From one of the rooms that opened to the world like a stage to the audience, Mrs. Rodney kept her evening vigil. The last faint amethystine haze on the mountains was deepening. They towered about the valley where the house lay, with a challenging immensity, mocking the pitiful grasp of these pygmies on the thousand hills. The snow on the taller of the peaks still held the high lights. But all the valleys and the spaces between the mountains were wrapped in sombre shadows; the crazy house invading the great company of mountains, penetrating brazenly to the very threshold of their silent councils, seemed but a pitiful ant-hill at the mercy of some possible giant tread. The ill-adjusted family, disputing every inch of ground with the wilderness, became invested with a dignity quite out of keeping with its achievements. Their very weaknesses and vanities, old Sally still clinging to her sun-bonnet and her limp rose-colored skirts, an eternal requiem for the dead and gone complexion, lost the picturesqueness of the pioneer and ranked as universal qualities, admissible in the austerest setting. Perhaps in some far distant council of the Daughters of the Pioneers a prospective member of the house of Rodney would unctuously announce: “My great-great-grandmother was a Miss Tumlin of Tennessee; great-great-grandfather’s first wife had been a Sioux squaw. Isn’t it interesting and romantic?” Eudora now came to her mother with great news. Hawks had taken the first opportunity of being alone with her to tell her of Jim’s release from jail and of his abortive encounter with Simpson in the eating-house. He had not deferred the telling from any feeling of reticence regarding the disclosure of family affairs before strangers. News travels in the desert by some unknown agency. Twenty-four hours after a thing happened it would be safe to assume that every cow and sheep outfit in a radius of three hundred miles would be discussing it over their camp-fires; and this long before there was an inch of telegraph wire or a railroad tire in the country. Hawks had merely reserved the news for Eudora’s private ear because he hoped thus to gain an advantage over his three rivals. “Ai-yi!” said old Sally, sharply, and the chair came to an abrupt stand-still. “In the name o’ Heaven, how kem they to let him out?” Mrs. Rodney’s knowledge of the law was of the vaguest; and if incarceration would keep a prisoner out of more grievous trouble, she could not understand giving him his freedom. To her the case was analogous to releasing a child from the duress of a corner and turning him loose to play with matches. “How kem they to let him out?” she repeated, the still rocking-chair conveying the impersonal dignity of the pulpit or the justice-seat. “I ’ain’t hearn tell of so pearty a couple as the jail an’ Jim in years.”