like a laugh. The grateful little burro was licking his hands.

57

“Why, Jinny!” he cried, sitting up. “Well, well, Jinny! Well, I’ll be jiggered!”

He slipped an arm over the rough little neck and the two watched the fire till dawn.

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CHAPTER V

The burro got well and throve. Gard devoted the period of her convalescence to teaching her the essential arts of the higher companionship. Her first lesson in burden-bearing was to bring ocotilla-stalks from the valley. With these she saw the oat patch fenced in from her own depredations, and lifted up her voice in remonstrance when she found herself barred out of that delectable ground. Gard explained the matter to her.

“This is a world, Jinny,” he said, “where we have to wait till the things we want are ripe. I’m waiting myself, Jinny, for my time to come. It will, some day, ah—some day!”

He was thinking of Westcott, but the curses that he was wont to call upon his enemy’s head died upon his lips. It was not that his hatred had died, but there seemed, somehow, to be other things than hate, even in his tiny world.

He hunted up a palo-verde thorn with which to mark his day, Jinny keeping him company. He 59still kept the record on the willow branch, removing the thorns and putting them away whenever he had ten. There were that number this morning.

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Spring was well advanced, now. The air was soft, and sweet with the scent of manzanita in the chaparral. For days past hundreds of wild bees had been hovering about the pool, and the underbrush. Gard had a line on them, and thought he knew where the bee-tree was located. His oats were nearly ready for harvest; a century plant in the valley was sending up a long bloom-stalk, and the sound of water leaping down the cañon mingled with the voices of birds in the chaparral.

As Gard put back his shell, with its contents of thorns and turned toward the pool sudden recognition came to him of a heretofore unsuspected truth.

“By the great 

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