Calamity went on down the Ridge and Wayland plunged at his mail.  On the very top of the pile lay a newspaper in a folder marked with red “Important.”  Before the pole cat begins operations, he chooses his target.  For myself, I think discretion is better than valor in such a case, and you would do well to retreat and let the little genus Mephitis Mephitica infect the air for his own benefit; but Wayland did not know what was coming and tore the paper open and read.  Then he flung it from him and stood looking with blazing eyes at the thing on the floor.

“Read it,” he said.

The old frontiersman got his glasses laboriously out of the case and began to read.  The sun was behind the Holy Cross, and he stood in the door to get the light on the paper.  When he had finished and looked round, he saw Wayland sitting crunched forward with his face in his hands.

“Wayland, man,” he slapped him twice on the shoulder, “look up, look up at that picture on the wall above y’r bed.”

Wayland took his hands from his eyes.  The Alpine glow struck through the doorway against the picture on the wall, the picture she had had Calamity bring down surreptitiously and had sent back framed, the picture of the face above the Warrior.

“Man alive, why w’d y’ care for the devil’s dirt and skunk stench and snake venom, when y’ have, when y’ have That?  She’s a—­a trump!  She’s a thoroughbred!  Man, y’d know she had th’ blood o’ Scottish kings and queens in her veins.  Y’ll no go down to-night, Wayland, when y’r all undone!  ‘Twould hurt her.  A intended tellin’ her to-night why A came; but A’ll not now!  A’ll not now!  She must not run from this scandal.  She must face it down before she goes, but A’ll go an’ see her father an’ come back an’ tell y’.  Cheer up man!  ’Tis part o’the fight.”

And for the only time in the struggle, Wayland let go; or rather—­his manhood got from under leash.  You can be stoical all right when you get the blow.  It’s another thing to be stoical when the blow hits what you love.  When the curtain-drop fell on Moyese, it fell on a man pounding the desk, kicking furniture, eating up the telephone, turning the air blue.  It fell on the Ranger sitting crunched in his chair gazing through misty eyes at a picture painted by an artist, who was an idealist.  Was he down and out?  Was Right the sport of fools?

CHAPTER XXII

A DOWNY-LIPPED YOUTH IN GRAY FLANNELS

I suppose it was owing to the fact that she was woman and he was man that she spent that first night of the home-coming in dumb hurt wonder that he had not come immediately to her; and that he passed the night in restless fevered fury, knowing well that you cannot both control fire and fan it, fuse metals molten and expect them not to forge, keep a resolution and break it.  She had listened eagerly to the old frontiersman’s