"You can't think of any place where you want to give our child a home. Well, I can! She's going to have one, whether it's ever lived in or not. It's going to be at Parowan, on the spot where her daddy lived when he found the gold that made her possible. I wouldn't do it for you, against your wish. You like this froth, and I want you to have what you like best. But _Mary's going to have a home_." He did not raise his voice; indeed he almost whispered the words. Yet they struck Doris like a lash. Never before had Bill opposed her wishes, or declared that he would do a thing which Doris had not first decided to do. "You can't take her away from me," she said breathlessly. "I don't intend to take her away from you." Bill's tone was flat, emotionless, because he dared not slip the leash from his emotions. "Some day, when she's old enough to know what she's missing, the kid may want to come--home. There's going to be one for her. It's her right." "In that case," said Doris coldly, "why not build it in civilization, at least, where she can use it?" "I'm hoping," said Bill, very quietly, "that when my girl grows up she'll have some sense." CHAPTER SIXTEEN SO BILL GOES BACK Parowan sprawled over the slope of the mountain without much regularity in her streets and with no dignity whatever. Bill had read faithfully each copy of the _Parowan Record_ as soon as he received it, and he had calmly believed that he was keeping in close touch with the town. For instance, he had studied the picture of the new, two-story concrete schoolhouse with its graded yard and young shade trees and the cement walks and all. He had told Doris proudly that the building would reflect credit on any California town,--which was true, so far as the picture went. Just at first he did not recognize the schoolhouse as he came up the street from the pagoda-roofed, cement depot with its arches that purported to be Moorish or Mission, no one seemed to know which. The depot had looked cunning in the picture, Doris had thought, and Bill had enthusiastically agreed with her. It did not look so cunning in reality; merely pretentious in a cheap way that irritated him. When he failed to recognize the schoolhouse, a cracker-box edifice of ugly cement blocks surrounded by raw, unpainted shacks, Bill was shocked. He had mistaken it for the jail until he observed the absence of bars at the windows, and the trampled ground in front. He strode up the board walk--hastily laid, of cheap lumber and already showing wide cracks and broken sections where knot holes had weakened the wood and much trampling had done the rest. The Parowan Security and Trust Savings Bank stared at him from the next corner. This building he recognized the moment he saw it, and with reason. Parowan Consolidated occupied the entire front of the second story, and the building was printed in miniature upon the Company's letterheads, with the sign showing distinctly across the upper windows.