There came at last a cool little wind and under its ministration Dickie let fall his head on his arms and slept.  He was blessed by a dream:  shallow water clapping over a cobbled bed, the sharp rustle of wind-edged aspen leaves, and two stars, tender and misty, that bent close and smiled.  He woke up and stared at the city.  He got up and walked about.  He was faint now and felt chilled, although the asphalt was still soft underfoot and smelled of hot tar.  As he moved listlessly along the pavement, a girl brushed against him, looked up, and murmured to him.  She was small and slight.  His heart seemed to leap away from the contact and then to leap almost irresistibly to meet it.  He turned away and went back quickly toward the Square.  It seemed to him that he was followed.  He looked over his shoulder furtively.  But the girl had disappeared and there was no one in sight but a man who walked unsteadily.  Dickie suddenly knew why he had saved that dime.  The energy of a definite purpose came to him.  He remembered a swinging door back there around a corner, but when he reached the saloon, it was closed.  Dickie had a humiliating struggle with tears.  He went back to his bench and sat there, trembling and swearing softly to himself.  He had not the strength to look farther.  He was no longer the Dickie of Millings, a creature possessed of loneliness and vacancy and wandering fancies, he was no longer Sheila’s lover, he was a prey to strong desires.  In truth, thought Dickie, seeking even now with his deprecatory smile for likenesses and words, the city was full of beasts, silent and stealthy and fanged.  That spirit, aloof, maintained its sweet detachment.  Beneath its observation Dickie fought with a grim, unreasoning panic that was very like the fear of a man pursued by wolves.

CHAPTER V

NEIGHBOR NEIGHBOR

Even in the shadow of after events, those first two months at Miss Blake’s ranch swam like a golden galleon through Sheila’s memory.  Never had she felt such well-being of body, mind, and soul.  Never had she known such dawns and days, such dusks, such sapphire nights.  Sleep came like a highwayman to hold up an eager traveler, but came irresistibly.  It caught her up out of life as it catches up a healthy child.  Never before had she worked so heartily:  out of doors in the vegetable garden; indoors in the sunny kitchen, its windows and door open to the tonic air; never before had she eaten so heartily.  Nothing had tasted like the trout they caught in Hidden Creek, like the juicy, sweet vegetables they picked from their own laborious rows, like the berries they gathered in nervous anticipation of that rival berryer, the brown bear.  And Miss Blake’s casual treatment of her, half-bluff, half-mocking, her curt, good-humored commands, her cordial bullying, were a rest to nerves more raveled than Sheila knew from her experience in Millings.  She grew rosy brown;