“We talked it over, she and I. Then I jumped the family doctor and consulted an up-to-date expert.  He told me what I’d figured out for myself, and said Arizona was the place for us.  We pulled up stakes and went down—­no money, nothing.  I got a job sheep-herding, and left her in town—­a lung town.  It was filled to spilling with lungers.

“Of course, living and sleeping in the clean open, I started right in to mend.  I was away months at a time.  Every time I came back, she was worse.  She just couldn’t pick up.  But we were learning.  I jerked her out of that town, and she went to sheep-herding with me.  In four years, winter and summer, cold and heat, rain, snow, and frost, and all the rest, we never slept under a roof, and we were moving camp all the time.  You ought to have seen the change—­brown as berries, lean as Indians, tough as rawhide.  When we figured we were cured, we pulled out for San Francisco.  But we were too previous.  By the second month we both had slight hemorrhages.  We flew the coop back to Arizona and the sheep.  Two years more of it.  That fixed us.  Perfect cure.  All her family’s dead.  Wouldn’t listen to us.

“Then we jumped cities for keeps.  Knocked around on the Pacific coast and southern Oregon looked good to us.  We settled in the Rogue River Valley—­apples.  There’s a big future there, only nobody knows it.  I got my land—­on time, of course—­for forty an acre.  Ten years from now it’ll be worth five hundred.

“We’ve done some almighty hustling.  Takes money, and we hadn’t a cent to start with, you know—­had to build a house and barn, get horses and plows, and all the rest.  She taught school two years.  Then the boy came.  But we’ve got it.  You ought to see those trees we planted—­a hundred acres of them, almost mature now.  But it’s all been outgo, and the mortgage working overtime.  That’s why I’m here.  She’d ‘a’ come along only for the kids and the trees.  She’s handlin’ that end, and here I am, a gosh-danged expensive millionaire—­in prospect.”

He looked happily across the sun-dazzle on the ice to the green water of the lake along the farther shore, took a final look at the photograph, and murmured: 

“She’s some woman, that.  She’s hung on.  She just wouldn’t die, though she was pretty close to skin and bone all wrapped around a bit of fire when she went out with the sheep.  Oh, she’s thin now.  Never will be fat.  But it’s the prettiest thinness I ever saw, and when I get back, and the trees begin to bear, and the kids get going to school, she and I are going to do Paris.  I don’t think much of that burg, but she’s just hankered for it all her life.”

“Well, here’s the gold that will take you to Paris,” Smoke assured him.  “All we’ve got to do is to get our hands on it.”

Carson nodded with glistening eyes.  “Say—­that farm of ours is the prettiest piece of orchard land on all the Pacific coast.  Good climate, too.  Our lungs will never get touched again there.  Ex-lungers have to be almighty careful, you know.  If you’re thinking of settling, well, just take a peep in at our valley before you settle, that’s all.  And fishing!  Say!—­did you ever get a thirty-five-pound salmon on a six-ounce rod?  Some fight, bo’, some fight!”