Harold Norton swung his three-year-old child up on his shoulder and started with his milking-pail for the barn. His wife stood in the doorway and watched with a smile that yellow head above the brown. The old merry irony had come back. Harold was almost happy again. But there was the child. The mother sighed as she turned to make ready her supper.

If anything less had been at stake, Mary Norton could not have endured her life. She had scrubbed the floor of their hut. She had vainly tried to whiten its grimy walls. She had learned to manage hammer and ax, as well as broom and scrubbing brush.

"If you had married some one else you might never have discovered your latent talent for driving nails," her husband said to her as she helped him shingle the roof of the new stable. He had a fashion of making jokes to cover real concern.

Mrs. Norton's face grew brown. Her hands were rough. She gloried in discomfort endured for the man whose slightest touch brought back always the old thrill. But her mind was always full of anxiety for Langdon. If he should grow up with coarse tastes! For him she washed and sewed and ironed. He led a dainty baby life in his wild home. The gently-bred woman suffered when her son's cheek, resting against her knee, touched the rough fabric that she wore.

Her life was full of fear. One day a rattlesnake crawled across the floor, close to the child. One night the face of an Indian looked suddenly through the unglazed kitchen window facing the cliff.

"My son," the father would say in jest, as he started for his day's work in a distant part of the ranch, "if Rain-in-the-Face or Big Bear attack the cabin, protect your

mother."

Then the mother looked at the child's fair hair and thought of Indian stories that she had heard. Once a murderer slept upon her floor. At night she listened to the wild chorus of the coyotes and the cry of the mountain lion. The ceaseless rushing of the river took into its sound the foreboding of her dreams.

Through all the discomfort and the fear she said to herself, "For Harold." Her husband's honor was at stake, and the game was worth the playing. His failure in bus

iness had left heavy debts to pay. In the discouragement that followed that failure he had fallen back into certain habits of dissipation, overcome but unforgotten. It was she who had suggested the pioneer life. Sheep-farming in Colorado was profitable. In the isolation, she said to herself, Harold would win back his lost self-control.

It was a desperate measure, but it was not without hope. Now and then the wife's fears vanished. Subtle influences of sky and sunlight brought her short seasons of peace. The whirr of wings of wild doves in the valley; the sweet insistent song of the meadow-lark; the flight in the glad air of strange birds, and the light at sundown on the face of the red cliff, brought her sudden promises of better things.

Tonight it was dark when Harold came with the milk. A tallow candle lighted the supper table. Langdon; who was happy with the happiness of three years in a life of flowers, sunshine, and dirt, laughed over his supper, then went to sleep with his curly head upon his saucer.

"It has been a success," Harold said, looking across the table, with its coarse china and earthenware. "Last Chance Cabin has been a success. We can pay two hundred dollars on the debt this year. And I'm a man again. It is all your doing, Mary."

His wife, who had risen to remove the dishes, came to stand at his side. She looked down at her patched dress and broken shoes.

"I am blessed among women," she said softly. Then the troubled look came back to her face, for the child awoke and cried.

The next morning mother and child stood at the door of the cabin to watch the father ride away. He was driving some cattle to the nearest village, eleven miles distant, to be shipped to the East. Far down the rocky path that the settlers called the Deaf and Dumb road the rider stopped and kissed his hand.

His wife waved her apron gayly. The memory of his words last night still made her glad.

"You will be back by three?" she had said as he mounted.

Harold's mood had changed. He looked down with the old, helpless, resigned expression of the weak.

That night he came home swaying in the saddle, half-intoxicated.

"Last night I was a genuine K. G.," he said to his wife, who shrank from him as he entered the kitchen, "a Keeley graduate. And now -?"

Six times the sun-flowers had been yellow in the valley; six times the white petals of the Rocky Mountain poppy had waved upon the wind. Often Mary Norton's eyes followed the high walls, on the one side steep and savage, on the other, gray-green slopes, to the end of the valley where the walls shut like a gate behind her.

For in the battle of souls she was near defeat. Harold's ride that day down the Deaf and Dumb road had been a turning point in their lives. Only a few neglected sheep and cattle roved now over the steep acres of their ranch. House and outbuildings were again falling into decay. And she no longer knew her husband. He was slipping away from her into a gradually coarsening kind of dissipation. His sense of shame had come between them, and he treated her with distant courtesy, as if she were a stranger. Of himself he spoke with a fatalistic irony more cruel than harsh words toward himself could have been.

"You are defeated, my dear," he said one day. "You are plucky, but, like all great generals, you must know when you are beaten. Go back East and think of me now and then as your lost field."

His remorse, his struggles, his penitence, he kept to himself.

In the savage country by the side of the desolate river, under the blank sky, the

The suggestion lingered in her mind, a constant temptation. Should a life so full of promise be sacrificed for a ruined life? The romantic love for her husband had given way to its stern consequence. Love was no longer an emotion. It was a task to be performed. Against her own clear-sightedness she fought hard for her old illusion. At times the passion of motherhood arose in protest. Did not common-sense morality tell her to save her child?

Then her old feeling for Harold would come back like a wave. She smiled over the ideals of her girlhood. Marriage had not been like her thought of it, but perhaps it had been better. In its self-merging she had lost the selfishness of longing to carry out her own ideals. And Harold was still Harold. The sense of responsibility for emotion once felt was strong within her. No, she would stay. The child was young, and he must take the chances. Nature was

"Get a move on you, you the child, beating the animal with his tiny whip.

"Don't, Langdon," begged his mother. She stood before her husband in the bright noonday light, all the fine wrinkles showing in her faded skin.

"Dear," she said, "I want to talk with you about going away."

66

Are you planning to go away?" sneered her husband. "If I can be of any service, don't hesitate to call on me."

The woman was frightened. never been like that before.

Harold had

"Harold," she begged, her voice broken with rising sobs, "let us go away and start over again. Come with me somewhere up in the mountains. It will be easier in a new place to live and be good."

Hot blood rushed into the man's face. "D-nit!" he shouted. "D-n the whole business! I've made all the fresh starts I intend to make. If it had n't been for your exasperating goodness I'd be better at this minute."

In the warm afternoon air Mary Norton sat, looking idly out of the kitchen window toward the cliffs. Flies buzzed among the unpainted rafters, and through the open window came now and then the hum of a wasp or bumble bee. The woman had dropped her sewing. She sat with her roughened hands folded, a listless, feminine droop in her shoulders. Above her thin, pathetic face her hair was parted meekly.

The cliff bore no promise for the future written in sunlight at the top. It was but a mass of brute stone and dirt, shutting her away from her old world.

A thunder shower came over the valley. The clouds hung in long delicate fringes over the hills. Swift lightning darted through them. Suddenly the sun shone out and a gorgeous rainbow spanned the stream. The sunlight gleamed through drops of falling rain. The low, mournful coo of the wild dove sounded through the warm air.

The woman sat gazing at the changing beauty of the afternoon with blank eyes. The strained resolve of long years had broken under a last wrench. Surely her husband's brutal words had set her free. Her duty was to Langdon and Tears trickled down

the faded cheeks, for the woman knew that the suffering of the primal curse had come

together in a bundle.

66

Has papa got any supper?" asked the boy, between his great mouthfuls of bread and milk.

"Yes, he was going to Mr. Riley's. Now come and help pack. King Xerxes must carry our bundles," said the mother gayly.

The boy climbed upon the donkey's back, then sprang to the ground.

"You must ride," he said. "I can walk all the way."

The mother promised to ride if she grew weary. They started down the Deaf and Dumb road. The child sat, laughing, between the bundles slung across King Xerxes' back. Mary Norton looked at her son with pride. He was a bonny, fair-haired lad. She thought of her sheltered future, when he should have grown tall and strong.

They could reach the station long before the eleven o'clock train that would take them to Denver. She had money enough for the trip East. Harold would probably not come home that night. would be leaving Denver. her to go.

Tomorrow they Harold had told

King Xerxes walked slowly. There was

no hurry. It was but ten miles to the station. At the end of the valley Mary Norton stopped to look back. Low clouds hung behind the cliffs of red rock, dark, ominous, forbidding. They left the river valley, and down a stony path, entered the next glade. Here was broken moorland, shut in by walls of fantastic, jagged rock. The contorted shapes looked like the work of an uncertain mind, unaware of its own purposes.

It was right, the woman said. The risk was too great even for one child. She quickened her pace.

"It's getting dark," cried Langdon gleefully. "You must ride now. I can take care of you!"

So the mother, riding the donkey, her boy trudging at her side, went down the glade in the fading light into the dusk. They heard the late notes of the lark. The last clouds faded over the silent hills. Shadows came to meet them over the gray, sagecovered swells of moorland. Dusky wings of bat or prairie owl flitted before them in the path.

Langdon walked bravely on. He had no voice for speaking. The mother was busy with her thoughts. Once King Xerxes, tried by the dusk and the unfamiliar ways, lifted up his voice and brayed. The child laughed aloud. The mother did not hear.

She was doing right, she kept saying to

herself, yet in that deserted home was a man for whom there was no hope without her. Then, back from her clear idea of what she ought to do, her mind went blundering along the ways of simple human instinct. Would good come from the newer, stronger love if she were false to the old?

Stars were out over the valley. All about, the rolling hills and hollows were shadowy, mysterious. The station was only three miles away.

"To hell it reacheth, so 't is love at all,'"

Mary Norton said softly to herself.

Late that night Mary Norton lifted her sleeping child from the donkey at her cabin door. A faint light shone through the window. She opened the door softly. On the floor lay her husband, asleep. A lantern burned at his side. He had evidently started to search for her. She could see that he had been drinking.

She half dragged, half carried the drowsy boy to his bed, then came back and looked down at her husband with a great compassion in her eyes.

The creaking of the bedroom door roused the sleeper.

"Don't go, Mary," he muttered, as he threw an arm over his head. “Give me one more chance."