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.

Carley motored out there to find the hospital merely a long one-story

frame structure, a barracks hastily thrown up for the care of invalided

men of the service. The chauffeur informed her that it had been used

for that purpose during the training period of the army, and later when

injured soldiers began to arrive from France.

A nurse admitted Carley into a small bare anteroom. Carley made known

her errand.

"I'm glad it's Rust you want to see," replied the nurse. "Some of these

boys are going to die. And some will be worse off if they live. But Rust

may get well if he'll only behave. You are a relative--or friend?"




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