"Harry," said he in a low voice, "do you remember the camp we
made on the shoulder of the mountain that night we were caught
out? And do you remember how the dawn came up on the big snow
peaks across the way--and all the canon below us filled with
whirling mists--and the steel stars leaving us one by one? Where
could I find room for that in English paddocks? And do you
recall the day we trailed across the Yuma deserts, and the sun
beat into our skulls, and the dry, brittle hills looked like
papier-mache, and the grey sage-bush ran off into the rise of the
hills; and then came sunset and the hard, dry mountains grew
filmy, like gauze veils of many colours, and melted and glowed
and faded to slate blue, and the stars came out? The English
hills are rounded and green and curried, and the sky is near, and
the stars only a few miles up. And do you recollect that dark
night when old Loco and his warriors were camped at the base of
Cochise's Stronghold, and we crept down through the velvet dark
wondering when we would be discovered, our mouths sticky with
excitement, and the little winds blowing?"

He walked up and down a half-dozen times, his breast heaving.

"It's all very well for the man who is brought up to it, and
who has seen nothing else. Case can exist in four walls; he
has been brought up to it and knows nothing different. But a
man like me--

"They wanted me to canter between hedge-row,--I who have ridden
the desert where the sky over me and the plain under me were
bigger than the Islander's universe! They wanted me to oversee
little farms--I who have watched the sun rising over half a