he said, unconscious of her answering
deeper sigh.

"Real. It is real! Look there--and there--and there!"

"That is all Hobby's work," said Edith as her eyes followed his
pointing finger, and saw there what he saw--the city of his vision,
the courts and palaces of love. "He has the builder's mind."

"Yes. It is a great gift." It was said ungrudgingly. "I wish I had it.
That way lies happiness. Me--I am a spectator."

She shook her reins to go, with a last look at his phantom farmlands.
"'An' I 'a stubb'd Thurnaby waaeste.' That's what they'll put on
Hobby's tombstone."

She lifted up her eyes from the waste places and the seeming, and let
them rest on the glowing mesas beyond the river and the long dim
ridges of misty mountain beyond and over all; and saw them in the
light that never was on sea or land. The heart of the good warm
boisterous earth called to kindred clay, "and turned her sweet blood
into wine."

Shy happiness tinged her pale cheek with color, a tint of wild rose
and sea-shell delicacy, faint and all unnoted; he was half inattentive
to her as she rode beside him, glowing in her splendid spring, a noble
temple of life, a sanctuary ready for clean sacrifice.

"Yes. Hobby, he's all right. Him and his likes, they put up the brains
and take the risks and do the work. But after it's all done some of
these austere men we read about, they'll ooze in and gather the
crops."

"He doesn't miss much worth having. What may be weighed and counted
and stolen and piled in heaps--oh, yes, Hobby Lull may miss that. Not
real things, like laughter and joy and--and love, Charlie."

Charlie See turned his head toward Redgate. She read his thought; in
her face the glow of life faded behind the white skin. But he did not
see it; nor the thread of pain in her eyes. In his thought she was
linked with Adam Forbes, and at her word he smiled to think of his
friend, and looked up to Redgate where, even then, "Nicanor lay dead
in his harness."

* * * * *

Pete Harkey's buckboard stood by the platform in front of the little
store, and the young people waited there for him and his marketing.

"Mail day?" asked Charlie.

"Nope. To-morrow is the big day."

"We used to get it three times a week," said Lyn. "Now it's only
twice."

"When I was a boy," said See thoughtfully, "I always wanted to rob a
stage, just once. Somehow or other I never got round to it." His brow
clouded.

"Why, Mr. See