thrown themselves was a long blot across the sand. About them
everything was drowsy and sleepy and still. Conniston, turning upon
his side, his pipe dropping dead from between his teeth, saw that
Hapgood was asleep. He lay back, looking upward through the still
branches of the oak, his spirit heavy with the heaviness of nature
about him. And musing idly upon the new scenes his exile had already
brought him, musing on a pair of gray eyes, Conniston himself went to
sleep.

The sun was low down in the western sky, dropping swiftly to the
clear-cut line of the horizon, the air growing misty with the coming
night, the sunset sky glowing gold and flaming crimson, when Conniston
awoke. He sat up rubbing his eyes, at first at a loss to account for
his surroundings. Then he saw Hapgood sprawled at his side and
remembered. And then, too, he saw what it was that had awakened him.

A man in a buckboard drawn by two sweating horses was looking
curiously at him while his horses drank noisily at the trough. He was
an unmistakable son of the West, bronzed and lean and quick-eyed. The
long hair escaping from under his battered gray hat vied with his long
drooping mustache in color, and they both challenged the flaming
crimson of the sunset. Conniston told himself that he had never seen
hair one-half so fiery or eyes approaching the brilliant blueness of
this man's. And he told himself, too, that he had never been gladder
to see a fellow human being. For the horses were headed toward the
hills in the south.

"How are you?" Conniston cried, scrambling to his feet and striding
with heavy feet to the buckboard.