relentlessly into a watering trough, and laughed with Frank and
called it some picture.

He eyed a succession of "current events" long since gone stale
out where the world moved swifter than here in the mountains, and
he felt as though he had come once more into close touch with
life. All the dull months he had spent with Cash and the burros
dwarfed into a pointless, irrelevant incident of his life. He
felt that he ought to be out in the world, doing bigger things
than hunting gold that somehow always refused at the last minute
to be found. He stirred restlessly. He was free--there was
nothing to hold him if he wanted to go. The war--he believed
he would go over and take a hand. He could drive an ambulance or
a truck--

Current Events, however, came abruptly to an end; and presently
Bud's vagrant, half-formed desire for achievement merged into
biting recollections. Here was a love drama, three reels of it.
At first Bud watched it with only a vague, disquieting sense of
familiarity. Then abruptly he recalled too vividly the time and
circumstance of his first sight of the picture. It was in San
Jose, at the Liberty. He and Marie had been married two days, and
were living in that glamorous world of the honeymoon, so
poignantly sweet, so marvelous--and so fleeting. He had
whispered that the girl looked like her, and she had leaned
heavily against his shoulder. In the dusk of lowered lights their
hands had groped and found each other, and clung.

The girl did look like Marie. When she turned her head with
that little tilt of the chin, when she smiled, she was like