“But you insisted on mortgaging every acre you bought—­your cattle and everything you had, to me; so that took away the credit,” cried Carmen, touched by his gratitude, and happy in the renewed assurance that this man was hers.  “Besides, all you did and spent seemed likely to harm more than help, when everybody said you wouldn’t get enough oil to pay for sinking your wells.  It was only when the gusher burst out by accident and took every one by surprise that your troubles were over.”

“If there’s any such thing as accident,” Nick mumbled, his eyes far away from Carmen.  “The longer I live, the more I think there isn’t.  It’s all arranged by Something Big up there beyond where the sun’s sinking and the moon’s rising.  But maybe you’ll say that’s sentimental, like the angel-thought.  I don’t mean it that way, though I’ve got an almighty lot to thank the Something for—­as well as to thank you.”

“It wasn’t I who took the gusher off your hands, anyhow, and saved you the expense of coping with it,” said Carmen.  “So I suppose you think it was Heaven sent you those men to buy what oil land you wanted to sell, and start Lucky Star City.”

“I guess that’s Who it was.  Not that I deserve any special kindness from that quarter,” Nick laughed.  “My mother used to talk a lot about those things, you know, and though I was only a little shaver when she died, I’ve remembered most all that was connected with her.”

Carmen did not speak.  She knew the history of Nick’s terrible childhood and early youth.  Long ago he had told her how his grandfather, a California pioneer of good Southern family, a successful judge, had turned an only son away, penniless, because the boy of twenty chose to take for a wife a pretty little dressmaker, of no family at all; how the couple had gone East, to live on a few hundred dollars left to the boy by an aunt; how he had hoped and expected to succeed in New York as a journalist and writer; how he had failed and starved with his bride; how he had faded out of life while Nick was a baby; how the girl-widow had taken in sewing to support her child, and when she couldn’t get that, had washed or scrubbed; and how, as Nick became a wise, worried old man of four or five years, he had been able to help earn the family living by selling the newspapers which had refused his dead father’s contributions.  Nick had not enlarged upon his adventures after this stage of his youthful career, merely sketching them in the baldest manner, when it had been necessary to present his credentials to the “boss”—­“old Grizzly Gaylor.”  But in one way or other it had leaked out that the boy had learned to read and write and cipher at a night school in New York, not having time for such “frills” as schooling by day.  And Carmen could not help knowing that he had gone on studying, and thinking out his own rather queer ideas about heaven and earth, ever since, in spite of the most strenuous interruptions—­for she had been ashamed occasionally by happening to discover how much Nick knew.  He had read everybody and everything from Plato to Schopenhauer, whereas it bored Carmen unspeakably to read anything except novels, and verses which she liked sometimes in magazines, because their pathos or passion might have been written round her.