ing generosity. He had reached his cabin, and was dressing his
face with salve and soda. "She sure played the game into the old man's
hand."

Y.D. could not sleep that night. He was busy sorting up his ideas of
life and revising them in the light of the day's experience. The more he
thought of his behavior the less defensible it appeared. By midnight he
was admitting that he had got just what was coming to him.

Presently he began to feel lonely. It was a strange sensation to Y.D.,
whose life had been loneliness from the first, so that he had never
known it. Of course, there was the hunger for companionship; he had
often known that. A drinking bout, a night at cards, a whirl into
excess, and that would pass away. But this loneliness was different. The
moan of the wind in the spruce trees communicated itself to him with an
eerie oppressiveness. He sat up and lit a lamp. The light fell on the
bare logs of his hut; he had never known before how bare they were. He
got up and shuffled about; took a lid off the stove and put it back on
again; moved aimlessly about the room, and at last sat down on the bed.

"Y.D.," he said with a laugh, "I believe you've got nerves. You're
behavin' like a woman."

But he could not laugh it off. The mention of a woman brought Wilson's
daughter back vividly before him. "She's a man's girl," he found
himself, saying.

He sat up with a shock at his own words. Then he rested his chin on his
hands and gazed long at the blank wall before him. That was life--his
life. That blank wall was his life.... If only it had a window in it; a
bright space through which the vision could catch a glimpse of something
broader and better.... Well, he could put a window in it. He could put a
window in his life.

The next noon Frank Wilson looked up with surprise to see Y.D. riding
into his yard. Wilson stiffened instantly, as though setting himself
against the shock of an attack, but there was nothing belligerent in
Y.D.'s greeting.

"Wilson," he said, "I pulled a dirty trick on you yesterday, an' I got
more than I reckoned on. The old Y.D. would have come back with a gun
for vengeance. Well, I ain't after vengeance. I reckon you an' me has
got to live in this valley, an' we might as well live peaceful. Does
that go with you?"

"Full weight and no shrinkage," said Wilson, heartily, extending his
hand. "Come up to the house for dinner."

Y.D. was nothing loth to accept the invitation, even though he had hi