realized what privilege had been his.  She slipped on and on, forgetting herself, revelling, dreaming; and it was proof at least of the Alice Strowbridge which might have been, that there came to her fingers and her throat that night no sound of cheap sensuous melody, no florid triviality from any land.  With a voice which had mastered the world, she sang the best of the masters of the world.  So music, with all its wooing, its invitation, its challenge, its best appeal, for a time filled and thrilled this strange auditorium, until forsooth later comers might, as was the story, indeed have found jewels caught there in the chinks of the rude-hewn walls.

All at once the voice of the artist, the subsidiary voice of the piano broke, dropped, and paused.  And then, with no more interlude, that great instrument, a perfect human voice, in the throat of a perfect human woman, swept gently into the melody of the old song of “Annie Laurie.”  At the beginning of it there was a schoolgirl of Georgia, and a freighter of the Plains, and at the end of it there was a woman with bowed head, and a man silent, whose head also was bowed.

Neither of the two in the great room heard the footfalls of one who approached in the dusk across the puncheon floor of the wide gallery.  Dan Andersen, for reasons of his own, had also come on up the trail to the hotel.  Perhaps he intended to make certain inquiries; but he never got even so far as the door.  The voice of Donatelli caught and held him as it had her other auditor.  He stopped midway of the gallery, listened to the very last note, then turned and quietly stole away, returning to the lonely bivouac beneath the pines.  He started even at the whisperings of the trees, as he threw down his blankets beside the little fire.  He could not sleep.  A face looked at him out of the dark, eyes gazed down at him, instead of stars, out of the heavens.  The night, and the stars, and the pines, and the desert wind reproached him for his faithlessness to themselves as comforters; but abjectly he admitted he could make no plea, save that he had heard once more of a Face that was the Fairest.

He heard the sound of slow footsteps after a time.  It was Tom Osby, who came and sat down by the fire, poking tobacco into his pipe with a crooked finger, and smoking on with no glance at the recumbent figure on the camper’s bed.  Yet the outdoor sense of Tom Osby told him that his companion was not asleep.

“I was just thinking” said Tom Osby, at length, scarce turning his head as he accosted Dan Anderson, “that since watermelons don’t grow very much up here in the mountings, we might take a load of passengers back home with us.”

“Passengers?” A voice came from the blankets.

“Yes.  Whole bunch of them railroad folks comin’ up on the mornin’ train from El Paso.  Old man and the girl both, and a lawyer fellow, Barkley, I believe his name is.  I reckon he’s attoreney for the road.”