"It's most of eight miles round by the canyon foot, where one can get across by the big redwood log, but I guess they'd have taken the trail if Brooke hadn't given them a lead," he said. "It's not easy to understand any one, but that's a curious kind of man." "Is Mr. Brooke more peculiar than the rest of you?" asked Barbara. Devine seemed to smile, though she could not see him very well. "Well," he said, drily, "that's rather more than I know, but I have a notion that his difficulty is he isn't quite sure what he would be at. Now, the man who does one thing at one time, and all with the same purpose, is the one who generally gets there first." "And Brooke does not do that?" "It kind of seems to me he is being pulled hard two ways at once just now," said Devine, with a curious little laugh. Barbara asked no more questions, and said very little to her sister as they walked home through the pines. She could not blot out the picture which, for a few intense minutes, she had gazed upon, though it had been exasperatingly blurred, and, she felt, considering what it stood for, ineffective in itself--a dim, half-seen figure, dwarfed to insignificance, swinging across a background of filmy mist. There had been nothing at that distance to suggest the intensity of the effort which was the expression of an unyielding will, but she had, by some subtle sympathy, grasped it all--the daring that recognized the peril and disregarded it, and the thrill of the triumph, the wholesome satisfaction born of the struggle with the primitive forces of the universe which man was meant to wage. This, it seemed to her, was a nobler one than the strife of the cities, where wealth was less often created than torn or fleeced from one's fellows; for needy humanity flowed in to build her homes and prosper by sturdy toil at every fresh rolling back of the gates of the wilderness. The miner and the axeman led the way; but the big plough oxen and plodding packhorse train followed hard along the trails they made. Behind, in long procession, jaded with many sorrows, came the outcasts from crowded Eastern lands, but there was room, and to spare, for all of them in the new Canaan.