northern lights spreading their long pale-green streams across the sky.
"The Indians call them the campfires of the dead," he told her.
"That's rather lovely, isn't it!"
He squared about and looked at her.
"If anything happened to me, Kay, what would you do?"
"I'm not going to think about it."
"But if it did? Suppose a horse comes down on me some day—you never can tell in this business—then what?"
"I suppose I'd go home. I don't know what else I could do. Please, Tom!"
"And marry Percy? That would be it, I suppose."
"I'd never marry anybody. I couldn't."
"You'd marry him," he said somberly, and was silent for a long time.
Outside of that one reference to her old life, he never mentioned it.
Time went on. The drought continued. Already the leaves of the cottonwoods by the creek had turned yellow and were falling; they dropped into the stream and were caught underneath by the eddies, where they moved along like small golden fish. The stream was very low, and what had been mysterious shadows in its depths were now revealed in their stark nakedness under a rock, a floating end of it looking like a long dead arm.
The trout had left the riffles and taken refuge in the pools, and the little pond surrounded by rushes, which was the ancient overflow from some forgotten irrigation ditch, was almost dry. Now and then a flock of early ducks flew over it, heads thrust forward, circled it and then went on in search of something better. The cattle kept slowly on the move in search of grass; one morning Kay found them all around the pool, and saw that they had eaten the rushes down. She could have wept, and thereafter the pool, like the débris, in the creek, lay naked and ugly, save when at sunset it reflected the colors of the sky.
But as time went on and the heat and drought continued, anxiety began to tighten Tom's nerves. He came in one
