like a beast of the wild.  But only for an instant do I ever catch this fleeting state.  Next I am Glenn Kilbourne of West Fork, doomed and haunted by memories of the past.  The great looming walls then become no longer blank.  They are vast pages of the history of my life, with its past and present, and, alas! its future.  Everything time does is written on the stones.  And my stream seems to murmur the sad and ceaseless flow of human life, with its music and its misery.

Then, descending from the sublime to the humdrum and necessary, I heave a sigh, and pull myself together, and go in to make biscuits and fry ham.  But I should not forget to tell you that before I do go in, very often my looming, wonderful walls and crags weave in strange shadowy characters the beautiful and unforgettable face of Carley Burch!

I append what little news Oak Creek affords.

That blamed old bald eagle stole another of my pigs.

I am doing so well with my hog-raising that Hutter wants to come in with me, giving me an interest in his sheep.

It is rumored some one has bought the Deep Lake section I wanted for a ranch.  I don’t know who.  Hutter was rather noncommittal.

Charley, the herder, had one of his queer spells the other day, and swore to me he had a letter from you.  He told the blamed lie with a sincere and placid eye, and even a smile of pride.  Queer guy, that Charley!

Flo and Lee Stanton had another quarrel—­the worst yet, Lee tells me.  Flo asked a girl friend out from Flag and threw her in Lee’s way, so to speak, and when Lee retaliated by making love to the girl Flo got mad.  Funny creatures, you girls!  Flo rode with me from High Falls to West Fork, and never showed the slightest sign of trouble.  In fact she was delightfully gay.  She rode Calico, and beat me bad in a race.

Adios, Carley.  Won’t you write me?

Glenn.

No sooner had Carley read the letter through to the end than she began it all over again, and on this second perusal she lingered over passages—­only to reread them.  That suggestion of her face sculptured by shadows on the canyon walls seemed to thrill her very soul.

She leaped up from the reading to cry out something that was unutterable.  All the intervening weeks of shame and anguish and fury and strife and pathos, and the endless striving to forget, were as if by the magic of a letter made nothing but vain oblations.

“He loves me still!” she whispered, and pressed her breast with clenching hands, and laughed in wild exultance, and paced her room like a caged lioness.  It was as if she had just awakened to the assurance she was beloved.  That was the shibboleth—­the cry by which she sounded the closed depths of her love and called to the stricken life of a woman’s insatiate vanity.

Then she snatched up the letter, to scan it again, and, suddenly grasping the import of Glenn’s request, she hurried to the telephone to find the number of the hospital in Bedford Park.  A nurse informed her that visitors were received at certain hours and that any attention to disabled soldiers was most welcome.