“Norman Ware,” she said, slowly, “I didn’t give you credit for being a genius, but you are as great in one way as Emerson.  You’ve hit on one of his ideas all by yourself.  He said, ’If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbours, though he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten track to his door,’ If you want company as bad as all that, you shall have a beaten track to your door.  We’ll build something better than the neighbours ever dreamed of, and it won’t be a mouse-trap, either.  There’s enough old lumber here to build half a dozen cages, and if you’ll pay for the wire netting out of your share of the garden profits, I’ll help you put up a menagerie that P.T.  Barnum himself wouldn’t have been ashamed of.”

Norman’s answer was a whoop and a double somersault, and he came up on his feet again remarking that she was worth all the fellows in Lone-Rock put together.

“According to what you’ve just said that isn’t very much of a compliment,” laughed Mary.  Still it gratified her so much that presently she was planning a side-show for the menagerie.  There were all her mounted specimens of trap-door spiders and butterflies and desert insects.  She would loan the collection occasionally, and her stuffed Gila monster and the arrow-heads and rattle-snake skins that she and Holland had collected.

As she hammered and sawed she told Norman the story of The Jester’s Sword.  “That is one reason I am taking so much interest in this,” she explained.  “I’ve been thinking for days about what the old friar said, that men need laughter sometimes more than food, and if we haven’t any cheer to spare ourselves, we may go a-gathering it from door to door as he did crusts and carry it to those who need.  That is why I have gone on long walks and made so many calls on the few people that are here, so that I’d have something amusing to tell Jack when I came home.  But he has seemed to find my ‘crusts of cheer’ mighty dry food, and he didn’t take half the interest in them that he did in talking to Lupe to-day.”

“Lupe will make a beaten track to his door fast enough,” prophesied Norman, “when he finds we want to buy more animals.  I’ll send word to-night to him to set his traps for those coyotes and foxes.”

That evening after supper, Jack wheeled himself out on to the porch.  It was the first time he had attempted it, and when he had made the trip successfully, he sat a few minutes watching the stars.  They seemed unusually brilliant, and he amused himself in tracing the constellations with which he was familiar.  It had been a family study at the Wigwam, and they had learned many things from the little Atlas of the Heavens which Mrs. Ware kept among her other old school books.  Presently he called Mary.

“I’ve located Taurus.  See, just over that tree top.  And there is its red eye, Aldebaran.  I wanted you to see what a jolly twinkle he has to-night.”