between Viking and Sunburst--we are all river-men and mill-hands at
Viking, and they're all salmon-fishers and fruit-growers at Sunburst.
By rights I ought to live here, but when I started I thought I'd build my
mills at Sunburst, so I pitched my tent down there. My wife and the
girls got attached to the place, and though the mills were built at
Viking, and I made all my money up here, I live at Sunburst and spend my
shekels there. I guess if I didn't happen to live at Sunburst, people
would be trailing their coats and making Donnybrook fairs every other day
between these two towns. But that's neither here nor there. Take my
advice, Mrs. Falchion, and come to Sunburst and see the salmon-fishers
at work, both day and night. It is about the biggest thing in the way
of natural picturesqueness that you'll see--outside my mills. Indians,
half-breeds, white men, Chinamen--they are all at it in weirs and cages,
or in the nets, and spearing by torch-light!--Don't you think I would do
to run a circus, Mrs. Falchion?--Stand at the door, and shout: 'Here's
where you get the worth of your money'?"

Mrs. Falchion laughed. "I am sure you and I will be good friends; you
are amusing. And, to be perfectly frank with you, I am very weary of
trying to live in the intellectual altitudes of Dr. Marmion--and The
Padre."

I had never seen her in a greater strain of gaiety. It had almost a kind
of feverishness--as if she relished fully the position she held towards
Roscoe and Ruth, her power over their future, and her belief (as I think
was in her mind then) that she could bring back to her self Roscoe's old
allegiance. That she believed this, I was convinced; that she would
never carry it out, was just as strong: for I, though only the chorus in
the drama, might one day find it in my power to become, for a moment, one
of the principal actors--from which position I had declined one day when