the ferocity which had previously been in his captor's
face. At length the tense silence was broken.

"Wasn't the old game good enough? Was it played out? Why did you take to
this? Why did you do it, Scranton?"

The voice quavered a little in reply. "I don't know. Something sort of
pushed me into it."

"How did you come to start it?"

There was a long silence, then the husky reply came. "I got a sickener
last time--"

"Yes, I remember, at Waywing."

"I got into the desert, and had hard times--awful for a while. I hadn't
enough to eat, and I didn't know whether I'd die by hunger, or fever, or
Indians--or snakes."

"Oh, you were seeing snakes!" said Tim grimly.

"Not the kind you mean; I hadn't anything to drink--"

"No, you never did drink, I remember--just was crooked, and slopped over
women. Well, about the snakes?"

"I caught them to eat, and they were poison-snakes often. And I wasn't
quick at first to get them safe by the neck--they're quick, too."

Tim laughed inwardly. "Getting your food by the sweat of your brow--and
a snake in it, same as Adam! Well, was it in the desert you got your
taste for honey, too, same as John the Baptist--that was his name, if I
recomember?" He looked at the tin of honey on the ground.

"Not in the desert, but when I got to the grass-country."

"How long were you in the desert?"

"Close to a year."

Tim's eyes opened wider. He saw that the man was speaking the truth.

"Got to thinking in the desert, and sort of willing things to come to
pass, and mooning along, you, and the sky, and the vultures, and the hot
hills, and the snakes, and the flowers--eh?"

"There weren't any flowers till I got to the grass-country."

"Oh, cuss me, if you ain't simple for your kind! I know all about that.
And when you got to the grass-country, you just picked up the honey, and
the flowers, and a calf, and a lamb, and a mule here and there, 'without
money and without price,' and walked on--that it?"

The other shrank before the steel in the voice, and nodded his head.

"But you kept thinking in the grass-country of what you'd felt and said
and done--and willed, in the desert, I suppose?"

Again the other nodded.

"It seemed to you in the desert, as if you'd saved your own life a
hundred times, as if you'd just willed food and drink and safety to
come; as if Providence had been at your elbow?"

"It was like a dream, and it stayed with me. I had to think in the
desert things I'd ne