tten all women in the sweep of his imaginative journey.

"Oh, that will be grand! How will you do it?"

"On old Kintuck, if his legs don't wear off."

"How will you live?"

"Forage where I can. Turn to and help on a 'round-up,' or 'drive' where
I can--shoot and fish--oh, I'll make it if it takes ten years."

"Then what?" Mary asked, with a curious intonation.

"Then I'll start for the Northwest," he replied after a little
hesitation--"if I live. Of course the chances are I'll turn up my toes
somewhere on the trail. A man is liable to make a miss-lick somewhere,
but that's all in the game. A man had better die on the trail than in a
dead furrow."

Mary looked at him with dreaming eyes. His strange moods filled her with
new and powerful emotions. The charm of the wild life he depicted
appealed to her as well as to him. It was all a fearsome venture, but
after all it was glorious. The placid round of her own life seemed for
the moment intolerably commonplace. There was epic largeness in the
circuit of the plainsman's daring plans. The wonders of Nature which he
catalogued loomed large in the misty knowledge she held of the West. She
cried out:

"Oh, I wish I could see those wonderful scenes!"

He turned swiftly: "You can; I'll take you."

She shrank back. "Oh, no! I didn't mean that--I meant--some time----"

His face darkened. "In a sleeping car, I reckon. That time'll never
come."

Then a silence fell on them. Harold knew that his plans could not be
carried out with a woman for companion--and he had sense enough to know
that Mary's words were born of a momentary enthusiasm. When he spoke it
was with characteristic blunt honesty.

"No; right here our trails fork, Mary. Ever since I saw you in the jail
the first time, you've been worth more to me than anything else in the
world, but I can see now that things never can go right with you and me.
I couldn't live back here, and you couldn't live with me out there. I'm
a kind of an outlaw, anyway. I made up my mind last night that I'd hit
the trail alone. I won't even ask Jack to go with me. There's something
in me here"--he laid his hand on his breast--"that kind o' chimes in
with the wind in the pinons and the yap of the ky-ote. The rooster and
the church bells are too tame for me. That's all there is about it.
Maybe when I get old and feeble in the knees I'll feel like pitchin' a
permanent camp, but just now I don't; I want to be on the move. If I had
a nice r