the homely articles of his daily use came to be a sort of commentary, seen by no eyes save his own, of his moods, and the longing for their expression.

He wrote thus upon other things as well. Lacking 48paper or implements charcoal and sharpened sticks became his tools; the rocks and trees; his broad earthen hearth; the plastic clay; even the yellow sand of the desert, his tablets, and little by little all these became eloquent of his lonely thoughts.

48

He put them down upon whatever served, for the mere comfort of seeing them; scraps of lessons conned in the old brick school-house; sums; fragments of the multiplication table; roughly drawn maps and sketches of boyhood scenes; lines from half-remembered poems and hymns; familiar Bible verses that his mother had taught him. They came back to him bit by bit, in his solitude. And one and all his soul found them camps by the way on its long journey up from despair.

From one of his excursions into the valley he brought home the empty shell of a desert turtle. This he split, and fashioned the upper half into a bowl to contain the palo-verde thorns of his record. They were already crowding the willow branch, and but for them he could scarcely have realized the passage of days.

There were a hundred and forty-seven thorns on the day that he transferred them to the new receptacle. Gard could not be sure that he had one for each day in the desert, but he knew that each one there actually represented a day.

49“I’ve had every one of that lot,” he told himself, talking aloud, as a solitary man gets to do. “Had ’em in the open, in spite of the law sharks.”

49

He still lived from day to day, however, despite his vows, and his threats of vengeance. He had known, when he sought Ashley Westcott, begging the price of a ticket east, that he was a doomed man.

“It’s all borrowed time,” he muttered, shaking the turtle-shell.

His face darkened.

“’T ain’t either,” he cried. “It’s time won back. They stole it from me down there. They robbed me of three years, the filthy thieves! What’s a hundred and forty-seven days against that?”

He remembered an occasion when to get away from the wood-pile that was his special charge, in his boyhood, he had heaped a scant 

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