m custody of the Law and of the horse he had
borrowed from the court house square. Indeed, it seemed to Jeff, in a
hazy afterthought, that perhaps the sheriff had arrested him again. If
so, it had slipped Jeff's mind, swallowed up in a gruesome horror of
congratulations, hand-shakings, back-slappings, badinage and questions;
heaped on a hero heartsick, dazed and dumb. Pleading weariness, he tore
himself away at last, almost by violence, and flung himself down in a
darkened bedroom of the Arcadian Atalanta.

One thing was clear. Headlight was there, Aforesaid Smith, Madison: but
his nearest friends, Pringle, Beebe and Ballinger, though they had
hasted back to Arcadia to fight Jeff's battles, were ostentatiously
absent from his hollow and hateful triumph: Johnny Dines had pointedly
refused to share his night ride from Helm's: and Jeff knew why, sadly
enough. The gods take pay for the goods they give: and now that goodly
fellowship was broken. The thought clung fast: it haunted his tossing
and troubled slumbers, where Ellinor came through a sunset glow,
swift-footed to meet him: where his friends rode slow and silent into
the glimmering dusk, smaller and smaller, black against the sky.

* * * * *

The Sutherland place made an outer corner of Rainbow's End, bowered
about by a double row of close and interlaced cottonwoods on two sides,
by vigorous orchards on the other two.

The house had once been a one-storied adobe, heroically proportioned,
thick-walled, cool against summer, warm in what went by the name of
winter. The old-time princely hospitality was unchanged, but Sutherland
had bought lots in Arcadia of early days; and now, the old gray walls of
the house were smooth with creamy stucco, wrought of gypsum from the
White Sands; the windows were widened and there was a superimposed
story, overhanging, wide and low. The gables were double-windowed,
shingled and stained nut-brown, the gently sloping roof shingled,
dormered and soft green: the overflow projecting to broad verandas on
either side, very like an umbrella: a bungalow with two birthdays--1866
: 1896.

Miss Ellinor Hoffman had deserted veranda, rocking-chair and hammock.
With a sewing basket beside her, she sat on a pine bench under a
cottonwood of 1867, ostensibly basting together a kimono tinted like a
dripping sea shell, and faced with peach-blossom.

The work went slowly. Her seat was at the desert corner of the homestead