“You mean,” said Eleanor, slowing the grays to a reluctant walk down grade, while the driver clamped the front wheel brake with his foot, “you mean because there was no crowbar, or anything to stop the hoist flying backwards and killing the men under the load of rock, you mean because there was no crowbar, you jumped into the wheel, yourself?”

“Sure,” said the man astonished at her question; and because Eleanor was a true Westerner and didn’t mind the tobacco squids and the damn’t’s in the least (where they belonged) she gave that one-armed driver a look that would have made any man proud:  only the one-armed driver didn’t see it.

“They took up a purse an’ wanted to give me a perscription—­damn’t, but I told ’em t’ turn it in t’ the Horspital.  Any man w’d a’ done same for a yellow dog.  What d’y’ want t’ give a fellow a medal for not bein’ stinkin’ coward?”

Eleanor laughed.  It was a happy silver laugh like the light on the Ridge cataracts.  Somehow, the one-armed stage driver with his unconscious heroism and equally unconscious profanity gave her a sense of the big wholesome unconscious outdoor world, just as the lavender silks and undertaker’s plumes and tallow smile inside smothered her with a drugged sense of heavy unwholesome musk.  The one-time miner did not know it; but what Eleanor was saying to herself was—­“So much bad in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us.”  Then she thought of the Senator and his genial smile and his voice soft as a woman’s, and his love of flowers.  He, too, must have his vein of heroism, if one could only find it.  She thought and thought as the tandem grays arched their necks at the sound of the tramway bells in the nearing city; thought and thought, vague wordless thoughts full of hope; vague womanish thoughts that women have thought since time began of finding that magic vein of heroism in the Man that is to transmute slag into gold, hog into human, and greed into generosity, and lust into love; thought and thought the gentle womanish hoping-against-hope thoughts that women have worn out their lives thinking and enslaved their bodies and pawned their souls.  If only one could find that vein in the Senator, the battle would be won without the letting of blood and smashing of reputations; as if peace without victory were ever worth while since time began.

Then, the stage was rattling over the pressed brick pavement of Smelter City; and the tandem grays were pretending to shy at the electric cars; and the one-armed driver came near expectorating his entire internal anatomy out of sheer joy and pride in the arched necks and the frail driver with the black curls under the broad brimmed English sailor hat handling the reins.  She had pulled off her heavy buckskin gloves; and she never knew how absurdly like matches her fingers looked to the big one-time miner beside her; nor how the exhilaration brought the tints of the painters’ flower to her cheeks and the light of the Alpine pools