Night had settled when Dave left the office. The champagne sky had deepened into a strip of copper; the silhouettes were soft and black; street lights studded the bank of foothills to the west like setting stars. Darkness had tucked the distance that lay between the city and the Rockies in the lap of night, and the great ridge stood up close and clear, prodding its jagged edge into the copper pennant of the day's farewell. A soft wind blew from the south-west; June was in the air. June, too, was in Dave's heart as he walked the few blocks to his bachelor quarters. What of the drab injustice of business? Let him forget that; now it was night . . . and she had called him Dave. He climbed the steps to his room with energy and life tingling in his limbs; then he stood in his window and for a long while watched the traffic in the street below. That is, his eyes were directed to the traffic, but what he saw was a merry girl in a brown sweater, showering her glances of admiration upon a raw youth of the ranges whose highest ambition was to break six bottles with six bullets. And she had even held that to be a worthy ambition. She had said, "Perhaps the day is coming when our country will want men who can shoot and ride more than it will want lawyers or professors." He smiled at the recollection of her words. The romantic days of youth! like the mirage of sunrise they fade and are lost in the morning of life. . . . And their young philosophies! The night they found the dead calf; he had propounded the wisdom that it is always the innocent thing that suffers; that the crittur that can't run gets caught. Well, that seemed to hold good. Wasn't that what Conward had argued to him this very afternoon, and he had found no answer? He wondered what Reenie's experience had been. . . . And then the compact under the spruce trees. . . . "Come to me--like that--" she had said, "and then--then we'll know." And to-day she had called him Dave.