She felt his eyes upon her, and this time turned away her own.  For a time they were silent, as the well-worn wagon rolled along behind the long-stepping grays; but Tom Osby was patient.

“A while ago,” he resumed after a time, “you said ‘we,’ and ’our railroad.’  That’s mighty near right.  You two folks right here in this wagon, yourself particular, can save that there railroad, and save Heart’s Desire, both at the same time.  And that’s something, even if them was all that was saved.”

“I don’t quite see what you mean,” answered Constance.

“Oh, now, look here,” said Tom, filling another pipe, “I ain’t so foolish.  I ain’t goin’ to say that the old days’ll last forever.  We all know better’n that when it comes right down to straight reasonin’.  A country’ll sleep about so long, same as a man; and then it’ll wake up.  I’ve seen the States come West for forty years.  They’re comin’ swifter’n ever now.”

“When we first came here,” said Constance, “I thought this was the very end of all the world.”

“It has been.  And the finest place in all the world, ma’am, is right at the end of the world.  That’s where a man can feel right independent.  A woman can’t understand that, no way on earth.  A man’s a right funny thing, ma’am.  He’s all the time hankerin’ to git into some country out at the end of the world, where there ain’t a woman within a thousand miles; and then as quick as he gets there, he begins to holler for some woman to come out and save his life!”

She turned upon him again, smiling in spite of herself.

“The boys have been mighty slow to let go of the old days,” he went on.  “In some ways there won’t never be no better days.  We never had a thief in our valley, until your pa come in here last summer.  There ain’t been a lock on a door in four hundred miles of this country in the last twenty years.  When the railroad comes the first thing it’ll bring will be locks and bolts.  At the same time, it’s got to come—­I know that.  We’ve about had our sleep and our dream out, ma’am.”

“It was beautiful,” Constance murmured vaguely; and he caught her meaning.

“Yes, plumb beautiful.  Folks that hasn’t tried it don’t know.  A man that’s lived the old life here, with a real gun on him as regular as pants, why, in about three years he gets what we call galvanized.  He’ll never be the same after that.  He’ll never go back to the States no more.  That’s hard for you to understand, ain’t it?  And yet that sort of feelin’ catches almost any man out here, sooner or later, if he’s any good.  It’s the country, ma’am.”

A strange spell seemed now to fall upon Constance herself, as she sat gazing out in the sunlight.  She felt the fatalism, the unconcern of a child, of a young creature.  She understood perfectly all that she had heard, and was ready to listen further.