minutes on the top of Saddle Pass so many years
ago. He got up and looked at himself in the old gold-framed mirror above
the table.

"My boy," he muttered, "you're quite safe. You used to be fairly good
looking then, if I do say it myself. But now look at you! You have
day-laborer written all over you! Your hair--I wonder when and why you
ever began to part it away down near your left ear. But that's easily
changed. Your nose--well, you couldn't alter that much, and it's still
fairly straight and respectable. But that scar on the cheek-bone doesn't
help your looks a bit, my boy. Still, you mustn't kick about that, I
reckon, for if that slice of rock had come along an inch or so farther
to the right you'd have been _tuerto_ now. Not that your eyes are
anything to be stuck up about, though; they're neither brown nor green,