“Do you call her happy?”

“No; she’s really sad.  That’s why she knows what real happiness is.”

“Judith, how do you suppose Inez will end?”

“Over in the cemetery with a coyote-proof grave like the rest of us.  And I ask you, Doug, since that’s the end of it, why worry?”

“That’s the very reason I worry!  Life is so short and if we don’t find happiness here, we are clean out of luck, forever.”

Judith spurred the nervous Whoop-la into five minutes of active bucking, then she leaped from the saddle and came to perch on the fence beside Douglas.  Her gaze wandered from his wistful face to the eternal crimson and orange clouds rolling across Fire Mesa.

“Outside of my riding,” she said slowly, “I get most happiness out of my eyes.”

Douglas followed her gaze.  “Inez likes it too.”

Judith nodded.  “She got me to using my eyes years ago.  She’s a funny person.  Reads almost nothing but poetry.  She’s got one she always quotes when she and I are looking at Fire Mesa.”

“What is it?” asked Doug.

“I don’t know but one verse: 

“A fire mist and a planet,
A crystal and a cell,
A jelly-fish and a saurian,
And caves where the cave-men dwell,
Then a sense of law and beauty
And a face turned from the clod,
Some call it Evolution
And others call it God.”

“Say it again, slow!” ordered Douglas, his eyes still on Fire Mesa.

Judith obeyed.

“I didn’t know Inez had got religious,” he said, when Judith finished.

“She hasn’t.  She doesn’t believe anything except that beauty is right and ugliness is wrong.”

“Then she’d better clean up her door-yard!” exclaimed Douglas.

“O darn it!” sighed Judith.  “I can’t even discuss poetry with you without your heaving a brick.”

“I’m not heaving bricks.  O Judith, I’m so devilishly unhappy!”

“You ought to quit thinking so much and have something you are crazy about doing.  When I get blue, I put Whoop-la to bucking.”

“I’m crazy about something, all right.  Judith, don’t you think you’re ever going to care about me.”

“I don’t know, Doug.  Who does know, at sixteen?”

“I did.”

“I wouldn’t marry a man that expected me to be a ranch wife in Lost Chief, if I loved him black in the face.”  Judith jumped down from the fence and turned Whoop-la free for the night.

Douglas sat staring at her, wondering whether or not to mention the subject of the trip to Mountain City.  He was firmly resolved that unless Judith gave in to her mother on the matter, he was going with her and his father.  But finally he decided that he would not end their friendly conversation with a row and he clambered down and went about his chores.

And so the days passed and the time grew close for the departure to Mountain City.  One evening, two days before the start, Douglas and Judith went to call on Little Marion and Jimmy.  When they reached the ranch house, they found Little Marion in the big bed in the living-room and Jimmy sitting beside the unshaded lamp, reading to her.