to mention
this, then closed them again. He had been to enough trouble on her
account. He had already spent a whole day scouring the country for a
saddle. . . . She would manage some way.

Late that night she was busy with scissors and needle.

CHAPTER THREE

Dr. Hardy recovered from his injuries as rapidly as could be expected,
and, while he chafed somewhat over spending his holidays under such
circumstances, the time passed not unhappily. Had he sought the world
over for a haven from the intrusion of business or professional cares
he could have found it nowhere in greater perfection than in the
foothill country centering about the Elden ranch. Here was an Arcadia
where one might well return to the simple life; a little bay of still
water sheltered from the onrushing tide of affairs by the warm brown
prairies and the white-bosomed mountains towering through their
draperies of blue-purple mist. It was life as far removed from his
accustomed circles as if he had been suddenly spirited to a different
planet. It was life without the contact of life, without the crowd and
jostle and haste and gaiety and despair that are called life; but the
doctor wondered if, after all, it did not come nearer to filling the
measure of experience--which is life.

A considerable acquaintanceship had sprung up between him and the
senior Elden. The rancher had come from the East forty years before,
but in turning over their memories the two men found many links of
association; third persons known to them both; places, even streets and
houses common to their feet in early manhood; events of local history
which each could recall, although from different angles. And Elden's
life in the West had been a treasury of experience, in which he now
dipped for the first time in years, regaling his guest with tales of
the open range long before barbed wire had stuck its poisoned fang into
the heart of the ranchman; tales of horse-stealing and cattle-rustling,
with glimpses of sudden justice unrecorded in the official documents of
the territory; of whiskey-running and excess and all those large
adventures that drink the red blood of the wilderness. In his grizzled
head and stooping frame he carried more experiences than would fill a
dozen well-rounded city lives, and he had the story-teller's art which
scorns to spoil dramatic effect by a too strict adherence to fact. But
over one phase of his life he kept the curtain resolutely down.