coax him to stay. She told me not to tell you about the potatoes—thought it might turn some of you against your victuals; but it's too blamed funny to keep."

"For my part I hope she'll patch up the peace with Jimmy, too," said Batty Carson in his hoarse whisper. "He's the only amusing thing in all this howling wilderness. His being so far off the track himself makes it all the funnier when he goes to playing human guidepost for everybody else."

"He'll get his neck wrung a-doing it sometime," rejoined Hillis. "I told him so when he came fussing around at first, sticking his fingers in my dish-water to see if it was hot enough to kill germs. I told him I'd scald him instead of the dishes if he didn't let me alone. But it's just his way I suppose. He's been here off and on ever since Welsh bought the ranch."

"It's off this time," came Batty's croaking whisper. "There he goes now. Whew! He's hot! Just watch him hump himself along!"

The eight men whose backs were toward the window, turned in their chairs to follow the gaze of the others. They had a glimpse of a tall spare figure, hurrying stiffly past the house as fast as his rheumatic joints would allow. There was anger in every line of it. Even the red bandana around his throat seemed to express it. The fierce curves of his old hat-brim, the bristling hairs of his grizzly mustache, the snap of his lean jaws as the few snags left in his sunken gums opened and shut on a quid of tobacco, all told of an inward rage which would be long in cooling.

"Well, it's all over now," announced Hillis a moment later, coming back from the kitchen with a bowl of hot gravy. "Jimmy vowed one of them had to go, so Mrs. Welsh said he'd have to be that one. She could get a Mexican to chop wood and carry water, but she couldn't get another cook like Matsu. And Jimmy's that mad and insulted and hurt he can't get off the place fast enough. He's gone now to pack his kit, muttering as if he'd swallowed a lot of distant thunder."

A laugh went around the long table. Usually the meals proceeded in silence except for a few spasmodic outbursts. Sitting all day in the sun, gazing at the monotonous desert landscape while one waits for winter to crawl by, is not a conversational stimulant. But to-day, even Maidlow, the grumpiest invalid in the lot, forgot his temperature and himself in adding his mite to the fund of anecdotes passing around the table about Jimmy. The conversation was less restrained than usual in the absence of the only lady and child which the ranch boasted. The Courtlands were spending the day in Ph[oe]nix, so there were three vacant chairs at the foot of the table. One was a child's high-chair with a bib hanging over its back. Hillis laid his hand on it in passing.

"Here's one that will miss the old rain-crow," he said, as if glad to find some good word about Jimmy. "Little Buddy Courtland comes about as near loving him as anybody could, I guess. He'll miss him."

"It's Dane Ward who'll really miss him," declared the dyspeptic, glancing out of the window at the farthest row of tents to the one at the end whose screen door was closed. "Now Jimmy's gone I don't see what that poor fellow will do when he needs some one to sit up with him of nights."

"That's right," agreed Batty Carson. "Jimmy's been his right bower ever since he came. I'll give the old devil credit for that much."

While they talked, Jimmy, outside in the shack which he shared with Hillis, was gathering up in a furious rage his small bundle of belongings, cursing darkly as he threw boots, shirts and overalls into a confused heap in the middle of his bunk. Near at hand the tents stood empty in the December sun; five rows of them, four in a row with twenty foot spaces between. Each canvas-covered screen door swung open, and outside sat a camp chair or a big wooden rocker, with blanket or overcoat trailing across it, just as its occupant had left it to go in to dinner. A litter of newspapers and magazines lay all around on the dry Bermuda grass.

There was one exception. One screen door was closed, that of the farthest tent on the back row in line with Jimmy's shack. A sound of coughing—choked, convulsive coughing, had been coming from that direction for several minutes, but the sound did not penetrate Jimmy's consciousness until he heard his name called in an agonized tone. He craned his head out to listen. The call came again in a frantic gasp:

"Jimmy! Jimmy! Oh, somebody come!"

Then he recognized the voice. It was Dane Ward calling him. In his row with Matsu he had forgotten the boy; forgotten that he was to carry him his dinner and give him his medicine. He remembered with a pang of self-reproach that he had promised to come back with fresh wood as soon as he had carried an armful of wood to the kitchen. He started off on a stiff jog-trot towards the tent.

A moment later, maybe not even so long as that, for as he ran he knew that he might be racing against death, he dashed into the kitchen which he had sworn never again to enter, and caught up a handful of salt. Hillis, thinking he had lost his mind, almost dropped the tray of dessert dishes he was holding for Matsu to fill; but Mrs. Welsh recognizing the import of Jimmy's act, followed without question as he called back over his shoulder, "It's Dane! The worst hemorrhage the lad's had yet."

Hillis carried the news into the dining room with the dessert. Big and strong, never having had a sick day in his life, he could not know the effect it would produce, and Mrs. Welsh had not thought to warn him. The room grew silent. It was what might happen to any one of them; had happened in fact to all. The apprehension of it was the skeleton at their every feast. First one man and then another pushed back his plate and went out into the sunshine. They all liked Dane, the shy, quiet boy from some village in the New York hills. That was all they knew of him, for he always sat apart. Sometimes there was a book in his lap but he rarely read—just sat and gazed off towards the east with a hungry look in his big grey eyes. The homesick longing of them was heart-breaking to see.

They went back to their chairs and their naps and their newspapers, but the usual afternoon monotony was broken by the interest centering in the farthest tent in the last row. They glanced up furtively every time the door opened. It swung many times in the course of the afternoon, for Mrs. Welsh to go in and out, for the doctor to make a hurried visit, for Jimmy to come and go with crushed ice and clean towels, a spoon or a pitcher of fresh water.

For Jimmy, in his anxious ministrations, forgot his fight with Matsu, forgot that he had had no dinner, and that he was in the midst of preparations for leaving the ranch. The ugly facts did not come back to him till several hours had passed. Then he started up from the chair beside Dane's bed and tip-toed heavily across the floor. He would finish making up his bundle while the boy was asleep. The danger was past now. If he could get down to the Tempe road before dark, probably he could catch a ride the rest of the way into Ph[oe]nix. A board creaked and Dane opened his eyes.

"I wasn't asleep," he said weakly. "Hand me that little picture off the bureau, won't you, Jimmy?" Then as his fingers closed over it—"And roll the canvas to the top of the door please. I can't see."

Jimmy sat down again, impelled by the pitifulness of the thin white face. He knew the picture, having examined it