“I shall certainly want to be good to Ann,” she murmured.  “Though I don’t think she needs me much—­any more.”

Something about her went to his heart.  “Why, Katie—­we all need you.”

She shook her head; there were tears, but a smile with them.  “Not much, Wayne.  Not now.  I’m not—­indispensable.  Though pray why should one wish to be anything so terrifying as indispensable?”

“Will you take Worth?” she asked after a little while.  “He goes—­with you and Ann?”

“We want him.  And Katie, we want you.  We’re to go to Colorado and fight the water barons,” he laughed.  “Aren’t you coming with us?”

She shook her head.  “Not just now.  I want to flit round in the East a little first.  Be gay—­renew my youth,” she laughed, choking a little.

She drew him to talk of his hopes.  “I’ll fess up, Katie,” he said, when warmed to it by her sympathy, “that I fear I do have rather a poetic notion about it.  I want to do something—­something that will count, something set in the direction of the future.  And I like the idea of going back to that old frontier—­place where I was born—­and where mother went through so much—­and where father fought—­and because of which he died.  And serving out there now in a way that is just as live—­just as vital—­as the way he served then.”

He paused; they were both thinking of their father and mother, of how they might not have understood, of the sadness as well as the triumph there is in change, that tug at the heart that must so often come when the new generation sees a little farther down the road than older eyes can see, the ache in hearts left behind when children of a new day are called away from places endeared by habit into the incertitude and perhaps the danger of ways unworn.

“Life seems too fine a thing, Katie, to spend it making instruments of destruction more deadly.  It’s not a very happy thought to think of their being used; and it’s not a very stimulating one to think of their not being.  In either case, it doesn’t make one too pleased with one’s vocation.  And life seems a big enough thing,” he added, a little diffidently, “to try pretty hard to get one’s self right with it.”

He did not understand the way Katie was looking at him as she replied:  “Yes, Wayne; I know that.  I’ve been thinking that myself.”

Something moved her to ask:  “Wayne, do you think you would have done it, if it had not been for Ann?”

“I think,” he replied quietly, “that possibly that is still another thing I have to thank her for.”  His face and voice gave Katie a sharp sense of loneliness, that loneliness which came in seeing how poorly she had understood him, how little people knew each other.

They talked of a number of things before he suddenly exclaimed:  “Oh Katie, I must tell you.  That fellow—­what’s his name?  Mann?  The mythical being known as the man who mends the boats is a fellow you’ll have to avoid, should you ever see him again—­which of course is not likely.”