“Be a lawyer’s clerk and rot here—­in some such place as this?” he cried in contempt.  “What! if the old man set me up in a home to-day, I would kick it down about my ears—­or else die there before the third day was out.”

“And where else is it that you hope to die?”

“In the bush somewhere; in the sea; on a blamed mountain-top for choice.  At home?  Yes! the world’s my home; but I expect I’ll die in a hospital some day.  What of that?  Any place is good enough, as long as I’ve lived; and I’ve been everything you can think of almost but a tailor or a soldier.  I’ve been a boundary rider; I’ve sheared sheep; and humped my swag; and harpooned a whale.  I’ve rigged ships, and prospected for gold, and skinned dead bullocks,—­and turned my back on more money than the old man would have scraped in his whole life.  Ha, ha!”

He overwhelmed her.  She pulled herself together and managed to utter, “Time to rest now.”

He straightened himself up, away from the wall, and in a severe voice said, “Time to go.”

But he did not move.  He leaned back again, and hummed thoughtfully a bar or two of an outlandish tune.

She felt as if she were about to cry.  “That’s another of your cruel songs,” she said.

“Learned it in Mexico—­in Sonora.”  He talked easily.  “It is the song of the Gambucinos.  You don’t know?  The song of restless men.  Nothing could hold them in one place—­not even a woman.  You used to meet one of them now and again, in the old days, on the edge of the gold country, away north there beyond the Rio Gila.  I’ve seen it.  A prospecting engineer in Mazatlan took me along with him to help look after the waggons.  A sailor’s a handy chap to have about you anyhow.  It’s all a desert:  cracks in the earth that you can’t see the bottom of; and mountains—­sheer rocks standing up high like walls and church spires, only a hundred times bigger.  The valleys are full of boulders and black stones.  There’s not a blade of grass to see; and the sun sets more red over that country than I have seen it anywhere—­blood-red and angry.  It is fine.”

“You do not want to go back there again?” she stammered out.

He laughed a little.  “No.  That’s the blamed gold country.  It gave me the shivers sometimes to look at it—­and we were a big lot of men together, mind; but these Gambucinos wandered alone.  They knew that country before anybody had ever heard of it.  They had a sort of gift for prospecting, and the fever of it was on them too; and they did not seem to want the gold very much.  They would find some rich spot, and then turn their backs on it; pick up perhaps a little—­enough for a spree—­and then be off again, looking for more.  They never stopped long where there were houses; they had no wife, no chick, no home, never a chum.  You couldn’t be friends with a Gambucino; they were too restless—­here to-day, and gone, God knows where, to-morrow.  They told no one of their finds, and there has never