if there's no interest left in anything, unless he can get a kick
out of going to jail. And, Jack, I do believe he's gone there."

The telephone rang and the Little Woman excused herself and went
into the hall, closing the door softly behind her.

I'm not greatly given to reminiscence, but while I sat and
watched the flames of civilization licking tamely at the
impregnable iron bark of the gas logs, the eyes of my memory
looked upon a picture:

Desert, empty and with the mountains standing back against the
sky, the great dipper uptilted over a peak and the stars bending
close for very friendliness. The licking flames of dry
greasewood burning, with a pungent odor in my nostrils when the
wind blew the smoke my way. The far-off hooting of an owl,
perched somewhere on a juniper branch watching for mice; and
Casey Ryan sitting cross-legged in the sand, squinting humorously
at me across the fire while he talked.

I saw him, too, bolting a hurried breakfast under a mesquite tree
in the chill before sunrise, his mind intent upon the trail;
facing the desert and its hardships as a matter of course, with
never a thought that other men would shrink from the ordeal.

I saw him kneeling before a solid face of rock in a shallow cut
in the hillside, swinging his "single-jack" with tireless rhythm;
a tap and a turn of the steel, a tap and a turn--chewing tobacco
industriously and stopping now and then to pry off a fresh bit
from the plug in his hip pocket before he reached for the "spoon"