and pines--and a man's mental grace must be as the grace of the untamed
trees. It is a land of far-arched and unstained skies, where the wind
sweeps free and untainted, and the atmosphere is the atmosphere of those
places that remain as God made them--and a man's soul must be as the
unstained skies, the unburdened wind, and the untainted atmosphere. It
is a land of wide mesas, of wild, rolling pastures and broad, untilled,
valley meadows--and a man's freedom must be that freedom which is not
bounded by the fences of a too weak and timid conventionalism.

In this land every man is--by divine right--his own king; he is his own
jury, his own counsel, his own judge, and--if it must be--his own
executioner. And in this land where a man, to live, must be a man, a
woman, if she be not a woman, must surely perish.

This is the story of a man who regained that which in his youth had been
lost to him; and of how, even when he had recovered that which had been
taken from him, he still paid the price of his loss. It is the story of
a woman who was saved from herself; and of how she was led to hold fast
to those things, the loss of which cost the man so great a price.

The story, as I have put it down here, begins at Prescott, Arizona, on
the day following the annual Fourth-of-July celebration in one of those
far-western years that saw the passing of the Indian and the coming of
the automobile.

The man was walking along one of the few roads that lead out from the
little city, through the mountain gaps and passes, to the wide, unfenced
ranges, and to the lonely scattered ranches on the creeks and flats and
valleys of the great open country that lies beyond.