“Jim,” said his father, before they went to bed, “remember you are the man of the family.” But young Jim was already nodding with sleep. Topeka and Judith were sleepy, too; they kissed their father and were glad to go to bed. The night began menacingly to close over the wilderness. Where the sun had hung above the mountain a moment before there glowed a great pool of red that dripped across the blackness in faint tricklings. The outlines of the foot-hills loomed huge, formless, uncouth. In the half-light it seemed a world struggling in the birth-throes. All day the dry, burning heat had quivered over the desert, like hot-air waves flickering over a bed of live coals, and now the very earth seemed to palpitate with the intensity of its fever. The bellowing of the thirst-maddened cattle had not stopped with the twilight that brought no dew to slake their parched throats. In the hills the coyotes wailed like lost souls. It was night bereft of benisons, day made frightful by darkness. All the heat of a cycle of desert summers seemed concentrated in that house in the valley where the man and his wife waited. Each sound of the desert night Alida translated into the trampling of horses’ feet; then, as the sound would die away, or prove to be but some night noise of the wilderness, the pallor would lose its pinch on her features, and she would stare into her husband’s face with eyes that did not see. Jim smoked his pipe and refilled it, smoked and filled again, but gave no sign of the object of his waiting. “Jim,” she said, when the clock had struck ten, then eleven, “I am going to fasten up the house.” “Do you hear them?” he asked, without emotion, but as one who deferred to the finer senses of women. She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. He looked at the door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till it barely held together, and there was no measure to the tenderness he put into: “Oh, you poor little fool, do you think you could keep them out by fastening that?” “Jim, I must,” and her voice broke. “They may think you are not here, that it’s only me and the children, and that’s why the house is fastened.” She got up and began to move about as though her thoughts scourged her to action, even if futile. He shook the ashes from his pipe. “Do anything you blame please,” he said, more by way of humoring her than from faith in her stratagem. He felt strong enough to face his destiny, to meet it in a way worthy of his mother’s people.