ed back to Tisdale's face. "You wouldn't have
caught me writing to Johnny Banks, then. I'm not that kind. The most I
could do was to see what I could make of the goats. I commenced herding
them myself, but I hadn't the face to do it down there in Oregon, where
everybody knew me, and I gradually worked north with them until I ended
here."

Tisdale had dropped his knife. He stooped to pick it up. "That's where you
made your mistake," he said.

The woman drew a step nearer, watching his face; tense, breathless.
Clearly he had turned her thoughts from the fence, and he slipped the
knife in farther and continued to pry and twist the wire loose. "How do
you know it was a mistake?" she asked at last.

Tisdale laid the second wire down. "Well, wasn't it? To punish yourself
like this, to cheat yourself out of the best years of your life, when you
knew how much Banks thought of you. But you seem to have overlooked his
side. Do you think, when he knows how you crucified yourself, it's going
to make him any happier? He carried a great spirit bottled in that small,
wiry frame, but he got to seeing himself through your eyes. He was ashamed
of his failures--he had always been a little sensitive about his size--and
it wasn't the usual enthusiasm that started him to Alaska; he was stung
into going. It was like him to play his poor joke gamily, at the last, and
pretend he didn't care. A word from you would have held him--you must have
known that--and a letter from you afterwards, when you needed him, would
have brought him back. Or you might have joined him up there and made a
home for him all these years, but you chose to bury yourself here in the
desert of the Columbia, starving your soul, wasting your best on these
goats." He paused with the last loosened wire in his hands and stood
looking at her with condemning eyes. "What made you?" he added, and his
voice vibrated softly. "What made you?"

The woman's features worked; tears filled her eyes.

They must have been the first in many months, for they came with the gush
that follows a probe. "You know him," she said brokenly. "You've seen him
lately, up there in Alaska."

"I think so, yes. The Johnny Banks I knew in the north told me something
about a girl he left down in Oregon. But she was a remarkably pretty girl,
with merry black eyes and a nice color in her cheeks. Seems to me she used
to wear a pink gown sometimes, and a pink rose in her black hair, and made
a picture that t