never had much opportunity to judge about home, you know.”
She darted out a quick little hand and touched his sleeve. The raillery had faded from her face. “So you haven’t. Not very tactful of me, was it! Will you throw me into the corner with Mr. Sears and Mr. Roebuck, Ban? I’m sorry.”
“You needn’t be. One gets used to being an air-plant without roots.”
“Yet you wouldn’t have fitted out this shack,” she pointed out shrewdly, “unless you had the instincts of home.”
“That’s true enough. Fortunately it’s the kind of home I can take along when they transfer me.”
Io went to the door and looked afar on the radiant splendor of the desert, and, nearer, into the cool peace of the forest.
“But you can’t take all this,” she reminded him.
“No. I can’t take this.”
“Shall you miss it?”
A shadow fell upon his face. “I’d miss something—I don’t know what it is—that no other place has ever given me. Why do you talk as if I were going away from it? I’m not.”
“Oh, yes; you are,” she laughed softly. “It is so written. I’m a seeress.” She turned from the door and threw herself into a chair.
“What will take me?”
“Something inside you. Something unawakened. ‘Something lost beyond the ranges.’ You’ll know, and you’ll obey it.”
“Shall I ever come back, O seeress?”
At the question her eyes grew dreamy and distant. Her voice when she spoke sank to a low-pitched monotone.
“Yes, you’ll come back. Sometime. … So shall I … not for years … but—” She jumped to her feet. “What kind of rubbish am I talking?” she cried with forced merriment. “Is your tobacco drugged with hasheesh, Ban?”
He shook his head. “It’s the pull of the desert,” he murmured. “It’s caught you sooner than most. You’re more responsive, I suppose; more sens—Why, Butterfly! You’re shaking.”
“A Scotchman would say that I was ‘fey.’ Ban, do you think it means that I’m coming back here to die?” She laughed again. “If I were fated to die here, I expect that I missed my good chance in the smash-up. Fortunately I’m not superstitious.”
“There might be worse places,” said he slowly. “It is the place that would call me back if ever I got down and out.” He pointed through the window to the distant, glowing purity of the mountain peak. “One could tell one’s troubles to that tranquil old god.”
“Would he listen to mine, I wonder?”
“Try him before you go. You can leave them all here and I’ll watch over them for you to see that they don’t get loose and bother you.”
“Absolution! If it were only as easy as that! This is a haunted place. … Why should I be here at all? Why didn’t I go when I should? Why a thousand things?”
“Chance.”
“Is there any such thing? Why can’t I sleep at night yet, as I ought? Why do I still feel hunted? What’s happening to me, Ban? What’s getting ready to happen?”
“Nothing. That’s nerves.”
“Yes; I’ll try not to think of it. But at night—Ban, suppose I should come over in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, and call outside your window?”
“I’d come down, of course. But you’d have to be careful about rattlers,” answered the practical Ban.
“Your friend, Camilla, would intercept me, anyway. I don’t think she sleeps too well, herself. Do you know what she’s doing out here?”
“She came for her health.”
“That isn’t what I asked you, my dear. Do you know what she’s doing?”
“No. She never told me.”
“Shall I tell you?”
“No.”
“It’s interesting. Aren’t you curious?”
“If she wanted me to know, she’d tell me.”
“Indubitably correct, and quite praiseworthy,” mocked the girl. “Never mind; you know how to be staunch to your friends.”
“In this country a man who doesn’t is reckoned a yellow dog.”
“He is in any decent country. So take that with you when you go.”
“I’m not going,” he asserted with an obstinate set to his jaw.
“Wait and see,” she taunted. “So you won’t let me send you books?” she questioned after a pause.
“No.”
“No, I thank you,” she prompted.
“No, I thank you,” he amended. “I’m an uncouth sort of person, but I meant the ‘thank you.’ ”
“Of course you did. And uncouthness is the last thing in the world you could be accused of. That’s the wonder of it. … No; I don’t suppose it really is. It’s birth.”
“If it’s anything, it’s training. My father was a stickler for forms, in spite of being a sort of hobo.”
“Well, forms make the game, very largely. You won’t find them essentially different when you go out into the—I forgot again. That kind of prophecy annoys you, doesn’t it? There is one book I’m going to send you, though, which you can’t refuse. Nobody can refuse it. It isn’t done.”
“What is that?”
Her answer surprised him. “The Bible.”
“Are you religious? Of course, a butterfly should be, shouldn’t she? should believe in the release of the soul from its chrysalis—the butterfly’s immortality. Yet I wouldn’t have suspected you of a leaning in that direction.”
“Oh, religion!” Her tone set aside the subject as insusceptible of sufficient or satisfactory answer. “I go through the forms,” she added, a little disdainfully. “As to what I believe and do—which is what one’s own religion is—why, I assume that if the game is worth playing at all, there must be a Judge and Maker of the Rules. As far as I understand them, I follow them.”
“You have a sort of religious feeling for success, though, haven’t you?” he reminded her slyly.
“Not at all. Just human, common sense.”
“But your creed as you’ve just given it, the rules of the game and that; that’s precisely the Bible formula, I believe.”
“How do you know?” she caught him up. “You haven’t a Bible in the place, so far as I’ve noticed.”
“No; I haven’t.”
“You should have.”
“Probably. But I can’t, somehow, adjust myself to that advice as coming from you.”
“Because you don’t understand what I’m getting at. It isn’t religious advice.”
“Then what is it?”
“Literary, purely. You’re going to write, some day. Oh, don’t look doubtful! That’s foreordained. It doesn’t take a seeress to prophesy that. And the Bible is the one book that a writer ought to read every day. Isaiah, Psalms, Proverbs. Pretty much all the Old Testament, and a lot of the New. It has grown into our intellectual life until its phrases and catchwords