Scot borrowed a horse and rode out at once to the camp. Dodson had temporarily disappeared, frightened at the horrible thing he had done. The accident had taken place twelve hours earlier, and the tears of the mother were for the moment spent. She was dry-eyed and wan, in that deep despair which is beyond expression, almost beyond feeling. With a tenderness that set flowing in Scot a wild river of sympathy she drew back the cotton handkerchief that covered the baby face. For an instant his heart beat fast. Except for the pallor Virginia looked so natural she might have been asleep. He half-expected to see the lashes tremble and the blue eyes open. McClintock took on himself all the arrangements for the funeral. He dragged Dodson out of a grog shop, soused his head in a horse trough, and when he became sober saw that he remained so until the burial. The day after the interment Scot called on Mrs. Dodson. Her husband was not at the camp. Presently he came plump to the purpose of his visit. He was never a spendthrift of words. “What are you and Vicky going to do?” he asked. “I don’t know,” the bereaved mother answered listlessly. “Vicky ought not to stay here. It’s not right. But I’ve no place to send her.” “Mr. Stewart and I have discussed that. We’ve talked with some of the business men of the town. If you’re willing we’ll divert the baby’s fund to Vicky and send her down to Miss Clapp’s school at Carson. She’ll be well taken care of there. Miss Clapp is a fine woman. Does it seem to you a good idea?” Tears brimmed to her eyes. “You’re good. I can never repay you. I—I’ll be awf’lly lonesome without her, but if you think it best——” “It’s not what I think but what you think,” he said gently. “Could I see her sometimes?” “As often as you like. She would spend her vacations with you, of course.” The lump in her throat began to ache again. Her gaze travelled beyond the cañon below, across the Twenty-Six Mile Desert and the Forty Mile Desert to the Pine Nut Mountains. There it rested for a long time. She drew in her breath with a deep ragged sigh that was almost a sob. “She’d better go. This is no life for a little girl. I want her to have a chance to—to—be happy and live with good people.” “Is it any life for a young woman to lead?” he asked, his blue eyes fixed steadily on her. A faint flag of colour fluttered in her wan cheeks. He had never before broken down the outposts of her reserve. She felt her pulse beating. His impersonal friendliness had suddenly become a close and vital thing. “Why speak of that? I made my choice years ago,” she said. She thought, but did not say, that the hard and bitter facts of existence cannot be talked away. They are as immovable as the Sierras. “We have to make fresh choices every day,” he told her. “Do you think your life can go on now the same as it did before? It can’t. There’s a gulf between you and—him. Have you any hope that it can be bridged?” “No.”