“I won’t believe him, I won’t believe him,” she told herself.  Her thought turned to other channels, and her heart spoke its wish.  “Wherever he is—­sometime he’ll come to me.”

VI

At a little town at the end of steel Ben and Ezram ended the first lap of their journey.  They had had good traveling these past days.  Steadily they had gone north, through the tilled lands of Northern Washington, through the fertile valleys of lower British Columbia, traversing great mountain ranges and penetrating gloomy forests, and now had come to the bank of a north-flowing river,—­a veritable flood and one of the monarch rivers of the North.  Every hour their companionship had been more close and their hopes higher.  Every waking moment Ben had been swept with thankfulness for the chance that had come to him.

They had worked for their meals and passage—­hard, manual toil—­but it had seemed only play to them both.  Sometimes they mended fence, sometimes helped at farm labor, and one gala morning, with entire good will and cheer, they beat into cleanliness every carpet in a widow’s cottage.  And the sign of the outcast was fading from Ben’s flesh.

The change was marked in his face.  His eye seemed more clear and steadfast, his lips more firm, the lines of his face were not so hard and deep.  His fellows of the underworld would have scarcely known him now,—­his lips and chin darkening with beard and this new air of self-respect upon him.  Perhaps they had forgotten him, but it was no less than he had done to them.  The prison walls seemed already as if they hadn’t been true.  He loved every minute of the journey, freshness instead of filth, freedom instead of confinement, fragrant fields and blossoming flowers.  Ever the stars and the moon, remembered of old, yielded him a peace and happiness beyond his power to tell.  And his gratitude to Ezram grew apace.

Besides self-confidence and the constant, slow unraveling of his memory problems, each day yielded rich gifts:  no less than added trust in each other.  Always they found each other steadfast, utterly to be relied upon.  Ezram never regretted for a moment his offer to Ben.  The young man had seemingly developed under his eye and was a real aid to him in all the problems of the journey.

As the days passed, the whole tone and key of the land had seemed to change.  They were full in the mountains now, snow gleaming on the heights, forests blue-black on the slopes; and Ben’s response was a growing excitement that at first he could not analyze.  The air was sweeter, more bracing, and sometimes he discerned a fleeting, delicate odor that drew him up short in his talk and held him entranced.  There was a sparkle and stir in the air, unknown in the cities he had left; and to breathe it deeply thrilled him with an unexplainable happiness.

Some way it was all familiar, all dear to him as if it had once been close to his life.  The sparkle in the air was not new, only recalled:  long and long ago he had wakened to find just such a delicate fragrance in his nostrils.  But the key hadn’t come to him yet.  His memory pictures were ever stronger of outline, clearer in his mind’s eye, yet they were still too dim for him to interpret them.  In these days Ezram watched him closely, with a curious, intense interest.