n the
word; "I never heard it used in that specific sense before."

"Well, it sure gets a greenhorn," said Joan.

Charley held the sage-branch to the embers, blowing them until a
little blaze jumped up into the startled dark. The sudden light
revealed Joan's face where she sat across from Mackenzie, and it was
so pensively sad that it smote his heart like a pain to see.

Her eyes stood wide open as she had stretched them to roam into the
night after her dreams of freedom beyond the land she knew, and so she
held them a moment, undazzled by the light of the leaping blaze. They
gleamed like glad waters in a morning sun, and the schoolmaster's
heart was quickened by them, and the pain for her longing soothed out
of it. The well of her youth was revealed before him, the fountain of
her soul.

"I'm goin' to roll in," Charley announced, his branch consumed in the
eager breath of the little blaze. "Don't slam your shoes down like you
was drivin' nails when you come in, Joan."

"It wouldn't bother you much," Joan told him, calmly indifferent to
his great desire for unbroken repose.

Charley rolled on his back, where he lay a little while in luxurious
inaction, sleep coming over him heavily. Joan shook him, sending him
stumbling off to the wagon and his bunk.

"You could drive a wagon over him and never wake him once he hits the
hay," she said.

"What kind of a man is Dad Frazer?" Mackenzie asked, his mind running
on his business adventure that was to begin on the morrow.

"Oh, he's a regular old flat-foot," said Joan. "He'll talk your leg
off before you've been around him a week, blowin' about what he used
to do down in Oklahoma."

"Well, a man couldn't get the lonesomeness around him, anyhow."

"You'll get it, all right, just like I told you; no green hand with
all his senses ever escaped it. Maybe you'll have it light, though,"
she added, hopefully, as if to hold him up for the ordeal.

"I hope so. But with you coming over to take lessons, and Dad Frazer
talking morning, noon, and night, I'll forget Egypt and its fleshpots,
maybe."

"Egypt? I thought you came from Jasper?"

"It's only a saying, used in relation to the place you look back to
with regret when you're hungry."

"I'm so ignorant I ought to be shot!" said Joan.

And Mackenzie sat silently fronting her, the dead fire between, a long
time, thinking of the sparkle of her yearning eyes, smiling in his
grim way to himself when there was no chance of