soul you couldn't dirty and
whose hands you couldn't tie. Oh, you're a discriminating lot of
Christians! There have been times when the sight of Harvey's name in some
Eastern paper has made me hang my head like a whipped dog; and, again,
times when I liked to think of him off there in the world, away from all
this hog-wallow, climbing the big, clean up-grade he'd set for himself.

"And we? Now that we've fought and lied and sweated and stolen, and hated
as only the disappointed strugglers in a bitter, dead little Western town
know how to do, what have we got to show for it? Harvey Merrick wouldn't
have given one sunset over your marshes for all you've got put together,
and you know it. It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of
God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and
bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's
been hearing here tonight is the only tribute any truly great man could
have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks
as the here-present financiers of Sand City--upon which town may God have
mercy!"

The lawyer thrust out his hand to Steavens as he passed him, caught up
his overcoat in the hall, and had left the house before the Grand Army
man had had time to lift his ducked head and crane his long neck about at
his fellows.

Next day Jim Laird was drunk and unable to attend the funeral services.
Steavens called twice at his office, but was compelled to start East
without seeing him. He had a presentiment that he would hear from him
again, and left his address on the lawyer's table; but if Laird found it,
he never acknowledged it. The thing in him that Harvey Merrick had loved
must have gone under ground with Harvey Merrick's coffin; for it never
spoke again, and Jim got the cold he died of driving across the Colorado
mountains to defend one of Phelps's sons who had got into trouble out
there by cutting government timber.

"A Death in the Desert"

Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the aisle
was looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore a
conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judged
him to be a travelling salesman of some sort. He had the air of an
adaptable fellow who had been about the world and who could keep cool and
clean under almost any circumstances.

The "High Line Flyer," as this train was derisively called among rai