in mottled patches of grape-leaf green and yellow and gold,
with a burgundian riot of color along the western sky-line where the
last orange rind of the sun had just slipped down out of sight.

As I stared down at the roof of our shack it looked small and pitiful,
tragically meager to house the tangled human destinies it was housing.
And the fields where we'd labored and sweated took on a foreign and
ghostly coloring, as though they were oblongs on the face of an alien
world, a world with mystery and beauty and unfathomable pathos about
it.

I was sitting there, with my heels swinging out in space and an oddly
consoling sense of calmness in my heart, when Peter came out of the
shack and started to cross toward the corral. I couldn't resist the
temptation to toss my old straw hat down at him.

He stopped short as it fell within twenty paces of him, like a meteor
out of the sky. Then he turned and stared up at me. The next minute I
saw him knock out his little briar pipe, put it away in his pocket,
and cross over to the tower.

I could feel the small vibrations of the steel structure on which I
sat poised, as he mounted the ladder toward me. And it felt for all
the world like sitting on the brink of Heaven, like a blessed damozel
the second, watching a sister-soul coming up to join you in your
beatitude.

"I say, isn't this taking a chance?" asked Peter, a little worried and
a little out of breath, as he clambered up beside me.

"It's glorious!" I retorted, with a nod toward the slowly paling
sky-line.

That far and lonely horizon looked as though a fire of molten gold
burned behind the thinnest of mauve and saffron and purple curtains, a
fire that was too subdued to be actual flame, but more an unearthly
and ethereal radiance, luring the vision on and on until it brought an
odd little sense of desolation to the heart and made me glad to
remember that Peter was swinging his lanky legs there at my side out
over empty space.

"I find," he observed, "that this tower was sold to a tenderfoot, by
the foot. That's why it went over. It was too highfalutin! It was
thirty feet taller than it had any need to be."

Then he dropped back into silence.

I finally became conscious of the fact that Peter, instead of staring
at the sunset, was staring at me. And I remembered that my hair was
half down, trailing across my nose, and that three distinctly new
freckles had shown themselves that week on the bridge of that same
n