At the side of the house languished a wretched, abortive garden, running over with weeds and sage-brush, and here a man pottered with the purposeless energy of old age, working with an ear cocked in the direction of the house, as he turned a spade of earth again and again in hopeless, pusillanimous industry.  But when his strained attention was presently rewarded by a shouted summons to supper, and he stood erect but for the slouching droop of shoulders that was more a matter of temperament than of age, one saw a tall man of massive build, whose keen glance and slightly grizzled hair belied his groping, ineffectual labor.  The head, and face were finely modelled.  Unless nature had fashioned them in some vagrant, prankish mood, such elegance of line betokened prior generations in which gentlemen and scholars had played some part—­the vagabond scion of a good family, perhaps.  A multitude of such had grafted on the pioneer stock of the West, under names that carried no significance in the places whence they came.

Weakness and self-indulgence there were, and those writ large and deep, on the face of Warren Rodney; and, in default of an expression of deeper significance, the wavering lines of instability produced a curiously ambiguous effect of a fine head modelled by a ’prentice hand; a lady’s copy of the Belvidere, attempted in the ardors of the first lessons, might approximate it.

A smoking kerosene lamp revealed a supper-table of almost institutional proportions.  There were four sons and two daughters of the Tumlin union, strapping lads and lasses all of them, with more than a common dower of lusty health and a beauty that was something deeper than the perishable iridescence of youth.  There was Fremont, named for the explorer-soldier; there was Orlando, named from his mother’s vague, idle musings over paper-backed literature at certain “unchancy” seasons; there was Richards, named from pure policy, for a local great man of whom Warren Rodney had anticipated a helping hand at the time; there was Eudora, whose nominal origin was uncertain, unless it bore affiliation to that of Orlando; there was Sadie, thus termed to avoid the painful distinctions of “old Sally” and “young Sally”; and, lastly, like a postscript, came Dan—­with him, fancy, in the matter of names, seemed to have failed.  Dan was now six, a plump little caricature of a man in blue overalls, which, as they had descended to him from Richards in the nature of an heirloom, reached high under his armpits and shortened the function of his suspenders to the vanishing point.

Eudora was now sixteen, and the woman-famine in all the land had gifted her with a surprising precocity.  Eudora knew her value and meant to make the most of it.  Unlike her mother in the old Black Hill days, she expected more than a “home of her own.”  To-night four suitors sat at table with Eudora, and she might have had forty had she desired it.  Any one of the four would have cheerfully murdered the