It was afternoon when Purvy reached the hospital, and, at nightfall of the same day, there arrived at his store's entrance, on stumbling, hard -ridden mules, several men, followed by two tawny hounds whose long ears flapped over their lean jaws, and whose eyes were listless and tired, but whose black muzzles wrinkled and sniffed with that sensitive instinct which follows the man-scent. The ex-sheriff's family were instituting proceedings independent of the Chief's orders. The next morning, this party plunged into the mountain tangle, and beat the cover with the bloodhounds in leash. The two gentle-faced dogs picked their way between the flowering rhododendrons, the glistening laurels, the feathery pine sprouts and the moss-covered rocks. They went gingerly and alertly on ungainly, cushioned feet. Just as their masters were despairing, they came to a place directly over the store, where a branch had been bent back and hitched to clear the outlook, and where a boot heel had crushed the moss. There one of them raised his nose high into the air, opened his mouth, and let out a long, deep-chested bay of discovery. CHAPTER VI George Lescott had known hospitality of many brands and degrees. He had been the lionized celebrity in places of fashion. He had been the guest of equally famous brother artists in the cities of two hemispheres, and, since sincere painting had been his pole-star, he had gone where his art's wanderlust beckoned. His most famous canvas, perhaps, was his "Prayer Toward Mecca," which hangs in the Metropolitan. It shows, with a power that holds the observer in a compelling grip, the wonderful colors of a sunset across the desert. One seems to feel the renewed life that comes to the caravan with the welcome of the oasis. One seems to hear the grunting of the kneeling camels and the stirring of the date palms. The Bedouins have spread their prayer-rugs, and behind them burns the west. Lescott caught in that, as he had caught in his mountain sketches, the broad spirit of the thing. To paint that canvas, he had endured days of racking camel -travel and burning heat and thirst. He had followed the lure of transitory beauty to remote sections of the world. The present trip was only one of many like it, which had brought him into touch with varying peoples and distinctive types of life. He told himself that never had he found men at once so crude and so courteous as these hosts, who, facing personal perils, had still time and willingness to regard his comfort. They could not speak grammatically; they could hardly offer him the necessities of life, yet they gave all they had, with a touch of courtliness. In a fabric soiled and threadbare, one may sometimes trace the tarnished design that erstwhile ran in gold through a rich pattern. Lescott could not but think of some fine old growth gone to seed and decay, but still bearing at its crest a single beautiful blossom while it held in its veins a poison.