lest he be reminded too keenly of his matrimonial wreck. He had
stayed with Cash and had hunted gold, partly because Cash never
seemed conscious of any need of a home or love or wife or
children, and therefore never reminded Bud of the home and the
wife and the love and the child he had lost out of his own life.
Cash seldom mentioned women at all, and when he did it was in a
purely general way, as women touched some other subject he was
discussing. He never paid any attention to the children they met
casually in their travels. He seemed absolutely self-sufficient,
interested only in the prospect of finding a paying claim. What
he would do with wealth, if so be he attained it, he never seemed
to know or care. He never asked Bud any questions about his
private affairs, never seemed to care how Bud had lived, or
where. And Bud thankfully left his past behind the wall of
silence. So he had come to believe that he was almost as emotion-
proof as Cash appeared to be, and had let it go at that.

Now here be was, with his heart and his mind full of Marie--
after more than a year and a half of forgetting her! Getting
drunk and playing poker all night did not help him at all, for
when he woke it was from a sweet, intimate dream of her, and it
was to a tormenting desire for her, that gnawed at his mind as
hunger gnaws at the stomach. Bud could not understand it. Nothing
like that had ever happened to him before. By all his simple
rules of reckoning he ought to be "over it" by now. He had been,
until he saw that picture.

He was so very far from being over his trouble that he was
under it; a beaten dog wincing under the blows of memory, stung
by the lash of his longing. He groaned, and Frank thought it was