“You’re as fit as I am,” he said quietly, in the soft, rumbling, reassuring bass that seemed kin to rivers and winds. “What d’you say to a clean break an’ a new start together?” He lingered on the last word wistfully. “I’ve been pretty lonesome, you know, a-knockin’ round from one prospect hole to another an’ livin’ like a pack rat.” She got up and came close and looked at him intently. The yellow piano scarf that covered her befrizzled red head like an incongruous cowl and clashed crudely with her red dress; her silver slippers, her spangles, the bunch of cotton roses at her waist, her rouged cheeks and scarlet lips and half-bared heaving breasts contrasted strangely with her honest eyes. “Do you want it for yourself, Jim?” “For myself--more’n anything.” “You’re not lying to me?” “So help me God.” He had expected her arms about his neck, but she gave him her hand like a man. “I’ll never let you down,” she said shortly. “Let’s go.” They went out under a sky of faint, clean blue, where a frosty moon queened it amidst a scattering of small pale stars, and found a man who was driving out of town in a wagon and went with him. By one means and another they made their way into the Gray Dome country and Jim built a cabin there. * * * * * Fifteen years later, Rosie Briggs stood in the door of it and watched Jim climb down the steep trail toward his latest prospect hole. There was a fresh sprinkling of snow, so light and dry that the faint wind started bits of it to rolling like feathers. Beneath it the smells of spruce and pine and juniper and little silver mountain sage were dormant. The cold, clean, thin air of early morning was stripped for the odor of Long Jim’s pipe, and it drifted up, rank and acrid. Rosie liked it, at that hour and in that place. She watched him until he waved his hand far below like a tiny marionette before he took the fork of the trail under the big Engelmann spruce and disappeared for the day. She waved back and turned to her tubs. Every week she washed the clothes of four families in Gray Dome, the mining town down the main road just around the next bend. It was hard work, but she didn’t mind it much. She didn’t think about it. Besides, she only worked four days a week. The other three she rested--sewed a little, crocheted a little, knit a little--sweaters and stockings and mittens for Jim and herself, and kept her diminutive house as clean as a chemist’s scales; or sat quietly out in front in summer or inside by the stove in winter and let the long waves of peace wash deeper and deeper in. Peace is good after a life like Rosie’s. She lay in it thankfully, as in a bath, and soaked old stains away.