The man passed his hand across his forehead, and leaned against the wheel.  “Lord, Lord!” he muttered.

His son warily slid out of the shed and left him leaning there.

PART II

Lin McLean, bachelor, sat out in front of his cabin, looking at a small bright pistol that lay in his hand.  He held it tenderly, cherishing it, and did not cease slowly to polish it.  Revery filled his eyes, and in his whole face was sadness unmasked, because only the animals were there to perceive his true feelings.  Sunlight and waving shadows moved together upon the green of his pasture, cattle and horses loitered in the opens by the stream.  Down Box Elder’s course, its valley and golden-chimneyed bluffs widened away into the level and the blue of the greater valley.  Upstream the branches and shining, quiet leaves entered the mountains where the rock chimneys narrowed to a gateway, a citadel of shafts and turrets, crimson and gold above the filmy emerald of the trees.  Through there the road went up from the cotton-woods into the cool quaking asps and pines, and so across the range and away to Separ.  Along the ridge-pole of the new stable, two hundred yards down-stream, sat McLean’s turkeys, and cocks and hens walked in front of him here by his cabin and fenced garden.  Slow smoke rose from the cabin’s chimney into the air, in which were no sounds but the running water and the afternoon chirp of birds.  Amid this framework of a home the cow-puncher sat, lonely, inattentive, polishing the treasured weapon as if it were not already long clean.  His target stood some twenty steps in front of him—­a small cottonwood-tree, its trunk chipped and honeycombed with bullets which he had fired into it each day for memory’s sake.  Presently he lifted the pistol and looked at its name—­the word “Neighbor” engraved upon it.

“I wonder,” said he, aloud, “if she keeps the rust off mine?” Then he lifted it slowly to his lips and kissed the word “Neighbor.”

The clank of wheels sounded on the road, and he put the pistol quickly down.  Dreaminess vanished from his face.  He looked around alertly, but no one had seen him.  The clanking was still among the trees a little distance up Box Elder.  It approached deliberately, while he watched for the vehicle to emerge upon the open where his cabin stood; and then they came, a man and a woman.  At sight of her Mr. McLean half rose, but sat down again.  Neither of them had noticed him, sitting as they were in silence and the drowsiness of a long drive.  The man was weak-faced, with good looks sallowed by dissipation, and a vanquished glance of the eye.  As the woman had stood on the platform at Separ, so she sat now, upright, bold, and massive.  The brag of past beauty was a habit settled upon her stolid features.  Both sat inattentive to each other and to everything around them.  The wheels turned slowly and with a dry, dead noise, the reins bellied loosely to the shafts, the horse’s head hung low.  So they drew close.  Then the man saw McLean, and color came into his face and went away.