From far away across the plain, John, the Courier, looked back.  His keen eyes fell upon the mountain.  He stopped and stared.

“Ah, Sorcerer,” he murmured, “hast thou now a heart?  What power has crowned thy brow with the holy cross?  Behold! one arm points to the rising sun and one to its setting.  I shall no longer call thee Sorcerer, for thou art become the Guide.”

At the edge of the plain stretched a line of hills.  Within them was a little valley that looked toward the distant mountain.  Leighton purchased the valley from its owner, Dom Francisco, who prized it lightly beside his vast herds of cattle.

At the top of the valley, and facing the mountain, Leighton built his new abode, four walls and a roof of homemade tiles.  When it was finished, he looked upon its ugliness and said, “The Lord hath crushed my heart to infinite depths.  Let us call this place Nadir.”

CHAPTER VIII

The Leightons, who settled at Nadir after a long year of pilgrimage, looked, back upon the happy years at Consolation Cottage as the dead might look back upon existence.  They were changed indeed.  Ann’s skin had lost the pale pink of transplanted Northern blood.  Her sweet face had almost lost the dignity of sorrow.  It was lined, weather-beaten, at times almost vacant.  The Reverend Orme’s black mane had suddenly turned white in streaks.  A perpetual scowl knitted his brows.  To mammy’s broad countenance, built for vast smiles, had come a look of plaintive despair.

Natalie and Lewis were at the weedy age of nine.  It was natural that they should have changed, but their change had gone beyond nature.  Upon them, as upon their elders, had settled the silences and the vaguely wondering expression of those who live in lands of drought and hardship, who look upon fate daily.

Both of the children had become thin and hard; but to Lewis had come a greater change.  His brown hair and eyes had darkened almost to black, his skin taken on an olive tinge.  His face, with its eager eyes sometimes shining like the high lights in a deep pool or suddenly grown slumberous with dreams, began to proclaim him a Leighton of the Leightons.  So evident became the badge of lineage that Ann and the Reverend Orme both noticed it.  To Ann it meant nothing, but in the Reverend Orme it aroused bitter memories of his own boy.  He began to avert his eyes from Lewis.

It was about this time that Natalie and Lewis cut their names to Lew and Nat.  The two were inseparable.  Each had a pony, and they roved at will until the sad day when a school was first opened in that wilderness.

It happened that Dom Francisco, the cattle king from whom Leighton had purchased Nadir, was a widower twice over and the father of twenty children, many of them still of tender years.  When he learned that Leighton had been a schoolmaster, he did not rest until he had persuaded him to undertake the instruction of such of his children as were not already of use on the ranch.  The Reverend Orme consented from necessity.  His cash from the sale of Leighton Academy was gone; the rents from Consolation Cottage were small and reached him at long intervals.