have been humiliated by his ignorances and stupidities, Nick reminded himself; and for him that would have been worse than death, even as for her, according to her admission, it would have been worse than death to go on caring for him.  Perhaps she had been wise.  Maybe he was “impossible.”  But, if ever she suffered a moment’s regret, now that they were parted, and if he could yet find a way of happiness for both, better than cold wisdom, was there no hope?  It was of a way to reach her that he was thinking to-night; and abruptly the big chair ceased to swing and creak.  “I’ll go and see that chap they call the Dook!” Nick mumbled on a sudden resolution, and knocked out the ashes from his pipe.

A minute later he was strolling through the hot purple twilight toward Lucky Star City, one of the queerest little towns on earth.  It had not, however, the remotest conception that it was queer.  On the contrary, it thought itself a gay and pleasant place, singularly up-to-date, and lacking nothing except water, which was now worth a good deal more than the fortune-giving oil of which it had too much.

The rough, mostly unpainted, wooden houses, shops, and hotels composing Lucky Star City were so near the great oil gusher which accounted for the town’s existence that the front rank of frame buildings was peppered all over with a jetty spray.  This disfigurement had come when the gusher was at its highest, and its black, blowing spume had been borne by the wind for long distances.  The earth seemed to have gone into mourning and to be spread with a pall almost as far as the boundary of the ranch which Nick had retained for himself; yet there was a strong dividing-line.  He had kept some pasture land, for he loved cattle; but his great pleasure had been in irrigation; and literally he had made the desert “blossom as a rose.”  Even the smell was different when he turned his back upon his own fragrant alfalfa fields, and drew in breaths laden with the fumes of crude petroleum.  But he was used to the scent of oil and hardly noticed it.

He skirted round the desert lake and steered clear of another lesser lake, formed entirely of petroleum from the great gusher.  By day its greasy blackness glared in hideous contrast to the blue though brackish water; but now night lent its ugliness a strange disguise.  All the faint twilight that remained glimmered on the gloss of its surface like phosphorus in the palm of a negro’s hand; and as Nick passed on toward the town, stars shone out in its dark mirror.  He could hear the thick splash of the gusher that rose and fell, like the beating of a giant’s heart, and from the brightly lighted town sounds of laughter and fiddling came to him.