There was a strife¹ ‘twixt man and maid —
Oh that was at the birth o’ time!
But what befell ‘twixt man and maid,
Oh that’s beyond the grip o’ rhyme.
’Twas: ‘Sweet, I must not bide² wi’ you,’
????And: ‘Love, I canna bide alone’;
For baith were young, and baith were true,
And baith were hard as the nether³ stone.

Auchinleck’s Ride.

Nicholas Tarvin sat in the moonlight on the unrailed bridge that crossed the irrigating⁴ ditch above Topaz, dangling⁵ his feet over the stream. A brown, sad-eyed little woman sat beside him, staring quietly at the moon. She was tanned with the tan of the girl who does not mind wind and rain and sun, and her eyes were sad with the settled melancholy⁶ of eyes that know big mountains, and seas of plain, and care, and life. The women of the West shade such eyes under their hands at sunset in their cabin-doors, scanning those hills or those grassless, treeless plains for the homecoming of their men. A hard life is always hardest for the woman.

Kate Sheriff had lived with her face to the West and with her smouldering eyes fixed⁷ upon the wilderness⁸ since she could walk. She had advanced into the wilderness with the railroad. Until she had gone away to school, she had never lived where the railroad ran both ways. She had often stayed long enough at the end of a section with her family to see the first glimmering⁹ streaks¹⁰ of the raw dawn of

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