Chapter 1-8

                              PART IV

                        THE ANCIENT PEOPLE

                                 I
     THE San Francisco Mountain lies in Northern Arizona,
above Flagstaff, and its blue slopes and snowy summit
entice the eye for a hundred miles across the desert.  About
its base lie the pine forests of the Navajos, where the great
red-trunked trees live out their peaceful centuries in that
sparkling air.  The PINONS and scrub begin only where the
forest ends, where the country breaks into open, stony
clearings and the surface of the earth cracks into deep can-
yons.  The great pines stand at a considerable distance from
each other.  Each tree grows alone, murmurs alone, thinks
alone.  They do not intrude upon each other.  The Navajos
are not much in the habit of giving or of asking help.  Their
language is not a communicative one, and they never
attempt an interchange of personality in speech.  Over
their forests there is the same inexorable reserve.  Each
tree has its exalted power to bear.
     That was the first thing Thea Kronborg felt about the
forest, as she drove through it one May morning in Henry
Biltmer's democrat wagon--and it was the first great
forest she had ever seen.  She had got off the train at Flag-
staff that morning, rolled off into the high, chill air when
all the pines on the mountain were fired by sunrise, so that
she seemed to fall from sleep directly into the forest.
     Old Biltmer followed a faint wagon trail which ran south-
east, and which, as they traveled, continually dipped lower,
falling away from the high plateau on the slope of which
Flagstaff sits.  The white peak of the mountain, the snow
gorges above the timber, now disappeared from time to
time as the road dropped and dropped, and the forest closed
behind the wagon.  More than the mountain disappeared
as the forest closed thus.  Thea seemed to be taking very
little through the wood with her.  The personality of which
she was so tired seemed to let go of her.  The high, spark-
ling air drank it up like blotting-paper.  It was lost in the
thrilling blue of the new sky and the song of the thin wind
in the PINONS.  The old, fretted lines which marked one off,
which defined her,--made her Thea Kronborg, Bowers's
accompanist, a soprano with a faulty middle voice,--were
all erased.
     So far she had failed.  Her two years in Chicago had not
resulted in anything.  She had failed with Harsanyi, and
she had made no great progress with her voice.  She had
come to believe that whatever Bowers had taught her was
of secondary importance, and that in the essential things
she had made no advance.  Her student life closed behind
her, like the forest, and she doubted whether she could
go back to it if she tried.  Probably she would teach music
in little country towns all her life.  Failure was not so tragic
as she would have supposed; she was tired enough not to
care.
     She was getting back to the earliest sources of gladness
that she could remember.  She had loved the sun, and the
brilliant solitudes of sand and sun, long before these other
things had come along to fasten themselves upon her and
torment her.  That night, when she clambered into her big
German feather bed, she felt completely released from the
enslaving desire to get on in the world.  Darkness had once
again the sweet wonder that it had in childhood.

                                II

     THEA'S life at the Ottenburg ranch was simple and full
of light, like the days themselves.  She awoke every
morning when the first fierce shafts of sunlight darted
through the curtainless windows of her room at the ranch
house.  After breakfast she took her lunch-basket and went
down to the canyon.  Usually she did not return until
sunset.
     Panther Canyon was like a thousand others--one of
those abrupt fissures with which the earth in the Southwest
is riddled; so abrupt that you might walk over the edge of
any one of them on a dark night and never know what had
happened to you.  This canyon headed on the Ottenburg
ranch, about a mile from the ranch house, and it was acces-
sible only at its head.  The canyon walls, for the first two
hundred feet below the surface, were perpendicular cliffs,
striped with even-running strata of rock.  From there on
to the bottom the sides were less abrupt, were shelving,
and lightly fringed with PINONS and dwarf cedars.  The
effect was that of a gentler canyon within a wilder one.
The dead city lay at the point where the perpendicular
outer wall ceased and the V-shaped inner gorge began.
There a stratum of rock, softer than those above, had
been hollowed out by the action of time until it was like
a deep groove running along the sides of the canyon.  In
this hollow (like a great fold in the rock) the Ancient
People had built their houses of yellowish stone and mor-
tar.  The over-hanging cliff above made a roof two hun-
dred feet thick.  The hard stratum below was an ever-
lasting floor.  The houses stood along in a row, like the
buildings in a city block, or like a barracks.
     In both walls of the canyon the same streak of soft rock
had been washed out, and the long horizontal groove had
been built up with houses.  The dead city had thus two
streets, one set in either cliff, facing each other across the
ravine, with a river of blue air between them.
     The canyon twisted and wound like a snake, and these
two streets went on for four miles or more, interrupted by
the abrupt turnings of the gorge, but beginning again
within each turn.  The canyon had a dozen of these false
endings near its head.  Beyond, the windings were larger
and less perceptible, and it went on for a hundred miles,
too narrow, precipitous, and terrible for man to follow it.
The Cliff Dwellers liked wide canyons, where the great
cliffs caught the sun.  Panther Canyon had been deserted
for hundreds of years when the first Spanish missionaries
came into Arizona, but the masonry of the houses was
still wonderfully firm; had crumbled only where a landslide
or a rolling boulder had torn it.
     All the houses in the canyon were clean with the clean-
ness of sun-baked, wind-swept places, and they all smelled
of the tough little cedars that twisted themselves into the
very doorways.  One of these rock-rooms Thea took for her
own.  Fred had told her how to make it comfortable.  The
day after she came old Henry brought over on one of the
pack-ponies a roll of Navajo blankets that belonged to
Fred, and Thea lined her cave with them.  The room was
not more than eight by ten feet, and she could touch the
stone roof with her finger-tips.  This was her old idea: a
nest in a high cliff, full of sun.  All morning long the sun
beat upon her cliff, while the ruins on the opposite side of
the canyon were in shadow.  In the afternoon, when she
had the shade of two hundred feet of rock wall, the ruins
on the other side of the gulf stood out in the blazing sun-
light.  Before her door ran the narrow, winding path that
had been the street of the Ancient People.  The yucca and
niggerhead cactus grew everywhere.  From her doorstep
she looked out on the ocher-colored slope that ran down
several hundred feet to the stream, and this hot rock was
sparsely grown with dwarf trees.  Their colors were so pale
that the shadows of the little trees on the rock stood out
sharper than the trees themselves.  When Thea first came,
the chokecherry bushes were in blossom, and the scent of
them was almost sickeningly sweet after a shower.  At the
very bottom of the canyon, along the stream, there was a
thread of bright, flickering, golden-green,--cottonwood
seedlings.  They made a living, chattering screen behind
which she took her bath every morning.
     Thea went down to the stream by the Indian water
trail.  She had found a bathing-pool with a sand bottom,
where the creek was damned by fallen trees.  The climb
back was long and steep, and when she reached her little
house in the cliff she always felt fresh delight in its com-
fort and inaccessibility.  By the time she got there, the
woolly red-and-gray blankets were saturated with sun-
light, and she sometimes fell asleep as soon as she stretched
her body on their warm surfaces.  She used to wonder at
her own inactivity.  She could lie there hour after hour in
the sun and listen to the strident whir of the big locusts,
and to the light, ironical laughter of the quaking asps.  All
her life she had been hurrying and sputtering, as if she
had been born behind time and had been trying to catch
up.  Now, she reflected, as she drew herself out long upon
the rugs, it was as if she were waiting for something to
catch up with her.  She had got to a place where she was
out of the stream of meaningless activity and undirected
effort.
     Here she could lie for half a day undistracted, holding
pleasant and incomplete conceptions in her mind--almost
in her hands.  They were scarcely clear enough to be called
ideas.  They had something to do with fragrance and color
and sound, but almost nothing to do with words.  She was
singing very little now, but a song would go through her
head all morning, as a spring keeps welling up, and it was
like a pleasant sensation indefinitely prolonged.  It was
much more like a sensation than like an idea, or an act of
remembering.  Music had never come to her in that sensu-
ous form before.  It had always been a thing to be struggled
with, had always brought anxiety and exaltation and cha-
grin--never content and indolence.  Thea began to won-
der whether people could not utterly lose the power to
work, as they can lose their voice or their memory.  She
had always been a little drudge, hurrying from one task to
another--as if it mattered!  And now her power to think
seemed converted into a power of sustained sensation.  She
could become a mere receptacle for heat, or become a color,
like the bright lizards that darted about on the hot stones
outside her door; or she could become a continuous repeti-
tion of sound, like the cicadas.

                                III

     THE faculty of observation was never highly developed
in Thea Kronborg.  A great deal escaped her eye as
she passed through the world.  But the things which were
for her, she saw; she experienced them physically and re-
membered them as if they had once been a part of herself.
The roses she used to see in the florists' shops in Chicago
were merely roses.  But when she thought of the moon-
flowers that grew over Mrs. Tellamantez's door, it was as
if she had been that vine and had opened up in white flow-
ers every night.  There were memories of light on the sand
hills, of masses of prickly-pear blossoms she had found in
the desert in early childhood, of the late afternoon sun pour-
ing through the grape leaves and the mint bed in Mrs.
Kohler's garden, which she would never lose.  These recol-
lections were a part of her mind and personality.  In Chicago
she had got almost nothing that went into her subconscious
self and took root there.  But here, in Panther Canyon,
there were again things which seemed destined for her.
     Panther Canyon was the home of innumerable swallows.
They built nests in the wall far above the hollow groove in
which Thea's own rock chamber lay.  They seldom ven-
tured above the rim of the canyon, to the flat, wind-swept
tableland.  Their world was the blue air-river between the
canyon walls.  In that blue gulf the arrow-shaped birds
swam all day long, with only an occasional movement of
the wings.  The only sad thing about them was their tim-
idity; the way in which they lived their lives between the
echoing cliffs and never dared to rise out of the shadow of
the canyon walls.  As they swam past her door, Thea often
felt how easy it would be to dream one's life out in some
cleft in the world.

     From the ancient dwelling there came always a dignified,
unobtrusive sadness; now stronger, now fainter,--like
the aromatic smell which the dwarf cedars gave out in the
sun,--but always present, a part of the air one breathed.
At night, when Thea dreamed about the canyon,--or in
the early morning when she hurried toward it, anticipating
it,--her conception of it was of yellow rocks baking in
sunlight, the swallows, the cedar smell, and that peculiar
sadness--a voice out of the past, not very loud, that went
on saying a few simple things to the solitude eternally.
     Standing up in her lodge, Thea could with her thumb
nail dislodge flakes of carbon from the rock roof--the
cooking-smoke of the Ancient People.  They were that
near!  A timid, nest-building folk, like the swallows.  How
often Thea remembered Ray Kennedy's moralizing about
the cliff cities.  He used to say that he never felt the hard-
ness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he
felt it among those ruins.  He used to say, too, that it made
one feel an obligation to do one's best.  On the first day
that Thea climbed the water trail she began to have intui-
tions about the women who had worn the path, and who
had spent so great a part of their lives going up and down
it.  She found herself trying to walk as they must have
walked, with a feeling in her feet and knees and loins which
she had never known before,--which must have come up
to her out of the accustomed dust of that rocky trail.  She
could feel the weight of an Indian baby hanging to her
back as she climbed.
     The empty houses, among which she wandered in the
afternoon, the blanketed one in which she lay all morning,
were haunted by certain fears and desires; feelings about
warmth and cold and water and physical strength.  It
seemed to Thea that a certain understanding of those
old people came up to her out of the rock shelf on
which she lay; that certain feelings were transmitted to her,
suggestions that were simple, insistent, and monotonous,
like the beating of Indian drums.  They were not expressi-
ble in words, but seemed rather to translate themselves
into attitudes of body, into degrees of muscular tension or
relaxation; the naked strength of youth, sharp as the sun-
shafts; the crouching timorousness of age, the sullenness of
women who waited for their captors.  At the first turning
of the canyon there was a half-ruined tower of yellow
masonry, a watch-tower upon which the young men used
to entice eagles and snare them with nets.  Sometimes
for a whole morning Thea could see the coppery breast
and shoulders of an Indian youth there against the sky;
see him throw the net, and watch the struggle with the
eagle.
     Old Henry Biltmer, at the ranch, had been a great deal
among the Pueblo Indians who are the descendants of the
Cliff-Dwellers.  After supper he used to sit and smoke his
pipe by the kitchen stove and talk to Thea about them.
He had never found any one before who was interested in
his ruins.  Every Sunday the old man prowled about in the
canyon, and he had come to know a good deal more about
it than he could account for.  He had gathered up a whole
chestful of Cliff-Dweller relics which he meant to take
back to Germany with him some day.  He taught Thea
how to find things among the ruins: grinding-stones, and
drills and needles made of turkey-bones.  There were frag-
ments of pottery everywhere.  Old Henry explained to her
that the Ancient People had developed masonry and pot-
tery far beyond any other crafts.  After they had made
houses for themselves, the next thing was to house the
precious water.  He explained to her how all their customs
and ceremonies and their religion went back to water.  The
men provided the food, but water was the care of the wo-
men.  The stupid women carried water for most of their
lives; the cleverer ones made the vessels to hold it.  Their
pottery was their most direct appeal to water, the envelope
and sheath of the precious element itself.  The strongest
Indian need was expressed in those graceful jars, fashioned
slowly by hand, without the aid of a wheel.
     When Thea took her bath at the bottom of the canyon,
in the sunny pool behind the screen of cottonwoods, she
sometimes felt as if the water must have sovereign quali-
ties, from having been the object of so much service and
desire.  That stream was the only living thing left of the
drama that had been played out in the canyon centuries
ago.  In the rapid, restless heart of it, flowing swifter than
the rest, there was a continuity of life that reached back
into the old time.  The glittering thread of current had a
kind of lightly worn, loosely knit personality, graceful and
laughing.  Thea's bath came to have a ceremonial gravity.
The atmosphere of the canyon was ritualistic.
     One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool,
splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big
sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her
draw herself up and stand still until the water had quite
dried upon her flushed skin.  The stream and the broken
pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a
sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the
shining, elusive element which is life itself,--life hurrying
past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to
lose?  The Indian women had held it in their jars.  In the
sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been
caught in a flash of arrested motion.  In singing, one made
a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's
breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

                                IV

     THEA had a superstitious feeling about the potsherds,
and liked better to leave them in the dwellings
where she found them.  If she took a few bits back to her
own lodge and hid them under the blankets, she did it
guiltily, as if she were being watched.  She was a guest in
these houses, and ought to behave as such.  Nearly every
afternoon she went to the chambers which contained the
most interesting fragments of pottery, sat and looked at
them for a while.  Some of them were beautifully deco-
rated.  This care, expended upon vessels that could not
hold food or water any better for the additional labor
put upon them, made her heart go out to those ancient
potters.  They had not only expressed their desire, but
they had expressed it as beautifully as they could.  Food,
fire, water, and something else--even here, in this crack
in the world, so far back in the night of the past!  Down
here at the beginning that painful thing was already
stirring; the seed of sorrow, and of so much delight.
     There were jars done in a delicate overlay, like pine
cones; and there were many patterns in a low relief, like
basket-work.  Some of the pottery was decorated in
color, red and brown, black and white, in graceful geo-
metrical patterns.  One day, on a fragment of a shallow
bowl, she found a crested serpent's head, painted in red
on terra-cotta.  Again she found half a bowl with a broad
band of white cliff-houses painted on a black ground.
They were scarcely conventionalized at all; there they
were in the black border, just as they stood in the rock
before her.  It brought her centuries nearer to these peo-
ple to find that they saw their houses exactly as she saw
them.

     Yes, Ray Kennedy was right.  All these things made one
feel that one ought to do one's best, and help to fulfill some
desire of the dust that slept there.  A dream had been
dreamed there long ago, in the night of ages, and the wind
had whispered some promise to the sadness of the savage.
In their own way, those people had felt the beginnings of
what was to come.  These potsherds were like fetters that
bound one to a long chain of human endeavor.
     Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea
now, but she herself seemed older.  She had never been
alone for so long before, or thought so much.  Nothing had
ever engrossed her so deeply as the daily contemplation of
that line of pale-yellow houses tucked into the wrinkle of the
cliff.  Moonstone and Chicago had become vague.  Here
everything was simple and definite, as things had been in
childhood.  Her mind was like a ragbag into which she had
been frantically thrusting whatever she could grab.  And
here she must throw this lumber away.  The things that
were really hers separated themselves from the rest.  Her
ideas were simplified, became sharper and clearer.  She felt
united and strong.

     When Thea had been at the Ottenburg ranch for two
months, she got a letter from Fred announcing that he
"might be along at almost any time now."  The letter
came at night, and the next morning she took it down
into the canyon with her.  She was delighted that he was
coming soon.  She had never felt so grateful to any one,
and she wanted to tell him everything that had happened
to her since she had been there--more than had happened
in all her life before.  Certainly she liked Fred better
than any one else in the world.  There was Harsanyi, of
course--but Harsanyi was always tired.  Just now, and
here, she wanted some one who had never been tired, who
could catch an idea and run with it.
     She was ashamed to think what an apprehensive drudge
she must always have seemed to Fred, and she wondered
why he had concerned himself about her at all.  Perhaps
she would never be so happy or so good-looking again,
and she would like Fred to see her, for once, at her best.
She had not been singing much, but she knew that her
voice was more interesting than it had ever been before.
She had begun to understand that--with her, at least--
voice was, first of all, vitality; a lightness in the body and
a driving power in the blood.  If she had that, she could
sing.  When she felt so keenly alive, lying on that insensi-
ble shelf of stone, when her body bounded like a rubber ball
away from its hardness, then she could sing.  This, too, she
could explain to Fred.  He would know what she meant.
     Another week passed.  Thea did the same things as
before, felt the same influences, went over the same ideas;
but there was a livelier movement in her thoughts, and a
freshening of sensation, like the brightness which came over
the underbrush after a shower.  A persistent affirmation--
or denial--was going on in her, like the tapping of the
woodpecker in the one tall pine tree across the chasm.
Musical phrases drove each other rapidly through her
mind, and the song of the cicada was now too long and too
sharp.  Everything seemed suddenly to take the form of a
desire for action.
     It was while she was in this abstracted state, waiting
for the clock to strike, that Thea at last made up her mind
what she was going to try to do in the world, and that she
was going to Germany to study without further loss of time.
Only by the merest chance had she ever got to Panther
Canyon.  There was certainly no kindly Providence that
directed one's life; and one's parents did not in the least
care what became of one, so long as one did not misbehave
and endanger their comfort.  One's life was at the mercy of
blind chance.  She had better take it in her own hands and
lose everything than meekly draw the plough under the
rod of parental guidance.  She had seen it when she was at
home last summer,--the hostility of comfortable, self-
satisfied people toward any serious effort.  Even to her
father it seemed indecorous.  Whenever she spoke seriously,
he looked apologetic.  Yet she had clung fast to whatever
was left of Moonstone in her mind.  No more of that!  The
Cliff-Dwellers had lengthened her past.  She had older and
higher obligations.

                                 V

     ONE Sunday afternoon late in July old Henry Biltmer
was rheumatically descending into the head of the
canyon.  The Sunday before had been one of those cloudy
days--fortunately rare--when the life goes out of that
country and it becomes a gray ghost, an empty, shivering
uncertainty.  Henry had spent the day in the barn; his
canyon was a reality only when it was flooded with the light
of its great lamp, when the yellow rocks cast purple shad-
ows, and the resin was fairly cooking in the corkscrew
cedars.  The yuccas were in blossom now.  Out of each
clump of sharp bayonet leaves rose a tall stalk hung with
greenish-white bells with thick, fleshy petals.  The nigger-
head cactus was thrusting its crimson blooms up out of
every crevice in the rocks.
     Henry had come out on the pretext of hunting a spade
and pick-axe that young Ottenburg had borrowed, but he
was keeping his eyes open.  He was really very curious
about the new occupants of the canyon, and what they
found to do there all day long.  He let his eye travel along
the gulf for a mile or so to the first turning, where the fis-
sure zigzagged out and then receded behind a stone prom-
ontory on which stood the yellowish, crumbling ruin of
the old watch-tower.
     From the base of this tower, which now threw its
shadow forward, bits of rock kept flying out into the open
gulf--skating upon the air until they lost their momen-
tum, then falling like chips until they rang upon the ledges
at the bottom of the gorge or splashed into the stream.
Biltmer shaded his eyes with his hand.  There on the prom-
ontory, against the cream-colored cliff, were two figures
nimbly moving in the light, both slender and agile, entirely
absorbed in their game.  They looked like two boys.  Both
were hatless and both wore white shirts.
     Henry forgot his pick-axe and followed the trail before
the cliff-houses toward the tower.  Behind the tower, as
he well knew, were heaps of stones, large and small, piled
against the face of the cliff.  He had always believed that
the Indian watchmen piled them there for ammunition.
Thea and Fred had come upon these missiles and were
throwing them for distance.  As Biltmer approached he
could hear them laughing, and he caught Thea's voice,
high and excited, with a ring of vexation in it.  Fred was
teaching her to throw a heavy stone like a discus.  When
it was Fred's turn, he sent a triangular-shaped stone out
into the air with considerable skill.  Thea watched it en-
viously, standing in a half-defiant posture, her sleeves
rolled above her elbows and her face flushed with heat
and excitement.  After Fred's third missile had rung upon
the rocks below, she snatched up a stone and stepped im-
patiently out on the ledge in front of him.  He caught her
by the elbows and pulled her back.
     "Not so close, you silly!  You'll spin yourself off in a
minute."
     "You went that close.  There's your heel-mark," she
retorted.
     "Well, I know how.  That makes a difference."  He drew
a mark in the dust with his toe.  "There, that's right.
Don't step over that.  Pivot yourself on your spine, and
make a half turn.  When you've swung your length, let it
go."
     Thea settled the flat piece of rock between her wrist and
fingers, faced the cliff wall, stretched her arm in position,
whirled round on her left foot to the full stretch of her
body, and let the missile spin out over the gulf.  She hung
expectantly in the air, forgetting to draw back her arm,
her eyes following the stone as if it carried her fortunes
with it.  Her comrade watched her; there weren't many
girls who could show a line like that from the toe to the
thigh, from the shoulder to the tip of the outstretched
hand.  The stone spent itself and began to fall.  Thea drew
back and struck her knee furiously with her palm.
     "There it goes again!  Not nearly so far as yours.  What
IS the matter with me?  Give me another."  She faced the
cliff and whirled again.  The stone spun out, not quite so
far as before.
     Ottenburg laughed.  "Why do you keep on working
AFTER you've thrown it?  You can't help it along then."
     Without replying, Thea stooped and selected another
stone, took a deep breath and made another turn.  Fred
watched the disk, exclaiming, "Good girl!  You got past
the pine that time.  That's a good throw."
     She took out her handkerchief and wiped her glowing
face and throat, pausing to feel her right shoulder with her
left hand.
     "Ah--ha, you've made yourself sore, haven't you?
What did I tell you?  You go at things too hard.  I'll tell
you what I'm going to do, Thea," Fred dusted his hands
and began tucking in the blouse of his shirt, "I'm going to
make some single-sticks and teach you to fence.  You'd be
all right there.  You're light and quick and you've got lots
of drive in you.  I'd like to have you come at me with foils;
you'd look so fierce," he chuckled.
     She turned away from him and stubbornly sent out
another stone, hanging in the air after its flight.  Her fury
amused Fred, who took all games lightly and played them
well.  She was breathing hard, and little beads of moisture
had gathered on her upper lip.  He slipped his arm about
her.  "If you will look as pretty as that--" he bent his
head and kissed her.  Thea was startled, gave him an
angry push, drove at him with her free hand in a manner
quite hostile.  Fred was on his mettle in an instant.  He
pinned both her arms down and kissed her resolutely.
     When he released her, she turned away and spoke over
her shoulder.  "That was mean of you, but I suppose I
deserved what I got."
     "I should say you did deserve it," Fred panted, "turning
savage on me like that!  I should say you did deserve it!"
     He saw her shoulders harden.  "Well, I just said I de-
served it, didn't I?  What more do you want?"
     "I want you to tell me why you flew at me like that!
You weren't playing; you looked as if you'd like to murder
me."
     She brushed back her hair impatiently.  "I didn't mean
anything, really.  You interrupted me when I was watching
the stone.  I can't jump from one thing to another.  I pushed
you without thinking."
     Fred thought her back expressed contrition.  He went
up to her, stood behind her with his chin above her shoul-
der, and said something in her ear.  Thea laughed and
turned toward him.  They left the stone-pile carelessly, as
if they had never been interested in it, rounded the yellow
tower, and disappeared into the second turn of the canyon,
where the dead city, interrupted by the jutting promon-
tory, began again.
     Old Biltmer had been somewhat embarrassed by the
turn the game had taken.  He had not heard their conver-
sation, but the pantomime against the rocks was clear
enough.  When the two young people disappeared, their
host retreated rapidly toward the head of the canyon.
     "I guess that young lady can take care of herself," he
chuckled.  "Young Fred, though, he has quite a way with
them."

                                VI

     DAY was breaking over Panther Canyon.  The gulf was
cold and full of heavy, purplish twilight.  The wood
smoke which drifted from one of the cliff-houses hung in a
blue scarf across the chasm, until the draft caught it and
whirled it away.  Thea was crouching in the doorway of
her rock house, while Ottenburg looked after the crackling
fire in the next cave.  He was waiting for it to burn down to
coals before he put the coffee on to boil.
     They had left the ranch house that morning a little after
three o'clock, having packed their camp equipment the
day before, and had crossed the open pasture land with
their lantern while the stars were still bright.  During the
descent into the canyon by lantern-light, they were chilled
through their coats and sweaters.  The lantern crept slowly
along the rock trail, where the heavy air seemed to offer
resistance.  The voice of the stream at the bottom of the
gorge was hollow and threatening, much louder and deeper
than it ever was by day--another voice altogether.  The
sullenness of the place seemed to say that the world could
get on very well without people, red or white; that under
the human world there was a geological world, conducting
its silent, immense operations which were indifferent to
man.  Thea had often seen the desert sunrise,--a light-
hearted affair, where the sun springs out of bed and the
world is golden in an instant.  But this canyon seemed to
waken like an old man, with rheum and stiffness of the
joints, with heaviness, and a dull, malignant mind.  She
crouched against the wall while the stars faded, and thought
what courage the early races must have had to endure so
much for the little they got out of life.
     At last a kind of hopefulness broke in the air.  In a mo-
ment the pine trees up on the edge of the rim were flashing
with coppery fire.  The thin red clouds which hung above
their pointed tops began to boil and move rapidly, weaving
in and out like smoke.  The swallows darted out of their
rock houses as at a signal, and flew upward, toward the
rim.  Little brown birds began to chirp in the bushes along
the watercourse down at the bottom of the ravine, where
everything was still dusky and pale.  At first the golden
light seemed to hang like a wave upon the rim of the can-
yon; the trees and bushes up there, which one scarcely
noticed at noon, stood out magnified by the slanting rays.
Long, thin streaks of light began to reach quiveringly
down into the canyon.  The red sun rose rapidly above the
tops of the blazing pines, and its glow burst into the gulf,
about the very doorstep on which Thea sat.  It bored into
the wet, dark underbrush.  The dripping cherry bushes,
the pale aspens, and the frosty PINONS were glittering and
trembling, swimming in the liquid gold.  All the pale, dusty
little herbs of the bean family, never seen by any one but
a botanist, became for a moment individual and import-
ant, their silky leaves quite beautiful with dew and light.
The arch of sky overhead, heavy as lead a little while be-
fore, lifted, became more and more transparent, and one
could look up into depths of pearly blue.
     The savor of coffee and bacon mingled with the smell of
wet cedars drying, and Fred called to Thea that he was
ready for her.  They sat down in the doorway of his
kitchen, with the warmth of the live coals behind them and
the sunlight on their faces, and began their breakfast,
Mrs. Biltmer's thick coffee cups and the cream bottle
between them, the coffee-pot and frying-pan conveniently
keeping hot among the embers.
     "I thought you were going back on the whole proposi-
tion, Thea, when you were crawling along with that lan-
tern.  I couldn't get a word out of you."
     "I know.  I was cold and hungry, and I didn't believe
there was going to be any morning, anyway.  Didn't you
feel queer, at all?"
     Fred squinted above his smoking cup.  "Well, I am
never strong for getting up before the sun.  The world
looks unfurnished.  When I first lit the fire and had a square
look at you, I thought I'd got the wrong girl.  Pale, grim--
you were a sight!"
     Thea leaned back into the shadow of the rock room and
warmed her hands over the coals.  "It was dismal enough.
How warm these walls are, all the way round; and your
breakfast is so good.  I'm all right now, Fred."
     "Yes, you're all right now."  Fred lit a cigarette and
looked at her critically as her head emerged into the sun
again.  "You get up every morning just a little bit hand-
somer than you were the day before.  I'd love you just as
much if you were not turning into one of the loveliest wo-
men I've ever seen; but you are, and that's a fact to be
reckoned with."  He watched her across the thin line of
smoke he blew from his lips.  "What are you going to do
with all that beauty and all that talent, Miss Kronborg?"
     She turned away to the fire again.  "I don't know what
you're talking about," she muttered with an awkwardness
which did not conceal her pleasure.
     Ottenburg laughed softly.  "Oh, yes, you do!  Nobody
better!  You're a close one, but you give yourself away
sometimes, like everybody else.  Do you know, I've de-
cided that you never do a single thing without an ulterior
motive."  He threw away his cigarette, took out his
tobacco-pouch and began to fill his pipe.  "You ride and
fence and walk and climb, but I know that all the while
you're getting somewhere in your mind.  All these things
are instruments; and I, too, am an instrument."  He looked
up in time to intercept a quick, startled glance from Thea.
"Oh, I don't mind," he chuckled; "not a bit.  Every
woman, every interesting woman, has ulterior motives,
many of 'em less creditable than yours.  It's your constancy
that amuses me.  You must have been doing it ever since
you were two feet high."
     Thea looked slowly up at her companion's good-humored
face.  His eyes, sometimes too restless and sympathetic in
town, had grown steadier and clearer in the open air.  His
short curly beard and yellow hair had reddened in the sun
and wind.  The pleasant vigor of his person was always
delightful to her, something to signal to and laugh with in
a world of negative people.  With Fred she was never be-
calmed.  There was always life in the air, always something
coming and going, a rhythm of feeling and action,--
stronger than the natural accord of youth.  As she looked
at him, leaning against the sunny wall, she felt a desire to
be frank with him.  She was not willfully holding anything
back.  But, on the other hand, she could not force things
that held themselves back.  "Yes, it was like that when I
was little," she said at last.  "I had to be close, as you
call it, or go under.  But I didn't know I had been like that
since you came.  I've had nothing to be close about.  I
haven't thought about anything but having a good time
with you.  I've just drifted."
     Fred blew a trail of smoke out into the breeze and looked
knowing.  "Yes, you drift like a rifle ball, my dear.  It's
your--your direction that I like best of all.  Most fellows
wouldn't, you know.  I'm unusual."
     They both laughed, but Thea frowned questioningly.
"Why wouldn't most fellows?  Other fellows have liked
me."
     "Yes, serious fellows.  You told me yourself they were all
old, or solemn.  But jolly fellows want to be the whole
target.  They would say you were all brain and muscle;
that you have no feeling."
     She glanced at him sidewise.  "Oh, they would, would
they?"
     "Of course they would," Fred continued blandly.  "Jolly
fellows have no imagination.  They want to be the animat-
ing force.  When they are not around, they want a girl to
be--extinct," he waved his hand.  "Old fellows like Mr.
Nathanmeyer understand your kind; but among the young
ones, you are rather lucky to have found me.  Even I
wasn't always so wise.  I've had my time of thinking it
would not bore me to be the Apollo of a homey flat, and
I've paid out a trifle to learn better.  All those things get
very tedious unless they are hooked up with an idea of
some sort.  It's because we DON'T come out here only to
look at each other and drink coffee that it's so pleasant to
--look at each other."  Fred drew on his pipe for a while,
studying Thea's abstraction.  She was staring up at the
far wall of the canyon with a troubled expression that drew
her eyes narrow and her mouth hard.  Her hands lay in her
lap, one over the other, the fingers interlacing.  "Suppose,"
Fred came out at length,--"suppose I were to offer you
what most of the young men I know would offer a girl
they'd been sitting up nights about: a comfortable flat in
Chicago, a summer camp up in the woods, musical even-
ings, and a family to bring up.  Would it look attractive
to you?"
     Thea sat up straight and stared at him in alarm, glared
into his eyes.  "Perfectly hideous!" she exclaimed.
     Fred dropped back against the old stonework and
laughed deep in his chest.  "Well, don't be frightened.  I
won't offer them.  You're not a nest-building bird.  You
know I always liked your song, `Me for the jolt of the
breakers!'  I understand."
     She rose impatiently and walked to the edge of the cliff.
"It's not that so much.  It's waking up every morning
with the feeling that your life is your own, and your
strength is your own, and your talent is your own; that
you're all there, and there's no sag in you."  She stood for
a moment as if she were tortured by uncertainty, then
turned suddenly back to him.  "Don't talk about these
things any more now," she entreated.  "It isn't that I
want to keep anything from you.  The trouble is that I've
got nothing to keep--except (you know as well as I) that
feeling.  I told you about it in Chicago once.  But it always
makes me unhappy to talk about it.  It will spoil the day.
Will you go for a climb with me?"  She held out her hands
with a smile so eager that it made Ottenburg feel how much
she needed to get away from herself.
     He sprang up and caught the hands she put out so cor-
dially, and stood swinging them back and forth.  "I won't
tease you.  A word's enough to me.  But I love it, all the
same.  Understand?"  He pressed her hands and dropped
them.  "Now, where are you going to drag me?"
     "I want you to drag me.  Over there, to the other houses.
They are more interesting than these."  She pointed across
the gorge to the row of white houses in the other cliff.
"The trail is broken away, but I got up there once.  It's
possible.  You have to go to the bottom of the canyon,
cross the creek, and then go up hand-over-hand."
     Ottenburg, lounging against the sunny wall, his hands in
the pockets of his jacket, looked across at the distant dwell-
ings.  "It's an awful climb," he sighed, "when I could be
perfectly happy here with my pipe.  However--"  He
took up his stick and hat and followed Thea down the
water trail.  "Do you climb this path every day?  You
surely earn your bath.  I went down and had a look at your
pool the other afternoon.  Neat place, with all those little
cottonwoods.  Must be very becoming."
     "Think so?" Thea said over her shoulder, as she swung
round a turn.
     "Yes, and so do you, evidently.  I'm becoming expert
at reading your meaning in your back.  I'm behind you so
much on these single-foot trails.  You don't wear stays, do
you?"
     "Not here."
     "I wouldn't, anywhere, if I were you.  They will make
you less elastic.  The side muscles get flabby.  If you go in
for opera, there's a fortune in a flexible body.  Most of the
German singers are clumsy, even when they're well set up."
     Thea switched a PINON branch back at him.  "Oh, I'll
never get fat!  That I can promise you."
     Fred smiled, looking after her.  "Keep that promise, no
matter how many others you break," he drawled.
     The upward climb, after they had crossed the stream,
was at first a breathless scramble through underbrush.
When they reached the big boulders, Ottenburg went first
because he had the longer leg-reach, and gave Thea a hand
when the step was quite beyond her, swinging her up until
she could get a foothold.  At last they reached a little plat-
form among the rocks, with only a hundred feet of jagged,
sloping wall between them and the cliff-houses.
     Ottenburg lay down under a pine tree and declared that
he was going to have a pipe before he went any farther.
"It's a good thing to know when to stop, Thea," he said
meaningly.
     "I'm not going to stop now until I get there," Thea in-
sisted.  "I'll go on alone."
     Fred settled his shoulder against the tree-trunk.  "Go
on if you like, but I'm here to enjoy myself.  If you meet a
rattler on the way, have it out with him."
     She hesitated, fanning herself with her felt hat.  "I never
have met one."
     "There's reasoning for you," Fred murmured languidly.
     Thea turned away resolutely and began to go up the
wall, using an irregular cleft in the rock for a path.  The
cliff, which looked almost perpendicular from the bottom,
was really made up of ledges and boulders, and behind
these she soon disappeared.  For a long while Fred smoked
with half-closed eyes, smiling to himself now and again.
Occasionally he lifted an eyebrow as he heard the rattle of
small stones among the rocks above.  "In a temper," he
concluded; "do her good."  Then he subsided into warm
drowsiness and listened to the locusts in the yuccas, and
the tap-tap of the old woodpecker that was never weary of
assaulting the big pine.
     Fred had finished his pipe and was wondering whether
he wanted another, when he heard a call from the cliff far
above him.  Looking up, he saw Thea standing on the edge
of a projecting crag.  She waved to him and threw her arm
over her head, as if she were snapping her fingers in the air.
     As he saw her there between the sky and the gulf, with
that great wash of air and the morning light about her,
Fred recalled the brilliant figure at Mrs. Nathanmeyer's.
Thea was one of those people who emerge, unexpectedly,
larger than we are accustomed to see them.  Even at this
distance one got the impression of muscular energy and
audacity,--a kind of brilliancy of motion,--of a person-
ality that carried across big spaces and expanded among
big things.  Lying still, with his hands under his head,
Ottenburg rhetorically addressed the figure in the air.
"You are the sort that used to run wild in Germany,
dressed in their hair and a piece of skin.  Soldiers caught
'em in nets.  Old Nathanmeyer," he mused, "would like
a peep at her now.  Knowing old fellow.  Always buying
those Zorn etchings of peasant girls bathing.  No sag in
them either.  Must be the cold climate."  He sat up.
"She'll begin to pitch rocks on me if I don't move."  In
response to another impatient gesture from the crag, he
rose and began swinging slowly up the trail.

     It was the afternoon of that long day.  Thea was lying
on a blanket in the door of her rock house.  She and Otten-
burg had come back from their climb and had lunch, and
he had gone off for a nap in one of the cliff-houses farther
down the path.  He was sleeping peacefully, his coat under
his head and his face turned toward the wall.
     Thea, too, was drowsy, and lay looking through half-
closed eyes up at the blazing blue arch over the rim of the
canyon.  She was thinking of nothing at all.  Her mind, like
her body, was full of warmth, lassitude, physical content.
Suddenly an eagle, tawny and of great size, sailed over the
cleft in which she lay, across the arch of sky.  He dropped
for a moment into the gulf between the walls, then wheeled,
and mounted until his plumage was so steeped in light that
he looked like a golden bird.  He swept on, following the
course of the canyon a little way and then disappearing
beyond the rim.  Thea sprang to her feet as if she had been
thrown up from the rock by volcanic action.  She stood
rigid on the edge of the stone shelf, straining her eyes after
that strong, tawny flight.  O eagle of eagles!  Endeavor,
achievement, desire, glorious striving of human art!  From
a cleft in the heart of the world she saluted it. . . .  It had
come all the way; when men lived in caves, it was there.
A vanished race; but along the trails, in the stream, under
the spreading cactus, there still glittered in the sun the
bits of their frail clay vessels, fragments of their desire.

                                VII

     FROM the day of Fred's arrival, he and Thea were
unceasingly active.  They took long rides into the
Navajo pine forests, bought turquoises and silver brace-
lets from the wandering Indian herdsmen, and rode twenty
miles to Flagstaff upon the slightest pretext.  Thea had
never felt this pleasant excitement about any man before,
and she found herself trying very hard to please young
Ottenburg.  She was never tired, never dull.  There was
a zest about waking up in the morning and dressing, about
walking, riding, even about sleep.
     One morning when Thea came out from her room at
seven o'clock, she found Henry and Fred on the porch,
looking up at the sky.  The day was already hot and there
was no breeze.  The sun was shining, but heavy brown
clouds were hanging in the west, like the smoke of a for-
est fire.  She and Fred had meant to ride to Flagstaff that
morning, but Biltmer advised against it, foretelling a
storm.  After breakfast they lingered about the house,
waiting for the weather to make up its mind.  Fred had
brought his guitar, and as they had the dining-room to
themselves, he made Thea go over some songs with him.
They got interested and kept it up until Mrs. Biltmer
came to set the table for dinner.  Ottenburg knew some of
the Mexican things Spanish Johnny used to sing.  Thea
had never before happened to tell him about Spanish
Johnny, and he seemed more interested in Johnny than
in Dr. Archie or Wunsch.
     After dinner they were too restless to endure the ranch
house any longer, and ran away to the canyon to practice
with single-sticks.  Fred carried a slicker and a sweater, and
he made Thea wear one of the rubber hats that hung in
Biltmer's gun-room.  As they crossed the pasture land the
clumsy slicker kept catching in the lacings of his leggings.
     "Why don't you drop that thing?" Thea asked.  "I
won't mind a shower.  I've been wet before."
     "No use taking chances."
     From the canyon they were unable to watch the sky,
since only a strip of the zenith was visible.  The flat ledge
about the watch-tower was the only level spot large enough
for single-stick exercise, and they were still practicing there
when, at about four o'clock, a tremendous roll of thunder
echoed between the cliffs and the atmosphere suddenly
became thick.
     Fred thrust the sticks in a cleft in the rock.  "We're in
for it, Thea.  Better make for your cave where there are
blankets."  He caught her elbow and hurried her along the
path before the cliff-houses.  They made the half-mile at a
quick trot, and as they ran the rocks and the sky and the
air between the cliffs turned a turbid green, like the color
in a moss agate.  When they reached the blanketed rock
room, they looked at each other and laughed.  Their faces
had taken on a greenish pallor.  Thea's hair, even, was
green.
     "Dark as pitch in here," Fred exclaimed as they hurried
over the old rock doorstep.  "But it's warm.  The rocks
hold the heat.  It's going to be terribly cold outside, all
right."  He was interrupted by a deafening peal of thunder.
"Lord, what an echo!  Lucky you don't mind.  It's worth
watching out there.  We needn't come in yet."
     The green light grew murkier and murkier.  The smaller
vegetation was blotted out.  The yuccas, the cedars, and
PINONS stood dark and rigid, like bronze.  The swallows
flew up with sharp, terrified twitterings.  Even the quak-
ing asps were still.  While Fred and Thea watched from
the doorway, the light changed to purple.  Clouds of dark
vapor, like chlorine gas, began to float down from the head
of the canyon and hung between them and the cliff-houses
in the opposite wall.  Before they knew it, the wall itself
had disappeared.  The air was positively venomous-looking,
and grew colder every minute.  The thunder seemed to
crash against one cliff, then against the other, and to go
shrieking off into the inner canyon.
     The moment the rain broke, it beat the vapors down.
In the gulf before them the water fell in spouts, and
dashed from the high cliffs overhead.  It tore aspens and
chokecherry bushes out of the ground and left the yuccas
hanging by their tough roots.  Only the little cedars stood
black and unmoved in the torrents that fell from so far
above.  The rock chamber was full of fine spray from the
streams of water that shot over the doorway.  Thea crept
to the back wall and rolled herself in a blanket, and Fred
threw the heavier blankets over her.  The wool of the
Navajo sheep was soon kindled by the warmth of her
body, and was impenetrable to dampness.  Her hair,
where it hung below the rubber hat, gathered the mois-
ture like a sponge.  Fred put on the slicker, tied the
sweater about his neck, and settled himself cross-legged
beside her.  The chamber was so dark that, although he
could see the outline of her head and shoulders, he could
not see her face.  He struck a wax match to light his
pipe.  As he sheltered it between his hands, it sizzled and
sputtered, throwing a yellow flicker over Thea and her
blankets.
     "You look like a gypsy," he said as he dropped the
match.  "Any one you'd rather be shut up with than me?
No?  Sure about that?"
     "I think I am.  Aren't you cold?"
     "Not especially."  Fred smoked in silence, listening to
the roar of the water outside.  "We may not get away from
here right away," he remarked.
     "I shan't mind.  Shall you?"
     He laughed grimly and pulled on his pipe.  "Do you
know where you're at, Miss Thea Kronborg?" he said at
last.  "You've got me going pretty hard, I suppose you
know.  I've had a lot of sweethearts, but I've never been
so much--engrossed before.  What are you going to do
about it?"  He heard nothing from the blankets.  "Are you
going to play fair, or is it about my cue to cut away?"
     "I'll play fair.  I don't see why you want to go."
     "What do you want me around for?--to play with?"
     Thea struggled up among the blankets.  "I want you for
everything.  I don't know whether I'm what people call in
love with you or not.  In Moonstone that meant sitting in
a hammock with somebody.  I don't want to sit in a ham-
mock with you, but I want to do almost everything else.
Oh, hundreds of things!"
     "If I run away, will you go with me?"
     "I don't know.  I'll have to think about that.  Maybe I
would."  She freed herself from her wrappings and stood
up.  "It's not raining so hard now.  Hadn't we better
start this minute?  It will be night before we get to
Biltmer's."
     Fred struck another match.  "It's seven.  I don't know
how much of the path may be washed away.  I don't even
know whether I ought to let you try it without a lantern."
     Thea went to the doorway and looked out.  "There's
nothing else to do.  The sweater and the slicker will keep
me dry, and this will be my chance to find out whether
these shoes are really water-tight.  They cost a week's sal-
ary."  She retreated to the back of the cave.  "It's getting
blacker every minute."
     Ottenburg took a brandy flask from his coat pocket.
"Better have some of this before we start.  Can you take
it without water?"
     Thea lifted it obediently to her lips.  She put on the
sweater and Fred helped her to get the clumsy slicker on
over it.  He buttoned it and fastened the high collar.  She
could feel that his hands were hurried and clumsy.  The
coat was too big, and he took off his necktie and belted it
in at the waist.  While she tucked her hair more securely
under the rubber hat he stood in front of her, between her
and the gray doorway, without moving.
     "Are you ready to go?" she asked carelessly.
     "If you are," he spoke quietly, without moving, except
to bend his head forward a little.
     Thea laughed and put her hands on his shoulders.  "You
know how to handle me, don't you?" she whispered.  For
the first time, she kissed him without constraint or embar-
rassment.
     "Thea, Thea, Thea!"  Fred whispered her name three
times, shaking her a little as if to waken her.  It was too
dark to see, but he could feel that she was smiling.
     When she kissed him she had not hidden her face on his
shoulder,--she had risen a little on her toes, and stood
straight and free.  In that moment when he came close to
her actual personality, he felt in her the same expansion
that he had noticed at Mrs. Nathanmeyer's.  She became
freer and stronger under impulses.  When she rose to meet
him like that, he felt her flash into everything that she had
ever suggested to him, as if she filled out her own shadow.
     She pushed him away and shot past him out into the rain.
"Now for it, Fred," she called back exultantly.  The rain
was pouring steadily down through the dying gray twilight,
and muddy streams were spouting and foaming over the
cliff.
     Fred caught her and held her back.  "Keep behind me,
Thea.  I don't know about the path.  It may be gone alto-
gether.  Can't tell what there is under this water."
     But the path was older than the white man's Arizona.
The rush of water had washed away the dust and stones
that lay on the surface, but the rock skeleton of the Indian
trail was there, ready for the foot.  Where the streams
poured down through gullies, there was always a cedar or
a PINON to cling to.  By wading and slipping and climbing,
they got along.  As they neared the head of the canyon,
where the path lifted and rose in steep loops to the surface
of the plateau, the climb was more difficult.  The earth
above had broken away and washed down over the trail,
bringing rocks and bushes and even young trees with it.
The last ghost of daylight was dying and there was no time
to lose.  The canyon behind them was already black.
     "We've got to go right through the top of this pine tree,
Thea.  No time to hunt a way around.  Give me your hand."
After they had crashed through the mass of branches, Fred
stopped abruptly.  "Gosh, what a hole!  Can you jump it?
Wait a minute."
     He cleared the washout, slipped on the wet rock at the
farther side, and caught himself just in time to escape a
tumble.  "If I could only find something to hold to, I could
give you a hand.  It's so cursed dark, and there are no
trees here where they're needed.  Here's something; it's a
root.  It will hold all right."  He braced himself on the rock,
gripped the crooked root with one hand and swung himself
across toward Thea, holding out his arm.  "Good jump!  I
must say you don't lose your nerve in a tight place.  Can
you keep at it a little longer?  We're almost out.  Have to
make that next ledge.  Put your foot on my knee and catch
something to pull by."
     Thea went up over his shoulder.  "It's hard ground up
here," she panted.  "Did I wrench your arm when I slipped
then?  It was a cactus I grabbed, and it startled me."
     "Now, one more pull and we're on the level."
     They emerged gasping upon the black plateau.  In the
last five minutes the darkness had solidified and it seemed
as if the skies were pouring black water.  They could not
see where the sky ended or the plain began.  The light at
the ranch house burned a steady spark through the rain.
Fred drew Thea's arm through his and they struck off
toward the light.  They could not see each other, and the
rain at their backs seemed to drive them along.  They kept
laughing as they stumbled over tufts of grass or stepped
into slippery pools.  They were delighted with each other
and with the adventure which lay behind them.
     "I can't even see the whites of your eyes, Thea.  But I'd
know who was here stepping out with me, anywhere.  Part
coyote you are, by the feel of you.  When you make up your
mind to jump, you jump!  My gracious, what's the matter
with your hand?"
     "Cactus spines.  Didn't I tell you when I grabbed the
cactus?  I thought it was a root.  Are we going straight?"
     "I don't know.  Somewhere near it, I think.  I'm very
comfortable, aren't you?  You're warm, except your
cheeks.  How funny they are when they're wet.  Still, you
always feel like you.  I like this.  I could walk to Flagstaff.
It's fun, not being able to see anything.  I feel surer of you
when I can't see you.  Will you run away with me?"
     Thea laughed.  "I won't run far to-night.  I'll think
about it.  Look, Fred, there's somebody coming."
     "Henry, with his lantern.  Good enough!  Halloo!  Hallo
--o--o!" Fred shouted.
     The moving light bobbed toward them.  In half an hour
Thea was in her big feather bed, drinking hot lentil soup,
and almost before the soup was swallowed she was asleep.

                               VIII

     ON the first day of September Fred Ottenburg and Thea
Kronborg left Flagstaff by the east-bound express.
As the bright morning advanced, they sat alone on the
rear platform of the observation car, watching the yellow
miles unfold and disappear.  With complete content they
saw the brilliant, empty country flash by.  They were
tired of the desert and the dead races, of a world without
change or ideas.  Fred said he was glad to sit back and let
the Santa Fe do the work for a while.
     "And where are we going, anyhow?" he added.
     "To Chicago, I suppose.  Where else would we be
going?"  Thea hunted for a handkerchief in her hand-
bag.
     "I wasn't sure, so I had the trunks checked to Albu-
querque.  We can recheck there to Chicago, if you like.
Why Chicago?  You'll never go back to Bowers.  Why
wouldn't this be a good time to make a run for it?  We
could take the southern branch at Albuquerque, down to
El Paso, and then over into Mexico.  We are exceptionally
free.  Nobody waiting for us anywhere."
     Thea sighted along the steel rails that quivered in the
light behind them.  "I don't see why I couldn't marry you
in Chicago, as well as any place," she brought out with
some embarrassment.
     Fred took the handbag out of her nervous clasp and
swung it about on his finger.  "You've no particular love
for that spot, have you?  Besides, as I've told you, my
family would make a row.  They are an excitable lot.  They
discuss and argue everlastingly.  The only way I can ever
put anything through is to go ahead, and convince them
afterward."

     "Yes; I understand.  I don't mind that.  I don't want to
marry your family.  I'm sure you wouldn't want to marry
mine.  But I don't see why we have to go so far."
     "When we get to Winslow, you look about the freight
yards and you'll probably see several yellow cars with
my name on them.  That's why, my dear.  When your
visiting-card is on every beer bottle, you can't do things
quietly.  Things get into the papers."  As he watched her
troubled expression, he grew anxious.  He leaned forward
on his camp-chair, and kept twirling the handbag between
his knees.  "Here's a suggestion, Thea," he said presently.
"Dismiss it if you don't like it: suppose we go down to
Mexico on the chance.  You've never seen anything like
Mexico City; it will be a lark for you, anyhow.  If you
change your mind, and don't want to marry me, you can
go back to Chicago, and I'll take a steamer from Vera
Cruz and go up to New York.  When I get to Chicago,
you'll be at work, and nobody will ever be the wiser.  No
reason why we shouldn't both travel in Mexico, is there?
You'll be traveling alone.  I'll merely tell you the right
places to stop, and come to take you driving.  I won't put
any pressure on you.  Have I ever?"  He swung the bag
toward her and looked up under her hat.
     "No, you haven't," she murmured.  She was thinking
that her own position might be less difficult if he had used
what he called pressure.  He clearly wished her to take the
responsibility.
     "You have your own future in the back of your mind all
the time," Fred began, "and I have it in mine.  I'm not
going to try to carry you off, as I might another girl.  If you
wanted to quit me, I couldn't hold you, no matter how
many times you had married me.  I don't want to over-
persuade you.  But I'd like mighty well to get you down to
that jolly old city, where everything would please you, and
give myself a chance.  Then, if you thought you could have
a better time with me than without me, I'd try to grab you
before you changed your mind.  You are not a sentimental
person."
     Thea drew her veil down over her face.  "I think I am, a
little; about you," she said quietly.  Fred's irony somehow
hurt her.
     "What's at the bottom of your mind, Thea?" he asked
hurriedly.  "I can't tell.  Why do you consider it at all, if
you're not sure?  Why are you here with me now?"
     Her face was half-averted.  He was thinking that it
looked older and more firm--almost hard--under a veil.
     "Isn't it possible to do things without having any very
clear reason?" she asked slowly.  "I have no plan in the
back of my mind.  Now that I'm with you, I want to be
with you; that's all.  I can't settle down to being alone
again.  I am here to-day because I want to be with you
to-day."  She paused.  "One thing, though; if I gave you
my word, I'd keep it.  And you could hold me, though you
don't seem to think so.  Maybe I'm not sentimental, but
I'm not very light, either.  If I went off with you like
this, it wouldn't be to amuse myself."
     Ottenburg's eyes fell.  His lips worked nervously for a
moment.  "Do you mean that you really care for me, Thea
Kronborg?" he asked unsteadily.
     "I guess so.  It's like anything else.  It takes hold of you
and you've got to go through with it, even if you're afraid.
I was afraid to leave Moonstone, and afraid to leave
Harsanyi.  But I had to go through with it."
     "And are you afraid now?" Fred asked slowly.
     "Yes; more than I've ever been.  But I don't think I
could go back.  The past closes up behind one, somehow.
One would rather have a new kind of misery.  The old
kind seems like death or unconsciousness.  You can't force
your life back into that mould again.  No, one can't go
back."  She rose and stood by the back grating of the
platform, her hand on the brass rail.
     Fred went to her side.  She pushed up her veil and turned
her most glowing face to him.  Her eyes were wet and
there were tears on her lashes, but she was smiling the
rare, whole-hearted smile he had seen once or twice be-
fore.  He looked at her shining eyes, her parted lips, her
chin a little lifted.  It was as if they were colored by a sun-
rise he could not see.  He put his hand over hers and clasped
it with a strength she felt.  Her eyelashes trembled, her
mouth softened, but her eyes were still brilliant.
     "Will you always be like you were down there, if I go
with you?" she asked under her breath.
     His fingers tightened on hers.  "By God, I will!" he
muttered.
     "That's the only promise I'll ask you for.  Now go away
for a while and let me think about it.  Come back at lunch-
time and I'll tell you.  Will that do?"
     "Anything will do, Thea, if you'll only let me keep
an eye on you.  The rest of the world doesn't interest me
much.  You've got me in deep."
     Fred dropped her hand and turned away.  As he glanced
back from the front end of the observation car, he saw that
she was still standing there, and any one would have known
that she was brooding over something.  The earnestness of
her head and shoulders had a certain nobility.  He stood
looking at her for a moment.
     When he reached the forward smoking-car, Fred took a
seat at the end, where he could shut the other passengers
from his sight.  He put on his traveling-cap and sat down
wearily, keeping his head near the window.  "In any case,
I shall help her more than I shall hurt her," he kept saying
to himself.  He admitted that this was not the only motive
which impelled him, but it was one of them.  "I'll make it
my business in life to get her on.  There's nothing else I
care about so much as seeing her have her chance.  She
hasn't touched her real force yet.  She isn't even aware of
it.  Lord, don't I know something about them?  There isn't
one of them that has such a depth to draw from.  She'll be
one of the great artists of our time.  Playing accompani-
ments for that cheese-faced sneak!  I'll get her off to Ger-
many this winter, or take her.  She hasn't got any time to
waste now.  I'll make it up to her, all right."
     Ottenburg certainly meant to make it up to her, in so
far as he could.  His feeling was as generous as strong human
feelings are likely to be.  The only trouble was, that he was
married already, and had been since he was twenty.
     His older friends in Chicago, people who had been friends
of his family, knew of the unfortunate state of his personal
affairs; but they were people whom in the natural course
of things Thea Kronborg would scarcely meet.  Mrs.
Frederick Ottenburg lived in California, at Santa Bar-
bara, where her health was supposed to be better than
elsewhere, and her husband lived in Chicago.  He visited
his wife every winter to reinforce her position, and his
devoted mother, although her hatred for her daughter-in-
law was scarcely approachable in words, went to Santa
Barbara every year to make things look better and to
relieve her son.

     When Frederick Ottenburg was beginning his junior year
at Harvard, he got a letter from Dick Brisbane, a Kansas
City boy he knew, telling him that his FIANCEE, Miss Edith
Beers, was going to New York to buy her trousseau.  She
would be at the Holland House, with her aunt and a girl
from Kansas City who was to be a bridesmaid, for two
weeks or more.  If Ottenburg happened to be going down
to New York, would he call upon Miss Beers and "show
her a good time"?
     Fred did happen to be going to New York.  He was going
down from New Haven, after the Thanksgiving game.  He
called on Miss Beers and found her, as he that night tele-
graphed Brisbane, a "ripping beauty, no mistake."  He
took her and her aunt and her uninteresting friend to the
theater and to the opera, and he asked them to lunch with
him at the Waldorf.  He took no little pains in arranging
the luncheon with the head waiter.  Miss Beers was the
sort of girl with whom a young man liked to seem experi-
enced.  She was dark and slender and fiery.  She was witty
and slangy; said daring things and carried them off with
NONCHALANCE.  Her childish extravagance and contempt for
all the serious facts of life could be charged to her father's
generosity and his long packing-house purse.  Freaks that
would have been vulgar and ostentatious in a more simple-
minded girl, in Miss Beers seemed whimsical and pictur-
esque.  She darted about in magnificent furs and pumps
and close-clinging gowns, though that was the day of full
skirts.  Her hats were large and floppy.  When she wrig-
gled out of her moleskin coat at luncheon, she looked like
a slim black weasel.  Her satin dress was a mere sheath, so
conspicuous by its severity and scantness that every one in
the dining-room stared.  She ate nothing but alligator-pear
salad and hothouse grapes, drank a little champagne, and
took cognac in her coffee.  She ridiculed, in the raciest
slang, the singers they had heard at the opera the night
before, and when her aunt pretended to reprove her, she
murmured indifferently, "What's the matter with you,
old sport?"  She rattled on with a subdued loquacious-
ness, always keeping her voice low and monotonous,
always looking out of the corner of her eye and speaking,
as it were, in asides, out of the corner of her mouth.  She
was scornful of everything,--which became her eyebrows.
Her face was mobile and discontented, her eyes quick
and black.  There was a sort of smouldering fire about
her, young Ottenburg thought.  She entertained him pro-
digiously.
     After luncheon Miss Beers said she was going uptown to
be fitted, and that she would go alone because her aunt
made her nervous.  When Fred held her coat for her, she
murmured, "Thank you, Alphonse," as if she were address-
ing the waiter.  As she stepped into a hansom, with a long
stretch of thin silk stocking, she said negligently, over her
fur collar, "Better let me take you along and drop you
somewhere."  He sprang in after her, and she told the driver
to go to the Park.
     It was a bright winter day, and bitterly cold.  Miss Beers
asked Fred to tell her about the game at New Haven, and
when he did so paid no attention to what he said.  She
sank back into the hansom and held her muff before her
face, lowering it occasionally to utter laconic remarks
about the people in the carriages they passed, interrupt-
ing Fred's narrative in a disconcerting manner.  As they
entered the Park he happened to glance under her wide
black hat at her black eyes and hair--the muff hid every-
thing else--and discovered that she was crying.  To his
solicitous inquiry she replied that it "was enough to make
you damp, to go and try on dresses to marry a man you
weren't keen about."
     Further explanations followed.  She had thought she
was "perfectly cracked" about Brisbane, until she met
Fred at the Holland House three days ago.  Then she
knew she would scratch Brisbane's eyes out if she married
him.  What was she going to do?
     Fred told the driver to keep going.  What did she want
to do?  Well, she didn't know.  One had to marry some-
body, after all the machinery had been put in motion.
Perhaps she might as well scratch Brisbane as anybody
else; for scratch she would, if she didn't get what she
wanted.
     Of course, Fred agreed, one had to marry somebody.
And certainly this girl beat anything he had ever been up
against before.  Again he told the driver to go ahead.  Did
she mean that she would think of marrying him, by any
chance?  Of course she did, Alphonse.  Hadn't he seen that
all over her face three days ago?  If he hadn't, he was a
snowball.
     By this time Fred was beginning to feel sorry for the
driver.  Miss Beers, however, was compassionless.  After
a few more turns, Fred suggested tea at the Casino.  He
was very cold himself, and remembering the shining silk
hose and pumps, he wondered that the girl was not frozen.
As they got out of the hansom, he slipped the driver a bill
and told him to have something hot while he waited.
     At the tea-table, in a snug glass enclosure, with the steam
sputtering in the pipes beside them and a brilliant winter
sunset without, they developed their plan.  Miss Beers had
with her plenty of money, destined for tradesmen, which
she was quite willing to divert into other channels--the
first excitement of buying a trousseau had worn off, any-
way.  It was very much like any other shopping.  Fred
had his allowance and a few hundred he had won on the
game.  She would meet him to-morrow morning at the
Jersey ferry.  They could take one of the west-bound
Pennsylvania trains and go--anywhere, some place
where the laws weren't too fussy.--  Fred had not even
thought about the laws!--  It would be all right with
her father; he knew Fred's family.
     Now that they were engaged, she thought she would
like to drive a little more.  They were jerked about in the
cab for another hour through the deserted Park.  Miss
Beers, having removed her hat, reclined upon Fred's
shoulder.
     The next morning they left Jersey City by the latest fast
train out.  They had some misadventures, crossed several
States before they found a justice obliging enough to marry
two persons whose names automatically instigated inquiry.
The bride's family were rather pleased with her originality;
besides, any one of the Ottenburg boys was clearly a better
match than young Brisbane.  With Otto Ottenburg, how-
ever, the affair went down hard, and to his wife, the once
proud Katarina Furst, such a disappointment was almost
unbearable.  Her sons had always been clay in her hands,
and now the GELIEBTER SOHN had escaped her.

     Beers, the packer, gave his daughter a house in St. Louis,
and Fred went into his father's business.  At the end of a
year, he was mutely appealing to his mother for sympathy.
At the end of two, he was drinking and in open rebellion.
He had learned to detest his wife.  Her wastefulness and
cruelty revolted him.  The ignorance and the fatuous con-
ceit which lay behind her grimacing mask of slang and
ridicule humiliated him so deeply that he became absolutely
reckless.  Her grace was only an uneasy wriggle, her auda-
city was the result of insolence and envy, and her wit was
restless spite.  As her personal mannerisms grew more and
more odious to him, he began to dull his perceptions with
champagne.  He had it for tea, he drank it with dinner, and
during the evening he took enough to insure that he would
be well insulated when he got home.  This behavior spread
alarm among his friends.  It was scandalous, and it did not
occur among brewers.  He was violating the NOBLESSE OBLIGE
of his guild.  His father and his father's partners looked
alarmed.
     When Fred's mother went to him and with clasped hands
entreated an explanation, he told her that the only trouble
was that he couldn't hold enough wine to make life endur-
able, so he was going to get out from under and enlist in
the navy.  He didn't want anything but the shirt on his
back and clean salt air.  His mother could look out; he was
going to make a scandal.
     Mrs. Otto Ottenburg went to Kansas City to see Mr.
Beers, and had the satisfaction of telling him that he had
brought up his daughter like a savage, EINE UNGEBILDETE.  All
the Ottenburgs and all the Beers, and many of their friends,
were drawn into the quarrel.  It was to public opinion, how-
ever and not to his mother's activities, that Fred owed his
partial escape from bondage.  The cosmopolitan brewing
world of St. Louis had conservative standards.  The Otten-
burgs' friends were not predisposed in favor of the plunging
Kansas City set, and they disliked young Fred's wife from
the day that she was brought among them.  They found her
ignorant and ill-bred and insufferably impertinent.  When
they became aware of how matters were going between her
and Fred, they omitted no opportunity to snub her.  Young
Fred had always been popular, and St. Louis people took
up his cause with warmth.  Even the younger men, among
whom Mrs. Fred tried to draft a following, at first avoided
and then ignored her.  Her defeat was so conspicuous, her
life became such a desert, that she at last consented to
accept the house in Santa Barbara which Mrs. Otto Otten-
burg had long owned and cherished.  This villa, with its
luxuriant gardens, was the price of Fred's furlough.  His
mother was only too glad to offer it in his behalf.  As soon
as his wife was established in California, Fred was trans-
ferred from St. Louis to Chicago.
     A divorce was the one thing Edith would never, never,
give him.  She told him so, and she told his family so, and
her father stood behind her.  She would enter into no
arrangement that might eventually lead to divorce.  She
had insulted her husband before guests and servants, had
scratched his face, thrown hand-mirrors and hairbrushes
and nail-scissors at him often enough, but she knew that
Fred was hardly the fellow who would go into court and
offer that sort of evidence.  In her behavior with other men
she was discreet.
     After Fred went to Chicago, his mother visited him often,
and dropped a word to her old friends there, who were
already kindly disposed toward the young man.  They
gossiped as little as was compatible with the interest they
felt, undertook to make life agreeable for Fred, and told his
story only where they felt it would do good: to girls who
seemed to find the young brewer attractive.  So far, he had
behaved well, and had kept out of entanglements.
     Since he was transferred to Chicago, Fred had been
abroad several times, and had fallen more and more into
the way of going about among young artists,--people with
whom personal relations were incidental.  With women, and
even girls, who had careers to follow, a young man might
have pleasant friendships without being regarded as a pro-
spective suitor or lover.  Among artists his position was not
irregular, because with them his marriageableness was not
an issue.  His tastes, his enthusiasm, and his agreeable
personality made him welcome.
     With Thea Kronborg he had allowed himself more lib-
erty than he usually did in his friendships or gallantries
with young artists, because she seemed to him distinctly
not the marrying kind.  She impressed him as equipped to
be an artist, and to be nothing else; already directed, con-
centrated, formed as to mental habit.  He was generous
and sympathetic, and she was lonely and needed friendship;
needed cheerfulness.  She had not much power of reaching
out toward useful people or useful experiences, did not see
opportunities.  She had no tact about going after good
positions or enlisting the interest of influential persons.
She antagonized people rather than conciliated them.  He
discovered at once that she had a merry side, a robust
humor that was deep and hearty, like her laugh, but it
slept most of the time under her own doubts and the dull-
ness of her life.  She had not what is called a "sense of
humor."  That is, she had no intellectual humor; no power
to enjoy the absurdities of people, no relish of their preten-
tiousness and inconsistencies--which only depressed her.
But her joviality, Fred felt, was an asset, and ought to be
developed.  He discovered that she was more receptive and
more effective under a pleasant stimulus than she was
under the gray grind which she considered her salvation.
She was still Methodist enough to believe that if a thing
were hard and irksome, it must be good for her.  And yet,
whatever she did well was spontaneous.  Under the least
glow of excitement, as at Mrs. Nathanmeyer's, he had seen
the apprehensive, frowning drudge of Bowers's studio flash
into a resourceful and consciously beautiful woman.

     His interest in Thea was serious, almost from the first,
and so sincere that he felt no distrust of himself.  He be-
lieved that he knew a great deal more about her possibili-
ties than Bowers knew, and he liked to think that he had
given her a stronger hold on life.  She had never seen her-
self or known herself as she did at Mrs. Nathanmeyer's
musical evenings.  She had been a different girl ever since.
He had not anticipated that she would grow more fond of
him than his immediate usefulness warranted.  He thought
he knew the ways of artists, and, as he said, she must have
been "at it from her cradle."  He had imagined, perhaps,
but never really believed, that he would find her waiting
for him sometime as he found her waiting on the day
he reached the Biltmer ranch.  Once he found her so--
well, he did not pretend to be anything more or less
than a reasonably well-intentioned young man.  A lovesick
girl or a flirtatious woman he could have handled easily
enough.  But a personality like that, unconsciously reveal-
ing itself for the first time under the exaltation of a per-
sonal feeling,--what could one do but watch it?  As he
used to say to himself, in reckless moments back there in
the canyon, "You can't put out a sunrise."  He had to
watch it, and then he had to share it.
     Besides, was he really going to do her any harm?  The
Lord knew he would marry her if he could!  Marriage would
be an incident, not an end with her; he was sure of that.
If it were not he, it would be some one else; some one who
would be a weight about her neck, probably; who would
hold her back and beat her down and divert her from the
first plunge for which he felt she was gathering all her ener-
gies.  He meant to help her, and he could not think of
another man who would.  He went over his unmarried
friends, East and West, and he could not think of one who
would know what she was driving at--or care.  The clever
ones were selfish, the kindly ones were stupid.
     "Damn it, if she's going to fall in love with somebody, it
had better be me than any of the others--of the sort
she'd find.  Get her tied up with some conceited ass who'd
try to make her over, train her like a puppy!  Give one of
'em a big nature like that, and he'd be horrified.  He
wouldn't show his face in the clubs until he'd gone after
her and combed her down to conform to some fool idea in
his own head--put there by some other woman, too, his
first sweetheart or his grandmother or a maiden aunt.  At
least, I understand her.  I know what she needs and where
she's bound, and I mean to see that she has a fighting
chance."
     His own conduct looked crooked, he admitted; but he
asked himself whether, between men and women, all ways
were not more or less crooked.  He believed those which are
called straight were the most dangerous of all.  They
seemed to him, for the most part, to lie between windowless
stone walls, and their rectitude had been achieved at the
expense of light and air.  In their unquestioned regularity
lurked every sort of human cruelty and meanness, and
every kind of humiliation and suffering.  He would rather
have any woman he cared for wounded than crushed.  He
would deceive her not once, he told himself fiercely, but a
hundred times, to keep her free.

     When Fred went back to the observation car at one
o'clock, after the luncheon call, it was empty, and he found
Thea alone on the platform.  She put out her hand, and
met his eyes.
     "It's as I said.  Things have closed behind me.  I can't
go back, so I am going on--to Mexico?"  She lifted her
face with an eager, questioning smile.
     Fred met it with a sinking heart.  Had he really hoped
she would give him another answer?  He would have given
pretty much anything--  But there, that did no good.  He
could give only what he had.  Things were never complete
in this world; you had to snatch at them as they came or go
without.  Nobody could look into her face and draw back,
nobody who had any courage.  She had courage enough for
anything--look at her mouth and chin and eyes!  Where
did it come from, that light?  How could a face, a familiar
face, become so the picture of hope, be painted with the
very colors of youth's exaltation?  She was right; she was
not one of those who draw back.  Some people get on by
avoiding dangers, others by riding through them.
     They stood by the railing looking back at the sand levels,
both feeling that the train was steaming ahead very fast.
Fred's mind was a confusion of images and ideas.  Only
two things were clear to him: the force of her determination,
and the belief that, handicapped as he was, he could do
better by her than another man would do.  He knew he
would always remember her, standing there with that ex-
pectant, forward-looking smile, enough to turn the future
into summer.