"I haven't had time to find out. Oh, my God! Sis, I wish't we'd never
come out here to this country at all. I want my mother, that's what I
want! I'm sick with all this." She began to cry, sobbing openly.
Mary Gage, now the stronger, drew the girl's head down into her own
arms.

"You mustn't cry," said she. "Annie, we've got to pull together."

"I guess so," said Annie, sobbing, "both of us. But I'm so
lonesome--I'm so awful scared."

The morning came slowly, at length fully, cool and softly luminous.
The friends of Sim Gage, all men, stood near his bedside. His eyes
opened sometimes, looking with curious languor around him, as though
some problem were troubling him. At length he turned toward Wid, who
stood close to him.

"Hit!" said he.--"I know, now."

No one said anything to this. After a time he reached out a hand and
touched almost timidly the arm of his friend. His voice was laboring
and not strong.

"Where's--where's my hat?" he whispered at length.

"Your hat?" said Wid. "Your hat?--Now, why--I reckon it's hanging
around somewheres here. What makes you want it?"

But some one had heard the request and came through the little hallway
with Sim Gage's hat, brave green cord and all.

The wounded man looked at it and smiled, as sweet a smile as may come
to a man's face--the smile of a boy. Indeed, he had lived a life that
had left him scarce more than a boy, all these years alone on outskirts
of the world.

He motioned to them to put the hat on the bed side him. "I want it
here," he said after a time, moving restlessly when they undertook to
take it from him.

He touched it with his hand. At length he reached out and dropped it
on the chair at the head of his bed, now and again turning and looking
at it the best he might, laboring as he did with his torn lungs;
looking at it with some strange sort of reverence in his gaze, some
tremendous significance.

"Ain't she _fine_?" he asked of his friend, again with his
astonishingly winsome smile; a smile they found hard to look upon.

A half hour later some man down the road said to another that the
sagebrusher had croaked too.

That is to say, Sim Gage, gentleman, soldier and patriot, had passed on
to the place where men find reward for doing the very best they know
with what God has seen fit to give them as their own.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE DAM

Doctor Allen Barnes turned slowly toward the house where the wife of
Sim Gage st