“I want to go,” said Dan Anderson, “and I ought to go.  I ought to go climb that tree and leave a pink and lavender card of regrets for the lady and her dad.  I reckon I will go, too, if I can ever get this faintness out of my legs.  But somehow I can’t get started.  I’d look well, tryin’ to climb a tree with my legs this way, wouldn’t I?  Man, haven’t you any sympathy?”

So we sat on a log out in front of Uncle Jim Brothers’s hotel, and waited for the worst to happen.

“Don’t you go away,” said Dan Anderson.  “I want you for my second.  You can go for the doctor.  I ain’t feelin’ very well.”

Now, there was no doctor in Heart’s Desire, nor had there ever been, as Dan Anderson knew.  Neither did he look in need of any help whatsoever.  He made no foolish masculine attempt at personal adornment, but his long figure, with good bony shoulders and a visible waist line, looked well enough in the man’s garb of blue shirt and belted trousers.  A rope of hair straggled from under his wide hat; for in Heart’s Desire wide hats were worn of right and not in affectation.  He was a manly man enough, in a place where weak men were rare.  The one most vitally concerned in all the population of Heart’s Desire, he was now the one least visibly affected.  All the rest of the settlement, suddenly smitten by the news that the stage was coming with Eastern Capital and a live Woman, had hastened under cover in search of coats and neckties.  Dan Anderson sat out on the street just as he had been, and watched the purple mysteries dropping on the mountains, and waited grimly for that which was to come to him.  True, there was the slight moisture on his brow and on his under lip, but otherwise his agitation displayed itself only in an occasional exuberance of metaphor.

For my own part, I remained unreconciled to these impending events.  “What will you do?” I asked Dan Anderson bitterly, “now that you’ve been ass enough to allow this girl to come on down in here?  You’ll have some one killed in this town before long.  Besides, where can a white girl live in this place?  There’s not a bedspread or a linen sheet in the whole town.”

“You talk like a chambermaid,” said Dan Anderson, scornfully.  “Do you suppose a Wellesley girl, accustomed steady to high thinkin’, can’t get along with a little plain livin’ once in a while?  As for women folks, why can’t Curly’s girl take care of her?  Does a chance lady caller in this city need a thousand women to entertain her?  And blankets—­why, you know well enough, that blankets are better after sundown here than much fine linen.  Heart’s Desire’ll be here calm and confident after this brief pageantry has passed from our midst.”

As he spoke, he half turned and started, with a broken exclamation.  I followed his gaze.  The street was vacant, barren of the accustomed throng that usually awaited near the post-office the arrival of the infrequent stagecoach.  But there, at the mouth of the canon, almost under the edge of the deepening shadow from the purple-topped mountain, appeared the dusty top of the creeping vehicle that bore with it the fate of Heart’s Desire.  Dan Anderson was pale now, and he put his hand to his shirt collar, as though it were too tight; but he sat gazing down the valley.