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 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

General Editors
   . 
 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece
and Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to
authenticate the present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has
been mapped over the centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal
of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest
scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and
abuse, of the classical past.
Topologies of the
Classical World
in Children’s Fiction
Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals

Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey

1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey 2019
© Excerpts from Bull by David Elliott. Copyright © 2017 by David Elliott.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved.
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941460
ISBN 978–0–19–884603–1
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Acknowledgments

This book has benefited from the assistance and helpful counsel of many
people over many years. Amanda Covington was a wonderful research
assistant. For advice on work now forming parts of chapters, we are
grateful to Karen Coats, Owen Hodkinson, Helen Lovatt, Sheila (Bridget)
Murnaghan, Judith Plotz, and Deborah Roberts. The section on Rick
Riordan in Chapter 5 comes from our longer article “ ‘A God Buys Us
Cheeseburgers’: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series and America’s Cul-
ture Wars,” which first appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn 39.3
(September 2015), and we thank the L&U editorial staff for their help
in strengthening this publication. Mara Bernstein at Indiana University
Libraries kindly sourced two illustrations, and multiple staff members at
Texas A&M University’s Evans Library supplied technological assistance
and research texts through TAMU’s Get It for Me service. Financial help
from the TAMU Department of English, the College of Liberal Arts, and
the Claudius M. Easley, Jr., Faculty Fellowship facilitated travel to con-
ferences where we could try out early versions of many of the textual
readings contained in this study and learn from the expertise of fellow
conferees too many to name. The “Asterisks and Obelisks: Greece and
Rome in Children’s Literature” conference held in Lampeter, Wales, in
2009 was particularly helpful as a forum for exchanging ideas about
classically inflected works for young readers.
It has been a pleasure to work with editors Charlotte Loveridge and
Georgina Leighton at OUP, and we are deeply grateful for the feedback
received from Lorna Hardwick and James I. Porter, the editors of the
Classical Presences series, and from our superb outside readers.
Copyright Acknowledgments

Excerpts from “Interview with Susan Cooper” by Raymond

H. Thompson. Copyright © 1989 by Raymond H. Thompson. Repro-
duced by permission.
Excerpt from one of the illustrated appendices to Julius Zebra: Bundle
with the Britons! by Gary Northfield. Copyright © 2016 Gary Northfield.
Reproduced by permission of Walker Books Ltd, London SE11 5HJ,
<www.walker.co.uk>.
Excerpts from “Dedicated to the Demigods: Our Lit Camps” by
Topher Bradfield. Copyright © 2013 by the Los Angeles Review of
Books. Reproduced by permission.
Section 5.5 comes from our longer article “ ‘A God Buys Us Cheese-
burgers’: Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson Series and America’s Culture
Wars.” Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press. This
article first appeared in The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 39, Issue 3,
September 2015, pages 235–53.
Excerpts from “John Christopher” by John R. Pfeiffer, from British
Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers, 1918–1960, ed. Darren Harris-Fain.
Dictionary of Literary Biography. Copyright © 2002 Gale, a part of Cengage,
Inc. Reproduced by permission. <www.cengage.com/permissions>
Excerpts from “Megan Whalen Turner: Testing the Conventional” by
Jennifer M. Brown. Copyright © 2010 ShelfAwareness. Reproduced by
permission.
List of Illustrations

2.1 Claude Allin Shepperson, illustration for The Strand’s

serialization of Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill,
June 1906 26
3.1 Mary Whitson Haring, frontispiece to Caroline Dale
Snedeker’s Theras and His Town, 1924 69
4.1 H. R. Millar, illustration for The Strand’s serialization of
E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, November 1905 103
4.2 Detail from Egbert L. Viele’s Topographical Map of
the City of New York: Showing Original Water Courses
and Made Land, 1865 137
5.1 First page of “Roman Numerals,” an appendix to Gary
Northfield’s Julius Zebra: Bundle with the Britons!, 2016 162
6.1 “Prosobranchia,” from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen
der Natur, 1904 188
 1
Introduction

Most researchers working at the intersection of cognitive theory and

literary studies accept as a fundamental premise that literature is not
just a product but also a cause of human cognition. They contend that
literature helps to shape readers’ thought not only by providing infor-
mation, ideas, and insight but also by influencing the ways in which
readers process input from the nonliterary world; as Ellen Spolsky puts it,
“Narratives seem to colonize human brains” (37). Groundbreaking work
by scholars including George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Metaphors We
Live By, 1980, and Philosophy in the Flesh, 1999), Mark Turner (The
Literary Mind, 1996), Peter Stockwell (Cognitive Poetics, 2002), Zoltán
Kövecses (Language, Mind, and Culture, 2006), and others has directed
attention toward literature’s power to provide conceptual metaphors that
shape readers’ understanding of the world, cognitive frames or schemas
for organizing experience, and scripts or internalized models for how to
behave in particular situations. While the cognitive study of literature has
many mansions,¹ it is this inquiry into metaphor and its offshoots that
concerns us here. Not surprisingly, children’s literature, directed primarily
toward an audience that has not yet reached intellectual or emotional
maturity and thus is still working to identify the principles by which
later decisions may be governed, has proven an especially rich field for
cognitively based inquiry, and scholars such as Maria Nikolajeva, Marek
Oziewicz, John Stephens, and Roberta Seelinger Trites (to name only a
few) have produced important recent work in this area.

¹ Consider, for instance, cognitive rhetoric, which takes a linguistic and behavioral
approach to the neuroscience of communication; cognitive narratology, which examines
how we process story in both producing and consuming it; and cognitive aesthetics of
reception, which considers the visual dimension that we create when we hear a story. Our
concern is primarily with cognitive poetics, which Margaret Freeman defines as a “tool
for . . . illuminating the structure and content of literary texts” (“Poetry” 254).

Topologies of the Classical World in Children’s Fiction: Palimpsests, Maps, and Fractals.
Claudia Nelson and Anne Morey, Oxford University Press (2020). © Claudia Nelson and
Anne Morey. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198846031.001.0001
     

In the book that follows, we seek to add to this dynamic conversation

by examining a particular subset of youth literature, namely some of the
many books written for older children and adolescents since the dawn of
the twentieth century that draw upon the classical world by making use
of ancient Greek and Roman settings, figures, and/or narratives. This
branch of children’s literature is a sufficiently widespread and important
phenomenon to have engendered its own dynamic conversation among
critics who do not take a cognitive approach, as valuable recent collec-
tions edited by Lisa Maurice (The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome
in Children’s Literature, 2015), Katarzyna Marciniak (Our Mythical
Childhood . . . , 2016), Markus Janka and Michael Stierstorfer (Verjüngte
Antike: Griechisch-römische Mythologie und Historie in zeitgenössischen
Kinder- und Jugendmedien, 2017), and Owen Hodkinson and Helen
Lovatt (Classical Reception and Children’s Literature: Greece, Rome and
Childhood Transformation, 2018), as well as Sheila Murnaghan and
Deborah H. Roberts’s monograph Childhood and the Classics: Britain
and America, 1850–1965 (2018) demonstrate.²
Yet to write about the past, or to incorporate intertextual references to
the past in a work set in the present or future, is to participate in what
geographer Barney Warf refers to as the fashioning of “time and space
[as] socially created, plastic, mutable institutions that profoundly shape,
just as they are shaped by, individual perceptions and social relations”
(2). As Warf notes, language (and by extension, literature) “is central to
how human beings construct and experience” space and time alike (3).
Authors who incorporate the classical world or any other past into their
work are not engaging in a neutral act, but modeling—and thus taking
part in shaping for readers—a particular understanding of time. Among
other things, by asserting the relevance of the distant past to the

² Marciniak’s volume is one outcome of the large and exciting international project by
the same name that she leads, which is funded by the European Research Council and
involves scholars on continents from Africa to Australia. The project focuses on children’s
literature as a significant vector for the transmission of classical tropes. Classicists use the
term “classical reception studies” to refer to such investigations, which have taken on
increasing importance over the past decades. Feeling the need for an adjectival form, in
this study we will sometimes refer to our primary texts as “neoclassical,” a term that we use
not to refer to works that attempt to reinstate genuine classical values in a postclassical age
(the definition that might come most naturally to a classicist) but rather in the more general
sense of the word, to refer to a postclassical adaptation of or riff upon an inspiration from
antiquity.
  

experience of the contemporary reader, they are endeavoring to lessen

what that reader might otherwise be inclined to regard as the classical
world’s remoteness: in the perception of the receptive reader, time and
space alike are abridged.
Even so, just as not all readers will read a given text in the same way
(we focus throughout this study on the invitations that we see particular
texts proffering, which may always be rejected by individual readers),
authors do not perform these abridgments in identical ways or to identi-
cal effect. In their survey of myth retellings and neoclassical historical
novels produced between 1850 and 1965, for instance, Murnaghan
and Roberts offer valuable insights into differences between British and
American and between nineteenth- and twentieth-century approaches to
the classical world, while noting that the texts that they discuss were all
intended to “draw the reader into another period” by lessening the
distance between past and present (Childhood 139). They add that
even near-contemporaries with similar projects—their examples here
are Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Kingsley—may reveal sharply
“contrasting visions of the relationship between children and the ancient
times” (42). For this reason, we propose that uniting neoclassical works
for children with the cognitive study of that literature is a productive way
of illuminating both the shifting ways in which children’s authors
seek to train their readers to think about the past and the ways in
which the classical heritage has been packaged for the young over the
last century.
In making our preliminary exploration of this intersection, we are
perforce omitting much. Influenced by space constraints, by the vast
amount of potentially relevant material, and in some cases by lack of
adequate expertise, we are not considering the enticing possibilities
offered by heavily illustrated texts (picture books such as the retold
myths included in Rosemary Wells’s Max and Ruby series, graphic
novels such as Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze sequence about the Trojan
War, comic books such as the Asterix titles) or by media other than print
(classical mythology and classical militarism have been particularly rich
sources of inspiration for computer and video games, from the 1984 title
Hercules to the ongoing God of War series). We are not looking at works
for the very young, aware that “a young brain is different from an adult
brain” (Nikolajeva, Reading 15), that “children’s ability to understand
different kinds of metaphors” increases significantly between ages six
     

and fourteen (Coats, “Form” 149), and that it is easier to generalize

about the cognitive processes invited by a group of texts if all these
texts address readers who have achieved a certain level of competence
and sophistication. We are also reluctantly ignoring works written out-
side Britain or the United States and those produced before the twentieth
century, although the lively classical tradition in continental Europe and
Australasia has resulted from the nineteenth century forward in the
publication of many historical novels with classical settings and many
repurposings of ancient myths. And finally, we are less interested in
relatively straightforward retellings of classical narratives (despite the
success and influence achieved by texts such as Ingri and Edgar Parin
d’Aulaire’s 1962 Book of Greek Myths and Padraic Colum’s The Golden
Fleece: And the Heroes Who Lived Before Achilles, designated a Newbery
Honor book in 1922) than we are in works that play with the classical
world in more radical ways.
Using a relatively constrained set of texts, then, we are asking the
following: how do British and American writers for middle-grade and
high-school readers encourage their audience to think about the classical
past and their own relationship to it, and how might this experience
potentially influence readers’ outlook more generally? (Here we would
emphasize the “might” in the previous sentence; as nonscientists, we see
our role in the collaboration between humanities scholars and cognitive
scientists as what Gregory Currie describes as “developing theories of
how we might learn from fiction, especially given that psychological work
in this area sometimes suffers from an impoverished view of the explana-
tory options” [653, orig. emphasis].) We contend that the metaphor with
which L. P. Hartley famously begins his 1953 novel The Go-Between,
“The past is a foreign country,” suggests a vision that is widespread in
youth literature, namely that time is most readily comprehended as an
aspect of place. In itself, this point is not surprising; Lakoff and Johnson
comment that “Most of our fundamental concepts are organized in terms
of one or more spatialization metaphors” (17). Indeed, that literary works
model particular ways of understanding space is an ancient phenomenon,
recently explored by such scholars as Alex C. Purves (Space and Time in
Ancient Greek Narrative, 2010) and William G. Thalmann (Apollonius of
Rhodes and the Spaces of Hellenism, 2011). Yet the precise nature of the
metaphors that a given author may draw upon in conceptualizing space
and time is contingent, not fixed, and popular metaphors—including the
  

clusters of related terms that we here organize under three collective

headings—can arise in response to, and in turn operate as a mechanism
for reinforcing, particular social developments.
For example, the possibility of “traveling” in time, an image that
equates time with a physical landscape, was popularized for Anglophone
readers as late as 1895, with H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine,³ and
reached children’s literature only in the twentieth century via Rudyard
Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet, both
of which were published in 1906 and, as the earliest texts in our study, are
considered at some length in later chapters. The formulation “time
travel,” which carries with it implications of the rapid or even instantan-
eous bridging of gaps via a folding or truncating of significant temporal
distance—not only spatiality, that is, but specifically the conquering of
spatiality—required a particular social context in order to take hold.
Geographers who think about how space is conceptualized have observed
the relevance of such developments as telegraphy, photography, radio,
and film, which, together with improvements in transportation networks,
promoted a general sense that increasingly, there would be no such thing
as distance either spatially or temporally. And arguably, one manifest-
ation of the “new ways of thinking about space and time” that Warf
identifies as emerging in the nineteenth century and gathering speed in
the twentieth (165) was the nineteenth-century invention of the chil-
dren’s historical novel, a form that depends upon the abrogation of time
inasmuch as it resituates the modern reader in a bygone world.
Inheriting the Victorian tendency to think of time and space as linked
and bridgeable, the twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that we
study here conceive of the past as understandable in terms of concrete
form, which in turn may affect readers’ approach to both past and
present. Accordingly, we are interested in how these texts implicitly or
explicitly draw upon a limited and powerful collection of spatial meta-
phors in order to organize the past. We do not insist that a contemporary
author who invokes the classical tradition rather than, say, the medieval

³ Wells was not, of course, the first or best known author to employ the conceit of a
character occupying a time not his or her own; his predecessors here include Mark Twain.
But Twain’s Connecticut Yankee finds himself in King Arthur’s court not, as he sees it,
through travel but as a result of a “transposition of epochs and bodies” after a blow on the
head (7).
Other documents randomly have
different content
 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 still kept the record on the willow
branch, removing the thorns and putting them away whenever he
had ten. There were that number this morning.
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 face of clay, Jinny,” he said, drawing a long breath,
“We’re not so bad off, after all!”
Again his eyes ranged the green circle of the glade; at the farther
side, where the growth was sparse, he could see the valley with its
yellow sands and rose-tinted air. The bright red of blossoming cacti
made vivid patches here and there in the waste; even the great
barren felt the touch of spring.
“God may have forgot this country,” the man said, after a long
silence, “But He sure made it, if He made the rest. It’s got the same
brand, when you come to see it.
“I guess, Jinny,” he continued, still gazing afar, “that the best of
one thing’s about as good as the best of another. What do you think
about it?”
As Jinny did not commit herself he sat down upon a rock and
reached out to scratch the shaggy gray head.
“If I’d got back to Iowa when I wanted to,” he went on, “I’d most
likely be dead by now.”
Jinny’s head drooped till her nose rested upon his knee, and she
nodded off to sleep. Gard let her stay and sat looking off across the
valley, his mind full of new emotion.
“A man might think,” he slowly mused, considering the mystery of
his coming to this place, “that ’twas what old Deacon Stebbins used
to call a ‘leading’.”
He turned the thought over in his mind.
“Why not?” he asked.
His eyes rested upon one toil hardened hand as it lay upon Jinny’s
back. He held it up, surveying it curiously.
“Rather different, from what it was,” he thought, clenching it into a
great fist. “Yah—” with sudden anger, “It’ll be different for Ashley
Westcott if ever he comes to feel it.”
His mind dwelt upon that possibility.
“If ever I do get hold of him,” he muttered, and then paused, as
half-forgotten memories of that faithful teacher came flocking to the
front.
“The deacon ’d be down on that idea,” he reflected. “Wonder how
he’d work his pet hobby o’ forgiveness here. He couldn’t judge of
everything,” his thought still ran on. “The deacon he never got so
near Hell as Arizona. If he had he’d have found it a place his God of
Mercy hadn’t got on His map.”
He put Jinny aside and set to work fashioning himself a new cup.
He had broken his only one the night before.
 “I guess I was wrong about that last notion.” His brain took up the
question again as he shaped the red clay. “I guess He must have this
place on the map. Looks like His mercy’d been trailing me here, so to
speak.”
He paused to contemplate the proportions of his new cup, staring,
half startled, at its rounded surface. Phrases from the old psalm that
mothers love to teach were beating upon his brain.
“Goodness and mercy,” he murmured, feeling his stumbling way
among the words, “goodness and mercy shall follow me.”
The familiar glade grew new and strange to his sight, as though he
saw it for the first time.
“Why!” he cried, a sudden light dawning, “Is that what it means?”
Almost mechanically he went on patting and pressing the clay.
“I guess it does mean that,” whispered he at last, pinching up a
handle for his cup. “I didn’t think I’d be alive till now when I came up
here. I’ve wanted to die, many a time; but I’m glad, now, I didn’t. I
may get out of here some day, too. I may live to get Westcott yet!”
“‘Goodness and mercy shall follow me.’” Was that so he could live
to see his dream of vengeance fulfilled?
Ah! He could not give that up! It could never mean that he must
give that up! Else where were the good of remaining alive?
No; no; it did not mean that! Even the old deacon wouldn’t have
thought he must forgive what he, Gabriel Gard, had borne.
“Oh, Lord,” Gard said aloud, “It can’t mean that! It ain’t in human
nature that it should mean that!”
The cup in his hand was crushed again to formless clay. He tore
and kneaded it viciously, great drops of sweat beading his forehead.
“It’s against human nature,” he groaned as he sought to bring the
plastic stuff again into shape. “I can’t do it! But—” The words rose to
an agonized wail as his spirit recognized the inexorableness of this
demand upon its powers—“I’ve got to. I’ve got to!”
His mind went back to the day upon the mountain-ridge, when he
had seen the quail, and he remembered his wish, the wish that had
been almost a prayer; remembered it with a hushed feeling of awe.
“If I’d sensed it,” he said in a voice tense with his soul’s pain, “If I’d
sensed that this is what comes of knowing there’s a God, I guess I
wouldn’t have dared wish that.”
Hour after hour the battle was fought over the wet, red clay, and
the day was far spent before the cup was ready for the kiln. When at
last Gard, weary, but at peace, brought it for the final perfecting of
the fire, he paused, ere he thrust it in, to read once more the rude
letters graven deep in its fabric.
THE CUP OF FORGIVENESS
“We’ll see how it comes out,” he muttered, grimly, but already the
hope grew in his heart that the clay would stand the test.

Throughout the spring Gard busied himself with building a cabin.

He needed a place in which to keep his stores from prowling
creatures. A brown bear had secured a good part of the last deer he
had shot—secured it while it was drying on branches of the mesquite
—and the birds and small beasts of the chaparral took toll of all his
scanty supplies. Then, too, he took a man’s delight in construction,
and the building of the cabin had come to be a labor of love, as well
as of necessity.
The walls of the structure were of desert stones laid up in mud. For
the roof he brought skeleton stalks of suhuaro. Later he meant to
plaster these with adobe, into which he should work straw, and the
coarse gramma grass of the region.
He worked upon the building at odd times, as the summer went
on, taking increasing joy in bringing it to completeness. He
mascerated prickly-pear cactus in water and soaked the earthen floor
with the resulting liquor, pounding it down afterwards until it was
hard and smooth as cement. He made his door of ocotilla-stalks laid
side by side and woven with willow-withes. In the same way he
contrived a shutter for the window, and he constructed a second,
smaller, fireplace, within the cabin.
“When we have distinguished visitors, Jinny,” he told the little
burro, “We’ll kindle a fire for them here.”
He still used the larger hearth outside. He had learned, after many
trials, to kindle a fire with the aid of flint and steel, and was no longer
dependent upon matches.
 When his shelter was complete he contrived furniture for it, for the
sheer pleasure of construction. Lacking boards, or the means to
manufacture them, he wove his table-top of arrow-weed and tough
grasses from the cañon. It was beginning to be a source of delight to
him to contrive solutions for each new problem of his hard existence.
One night, in the early autumn, Gard was wakened by a fearful
crash of thunder. He sprang from his bed, to find Jinny already
huddled against him. All about them was the roar of the sudden
storm.
The pool had overflowed, and swept across the glade in a broad
stream, pouring down the defile in a whelming tide. The heavens
seemed to have opened, torrentially; Gard’s bed was beaten down,
and the fire was flooded. Gard himself was almost thrown to earth by
the thrashing rain ere he could reach the cabin, into which he darted,
Jinny close at his heels.
The shelter was built against huge boulders, out of the track of the
flood from the pool, but the mud and thatch roof leaked like a sieve.
It served, however, to break the fierce violence of the storm, and they
huddled there miserably till the worst should be over.
The sounds without were like those of a battle: the echoing rattle
of thunder down the cañon; the rending of rocks; the crash of falling
trees; the screaming of the wind—all mingled in a fierce, wild tumult.
A flash of lightning revealed a great scrub oak, torn from its
anchorage above, crashing down into the glade. The next instant the
whole place seemed filled with some giant thing that raged and
snarled, hurling itself from side to side in mighty struggle.
It dashed against the fireplace, flinging the great stones of it in
every direction, and fell upon the uprooted tree in a frenzy of titanic
rage.
Its horrible roaring shook the cabin, and Jinny, pressing against
Gard, was almost beside herself with terror. Gard himself, peering
through the window of the hut, could make out nothing definite,
until another flash suddenly showed him a huge grizzly, reared upon
its hind legs, striking madly at the empty air.
The storm had moderated, now, and he could hear, as he strained
to listen, the fearful snarls of the bear rising above the roar of the
wind. The threshing tumult of its plunging had ceased, however, and
even the snarling had grown weaker.
The rain ceased, but the wind still swept the glade, and the pool
had become a lake. Gard was chilled to the bone, but dared not
venture without. He had not heard the grizzly for some time, but
Jinny still cowered against him, trembling.
At dawn he looked from the window upon a scene of devastation.
The ground was strewn with debris. Great boulders had been hurled
down by the torrent’s force, and beside one ragged block of granite
lay the grizzly, terrible, even in death. One side of its savage head was
crushed in, and a shoulder shattered.
Jinny was still too terrified to venture outside the hut, but Gard
went out and set to work to restore some semblance of order about
the place.
The roof of the shack was a wreck. Gard had to clear away a part of
it that had fallen, before he could find his precious matches and get a
fire. There were nine of the matches left, and it took two to start a
blaze with the soaked wood. He breakfasted upon dried venison,
which he shared with Jinny, grown catholic in her tastes, and then
set about skinning and dressing the bear.
He stretched and scraped the great hide, and pinned it out upon
the earth, (it meant warmth and comfort to him through the coming
winter nights,) and cut the meat into long strips, to dry. It would be a
welcome change, later, from venison and rabbit.
It was noon before his toil was completed and the traces of it so far
removed as to ease Jinny’s perturbation. He was obliged to bathe in
the enlarged pool before she seemed comfortable when near him.
As he dressed, after his ablutions, his eye caught a broken bit of
rock lying at the water’s edge. He picked it up, a curious tightening in
his throat.
There is something about the glitter of a streak of yellow in a bit of
rock that would set the heart of the last man on the last
unsubmerged point of earth to beating fast. The piece of float was
freshly severed and the flecks of yellow showed plainly in its split
surface. Gard scrutinized the mud round about, and beyond the pool
found another bit of float.
 Forgetful of all else, he sprang up the cañon. It, too, was full of
debris, witness to the mighty power of the storm. He hardly knew the
place as he climbed along, making a new way for himself; for the
swollen stream roared wildly where but the day before he had been
able to walk.
The cañon walls on either side were wrought and twisted by the
action of ancient heat, scarred and eroded by the force of ancient
waters, but they revealed no fresh break, though he scanned them
eagerly.
He kept on, however; for a quarter of a mile above the pool
another bit of float pointed the way. It was a savage climb, but
mounting, circling and crawling past heaped up boulders and masses
of earth, he presently found progress checked by a landslip, beneath
which the rushing water was already cutting a channel.
Here lay the vein, uncovered, the gleaming particles in the cloven
rock making the man’s breath come thick as he studied them.
There was no doubt about it: he had discovered pay rock of the
richest sort. How rich it was he had no means of determining, nor
did he then dream; but he knew that right in sight was more gold
than he should be able to get out with any tool at his command, and
hope was already high within him.
He stooped and picked up small fragments of broken rock that lay
among the debris. How heavy they were! What power they
represented! What dreams might come true, by the aid of their
yellow shine!
Here was his ticket east. Here was a ticket to the uttermost parts of
the earth. With it he could go away, stand rehabilitated among his
fellows. Golden vistas of power and pleasure spread out before him
as he stood gazing long at the cleft, yellow-flecked rock before him.
“Whoever runs this outfit,” he whispered, “has remembered it,
after all.”
It was long before he could bring himself back to reality. Only the
gathering autumn gloom, coming early, in the cañon’s depth, finally
recalled him. He began turning over in his mind the means he must
contrive with which to meet this emergency. If only he had the tools!
“It’s up to me to make some,” he said aloud, and at the words he
suddenly turned and looked back at the golden vein he was leaving.
 “You’re great!” he shouted; “You’re bully to have; but you ain’t all
there is to it!”
He spread out his hard hands. “These that can make the things to
get you out with are better yet,” he said, speaking more slowly.
For he suddenly remembered the pit from which he was digged,
and the man’s heart yearned to his fire beside the clean pool, and for
the life there that he had wrested from nothing.
 CHAPTER VI

Gard and Jinny were on an expedition after salt. The instinct hidden
in the gray little hide was so much more useful in the case than the
thinking machinery beneath the man’s thatch of hair, that she had
long ago led him to a desert supply of this commodity, which he had
longed for, without being able to supply his need.
He was utilizing the trip in an effort to make Jinny bridlewise, a
proceeding which filled her with great displeasure. She was a sturdy
little brute, of good size for a wild burro, and she bore his weight
without apparent effort; but she had a fondness for choosing her own
direction, and objected, strongly, to the guiding rein. She protested,
now, raising her voice, after the manner of her kind, when Gard,
from her back, essayed to turn her at his will.
“Jinny! Jinny!” he remonstrated; “Not for the world would I call
you anything but a lady; but I can’t be so mistaken, Jinny! You’re not
a nightingale!”
Jinny was persistent, however, in her determination to travel
eastward, and although her companion, had he been allowed a
preference, would have elected to go toward the west, he had learned
enough about his small gray friend to be willing to trust her
judgment in the matter.
“Though I must say, Jinny,” he remarked, reproachfully, as he gave
her her head, “that it’s spoiling the making of a good saddle-burro.”
It was well toward the end of Gard’s second year in the desert. In
all this time he had but once encountered his own kind.
On that occasion, too, he had been after salt, and he had met a
desert Indian afar on the plain. They had talked together, after a
fashion, by the aid of signs, and Gard had learned that the railroad
lay three days distant, toward the north-west. This was a matter
about which he had often speculated, and he was glad of the
information. Because of it, he proffered the Indian the deputy’s pipe,
which he had with him, happening, on that day, to be wearing
Arnold’s coat. The brave took it, the gift only serving to strengthen
his already formed opinion that the gaunt white man with the great
beard was loco.
 It was a year since the discovery in the cañon. Gard had worked
the vein, in a primitive way, making for the purpose a rough mattock,
from his useful wagon-spring. It was by far the best tool he had
constructed, and he regarded it with even more pride and pleasure
than he took in the two heavy little buckskin bags for which he had
made a hiding-place in the chimney of the rehabilitated cabin.
He had arrived in these days at a strange content. He loved the
vast reaches of his large place; the problems of his elemental
environment. The luminous blue sky, the colorful air, the immensity
of the waste plain, gave him pleasure. Even the weird desert growths
no longer oppressed him.
“After all, Jinny,” he said, as they threaded their way gingerly past
a great patch of cholla, with its vicious, hooked spines, “there’s as
much life here as there is death. I never sensed it before; but
everything’s got a claw to hang onto life with.”
The thought of returning to civilization was put away with ever
increasing ease. He had not abandoned the idea, but it came as a
more and more remote possibility. Even his dream of vengeance had
long been put aside. He had learned the futility of hate in the nights
when he watched the great stars wheel by, marking the march of the
year.
“There’s nothing in it,” he had finally said to himself.
“It ain’t a man’s job to be staking out claims in hell for another
fellow.”
If Jinny, who heard this, did not understand, she at least offered
no contradiction, being by that much wiser than many of her kind on
a higher plane.
The desert stretched away before Gard, vast, silent, untamed, at
this moment a thing of gold and flame, touched, far in the distance,
by great cloud-shadows, that sent the man’s gaze from the fierce
plain to the wide blue overhead. But not a cloud was in sight and he
realized that, probably for the hundredth time, he had been deceived
by patches of lava cropping up among the red and yellow sands.
Something that was not a cloud arrested his attention. Far in the
sky half a dozen great black birds flew, now high, now lower, but
circling always above one spot. Gard watched them with an
understanding eye.
 “Jinny,” he said, “There’s something dying, over there. You and I’d
better go see what it is.”
He had dismounted some time since, and was walking beside the
burro. Now he started forward at a faster pace. It might be only a
hurt coyote that the hideous birds waited for, but it might be a man!
The thought quickened his steps still more, till Jinny had to trot, to
keep pace with him.
Once an aerial scavenger swooped lower than any other had yet
done, and at the sight the man broke into a run. The birds still kept
off, however. Whatever it was, lying out there, somewhere, it was yet
alive.
They were traveling along the edge of a deep barranca that yawned
in the desert, and presently Gard caught sight of a dark object lying
on the sand, at the bottom of the fissure. It was a man. The banks of
the ditch sloped just there. Evidently he had attempted to cross, and
had been caught in quicksand.
He was lying on his back, his arms outstretched, his feet wide
apart, a curious rigidity about his whole figure. Gard’s long stride left
Jinny far behind as he ran.
“Hold on!” he shouted. “Somebody’s coming!”
There was no response from the man. He lay as one dead, save for
the occasional lifting now of one arm, now of the other.
Down the sloping bank Gard ran, to the very edge of the shifting
sand. Here he stopped, and began cautiously to tread, his feet side by
side, stamping, stamping, moving forward half an inch at a time, but
never ceasing to tread. He was harried by the need of haste, but he
made sure of his progress as he went, knowing that the sand must be
solidly packed, every inch of the way.
From time to time he spoke to the man, and at last got a mumbled
word or two from the swollen lips. The need of haste was increasing
every second, and Gard worked breathlessly, now, till at last he could
touch his fellow, lying there.
Still marking time with his feet upon the sand, he slipped from his
own waist the riata he always carried when he came down to the
plain. He had made it himself of finely braided hide, suppled and
wrought with faithful care, and he knew its strength. Working fast,
he raised the man’s shoulders, ever so little, and slipped the rope
beneath his arms. He knotted it into a loop and adjusted it over his
own shoulders. Then, getting a strong hold with his hands under the
man’s arms, he straightened up.
The sand slipped, and ran, gurgling horribly, sucking, sucking, loth
to lose its victim, but the pull of rope and hands together counted.
Gard took a backward step and gained a few precarious inches.
A second time he stooped, and straightened, repeating the
performance again and again, until the man lay upon the trampled
path. Gard could use his strength to better advantage now, and half
lifting the dead weight, he drew it back to the edge of the sand.
The man was barely conscious, but Gard laid him on the sloping
bank and gave him a little water from his canteen.
It revived him somewhat, and was repeated, after a moment. He
was able to mumble now, begging for more, which Gard gave him as
fast as he dared, till at last the poor fellow got to his hands and knees,
and was able, with help, to crawl slowly up to the plain.
Here, Gard soaked a little cake of oat flour in water, and fed him
like a baby, but it was an hour before he was able, after many
attempts, to get the man upon Jinny’s back.
He could not sit erect, but Gard walked beside him, supporting
him, and the little cavalcade set out for home. The rescued man was
half delirious, and muttered continually, between his pleadings for
water, of the heat; of thirst, and of the vultures. Gard could not make
out what particular disaster had befallen him, but the empty canteen
slung at his back, and the absence of anything like food, or of an
outfit, was eloquent witness that a desert tragedy had been averted.
Before they had gone far up the trail to the glade the delirious
muttering ceased; the man swayed toward his rescuer until his head
rested upon the latter’s shoulder, and so they went on. Whether he
was asleep, or in a faint, Gard could not tell.
“He’s had a tough pull, that’s certain, Jinny,” he said, giving the
burro an encouraging pat.
Could Jinny have spoken she might have said that she was herself
having a hard pull. She had often carried Gard, on the plain, but this
dead weight, on an up-grade, was a brand-new surprise for her. She
wagged her solemn little head sorrowfully as she plodded on, and not
even the oat cake that Gard reached forth to her seemed to impart
any charm to life as she then saw it.
They reached the glade at last, and Gard got the stranger upon his
own bed, covering him with the great bear-skin robe. He brought
him nearly all that was left of the deputy’s whiskey, cherished
carefully all these months, and set to preparing a meal.
He kicked aside the smoldering ashes of a nearly burned out fire
on the hard earth, and with a few thrusts of a broad, flat stick,
disclosed the earthen jar of mesquite beans that he had left to cook in
his absence. Simmering with the beans were the marrowbone of a
deer and the carcass of a rabbit caught that morning. The savory
whiffs from the steaming mess made the exhausted man on the bed
turn his face to the fire.
“How in all git out,” he began, feebly, and stared in amazement; for
Gard had flanked the bean-pot with another, taken from the fire he
had quickly kindled by transferring the still smoldering sticks from
the bake-fire to the fireplace. The visitor sniffed at this second pot,
incredulously.
“Where ’d you git coffee?” he demanded.
“Sweet acorns,” Gard explained, briefly. He was tasting the full joy
of hospitality as he brought wild honey, and more oat cakes, from the
shack.
The stranger reached eager hands toward the acorn coffee.
“Gimme some—hot!” he pleaded.
Gard filled a crooked earthen bowl with it and brought it to him,
steaming. He drained it, almost savagely, handing the bowl back with
a sigh of satisfaction that left nothing for words to express.
“Partner,” he said, his little close-set eyes taking in the scene,
wonderingly, “This is sure a great layout. How’d ye find the place, an’
what’s yer game?”
“I got up here by chance,” Gard said, evasively. “I liked the spot,
and so I’ve stayed along. My name’s Gard,” he added, remembering
that he had not told it.
“Mine’s Thad Broome,” the other replied, “an’ I’m runnin’ the hell
of a streak o’ luck.”
 Gard had moved his little table up beside his guest, and now he
proceeded to serve his meal on flat, clay plates of rather nondescript
shape. He had a fork and a spoon, rudely fashioned of wood, and
these he allotted to the stranger.
“Did you make everything ye’ve got?” Broome demanded,
examining them curiously.
“Very nearly,” was the reply, and the new-comer began to eat,
eagerly. At intervals, during the meal, he told his story.
“I’m a cowman myself,” he said, flinging a bone out across the
glade, “An’ if ever I git back on the range ye kin fry me in skunk ile
first time ye ketch me off it.”
He took another great draught of the acorn coffee, swearing,
savagely, as he set the bowl down.
“Seems like I’d never git the taste o’ the desert out’n my mouth
again,” he muttered.
“I was with the ‘K bar C’ outfit,” he went on, “Up Tusayan way.
Know it?”
Gard shook his head.
“Then ye’re that much better off,” Broome said, gloomily. “The
grub was fierce; they was a foreman that was seven hull devils all
rolled in one, an’ a range that’d drive ye crazy to ride. I was mighty
sick of it, a while along, an’ I met up with a cuss one day that ’d bin
out prospectin’ an’ struck it rich. So, bein’ a blame fool, I got the
fever.”
He paused to watch his host, who was gathering the remains of the
meal and putting things shipshape with a certain fine neatness that
had become the habit of Gard’s solitude.
“D’ye allus put on as much dog as that?” he asked.
“As much as what?”
“Cleanin’ camp like an old maid school-ma’am,” was the reply.
“Jus’ you alone: wha’d ye bother for?”
“It had to be that, or to go on all fours.” Gard offered no further
explanation. Thad Broome’s type was familiar enough; he had
foregathered with it by many a camp fire. He had saved this man
from a horrible death, and the fellow was his guest; yet he realized,
with a feeling of shamed hospitality, that Broome’s presence was
irksome.
“Been here long?” the latter asked.
“Longer than it has seemed, maybe,” laughed Gard.
“There’s a difference in things,” he added, lightly. “I guess, now,
the time you were down in the quicksand seemed longer than it
really was?”
“Hell, yes!” Broome was launched again on the stream of his
troubles. He resumed the narrative, sprinkling it liberally with oaths.
He had started out with a full equipment and a good bronco, and the
creature had “died on him,” a week before, in the desert.
“You should have had a burro,” Gard said.
“So they said. But I stuck to the idee of a bronc. I ain’t no walkist.”
“He didn’t last but three weeks,” he added, “an’ when he croaked
the damned buzzards was on ’im before I got out o’ sight.”
“Where were you going when you struck the quicksand?” the other
asked.
“Tryin’ to strike the railroad, afoot,” was the reply. “It’s me fer
ridin’ when I can. I said I wan’t no walkist. I got turned ’round. I kep’
lightin’ load, an’ my grub gin out. Then I run out o’ water.” He gave a
shuddering gulp, and continued:
“I run round a lot, lookin’ fer’t, till I got in the quicksand. That was
just before you hollered, I guess. But them buzzards was Johnny on
the spot the minute I was down. I most went mad with ’em.”
“Didn’t you have a gun?” Gard asked. “Why didn’t you fire it?”
“Gun? You bet yer life I had a gun. I fired all my am-nition an’ then
I fergit what. I guess I threw the damned thing away. I got dotty,
havin’ no water.”
“And there was good water within twenty feet of you,” Gard said,
musingly.
“How’s that?” Broome’s tone was incredulous.
“Why didn’t you tap the nigger-head there by the barranca?” his
companion asked.
“What—the big cactus like a green punkin? What for?” Broome
demanded, and Gard explained the nature of the bisnaga. If he had
cut off the top he would probably have found a quart or two of water.
Broome listened with curious intentness, and when the other had
finished, broke into a torrent of execration.
He cursed the desert in its nearness and its remoteness, inclusively
and particularly, for several moments, until presently words seemed
to fail him, and the torrent of his oaths dribbled to an intermittent
trickle.
When he finally paused for breath Gard sat as though he had not
heard, staring across the glade at the fire, but Jinny, at his side,
seemed all attention, her long ears pricked forward, her sagacious
little visage turned full upon the stranger. There was something
disconcerting in the attitude of the two, and Broome felt it, without
comprehending it. His voice trailed off weakly.
“Mebby ye don’t like my remarks,” he said, lamely, “I notice ye
don’t cuss none yerself?”
“Don’t I?” Gard asked the question in all simplicity. “I didn’t know
it.”
Broome stared, uneasily, until the other was constrained to take
notice.
“I guess I do,” he laughed, half apologetically. “I guess I swear as
much as anybody, when I feel so,” he added, “but I don’t feel so much
—not nowadays.”
“Ye kin jus’ bet yer life,” blustered Broome, with a show of being at
ease, “that if ye’d bin through what I have ye’d be ready to cuss the
hull blamed outfit.”
He laughed loudly, as he spoke, but Gard was replenishing the fire,
and made no reply.
Long hours after Broome was sleeping, exhausted, his host sat
before the glowing embers. The day’s experiences had brought much
to consider.
For one thing, it was certain that the time had arrived when he
must return to civilization. He could not keep Broome with him, even
if the latter wished to stay. He saw endless possibilities of pain and
trouble in such a partnership. And since he could not keep him, he
must himself go before Broome had a chance to make any
explorations. His heart sank at the prospect.
 “It’s been mighty peaceful here, Jinny,” he whispered to his
faithful little comrade, who dozed beside him in the firelight. “We’ll
sure miss it.”
Jinny shifted her weight in her sleep, and her head drooped lower.
“One thing, old girl,” Gard said, regarding her, whimsically, “You
don’t have to think about it. A man’s different; he knows when he’s
well off, and hates to leave it.”
He glanced about him. The firelight touched fitfully the encircling
trees, the great rocks, the open door of the shack where Broome lay
asleep, the gleaming pool. Above in the violet depths, blazed the
dipper; how many times he had watched it patrol the sky!
“I hate to go,” he whispered, again, “I hate to go, Jinny; but good
as ’tis, I know it ain’t really life. A man belongs with men. They may
be good or they may be bad; but a man’s got to take ’em as he meets
up with ’em. He can’t be a real man forever, just by himself.”
 CHAPTER VII

The first touch of dawn saw Gard awake and stirring. He went softly
about the glade, feeding Jinny in her little corral off at one side, and
preparing his own breakfast. The meal finished, he left food where
his guest could find it, and made his way up the cañon. He had
settled in his own mind that if Broome was able to travel they should
leave the glade on the following day; but there was first something
that he must do.
The forenoon was well advanced when Broome stirred, opened his
eyes and sat up with a start. He was a moment or two realizing his
surroundings and recalling the events that had brought him to this
place.
He sat staring at the cabin; at the rough mud-and-stone walls; the
primitive fireplace; the rude furnishings, and finally summed up his
impressions in a phrase:
“Hell! What a layout!”
Then, remembering Gard’s probable proximity, he went heavily to
the door.
There was no one in sight. In the big outer fireplace an “Indian”
fire smoldered, guarded on one side by the earthen coffee-pot, on the
other by the big kettle of beans. On the table were a bowl and a plate;
the former upside down over some cakes of oat bread. Broome
welcomed the sight, for he was hungry.
“Wonder where the patron got to so early,” he muttered as he fell
upon the food.
He ate swinishly, standing before the fire, and had nearly
completed his meal when he caught sight of the inscription Gard had
put upon the cup from which he was drinking. His little shifty eyes
studied it curiously as he turned the cup about.
“What in tunk is that for?” he muttered, perplexed, and when he
had managed to decipher the words he nearly dropped the little
vessel in his surprise.
“T-h-e c-u-p o-f f-o-r-g-i-v-e-n-e-s-s,” he spelled again, holding the
cup up to the light and feeling the sunken letters with one hard
finger. “Rummy kind o’ cup that’d be.”
 He stooped to refill it with “coffee” from the blackened pot in the
embers and, as he straightened up, his eye met another inscription,
on a broad stone beside the door of the cabin. He read it aloud,
laboriously:
“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on
Thee.”
“‘Peace’—‘peace.’” Broome looked about him, half dazed, groping
in the void of his own spiritual habitation for an explanation of what
he saw.
“There’s sure peace good an’ plenty in these diggings,” he
muttered, “if that’s what a man’s aimin’ to locate; peace enough to
drive him loco. Guess that’s what ails him. He must be a jumpin’ luny
to go scratchin’ round like this.... There’s another one!”
He espied it on the wall over the pallet where he had slept.
“I will both lay me down in peace and sleep; for Thou Lord only,
makest me dwell in safety.”
Gard had written that the day after the night of terror when storm
had devastated the glade; written it remembering how his mother
had taught it to him, an imaginative little chap, afraid of the dark. He
had been saying his prayers one night, beside his cot in the shed-
chamber, when he became afraid the SOMETHING was coming
through the gloom to grab him from behind as he knelt. His mother,
coming to tuck him up, found him cowering under the blankets and
winning from him the secret of his fright, sat down beside him and
taught him the beautiful verse. Broome, reading it now, experienced
a feeling of dread.
“Peace again,” he growled, “I hope he gets peace enough with all
his bug-house slate-writing. The feller’s hell on religion; shouldn’t
wonder if he was a preacher.”
He turned away with an awed shiver.
“Gosh!” he ejaculated, “I’m glad I didn’t see that over my head last
night. I couldn’t a’ slept a wink.”
He went outside again to fill and drink another cup of acorn coffee,
and when his bodily hunger was satisfied left the debris of his meal
on the hearth and wandered about the glade, seeking gratification of
his objective curiosity.
 “Why!” he exclaimed, when he discovered Jinny, in the corral,
“The patron can’t be far off: he’s left the burro!”
He surveyed Jinny thoughtfully, as she stood at the far side of the
corral. Then he wandered over to Gard’s rude pottery-factory.
“I’d like to know what the cuss is doin’ here,” he thought. “He’s
made his outfit from the ground up.”
He was struck by that as he continued his roving scrutiny. Gard’s
bow and arrows fairly frightened him.
“That fellow’s clean dotty,” he muttered. “What in thunder kin a
live man do with that?”
Presently he found the first knife Gard had fashioned, laid upon a
ledge of the camp fireplace, and turned it over like one bewildered.
“Shivering spooks!” he swore, softly; “If this ain’t an outfit! He
don’t look like a ‘lunger,’” he added, referring again to Gard; “nor this
ain’t no prospector’s layout; nor the cuss don’t seem locoed—not
altogether. It’s what I thought. He’s some kind of a preacher. He
don’t cuss none, an’ he seemed sorter quiet like last night. He didn’t
act just like it, though, neither.”
Born of desire, another idea assailed him. “Wonder where he keeps
his whiskey,” he mused. “That was a hell of a good sample he showed
last night.”
He began to search more systematically, still keeping an alert eye
for Gard’s possible return.
“They ain’t no hiding-place outside,” he decided, and turned his
attention once more to the cabin. He had no idea what sort of a
receptacle to look for, and a scrutiny of the corners revealed nothing.
He crossed the room, to the fireplace, and suddenly gave a little start.
He had made what promised to be a discovery.
He tiptoed to the door: no one was in sight, but he stepped outside
and again made the round of the glade. Coming back, he took the
precaution to close the door when he reëntered the hut.
At the fireplace again, he stooped and put both hands upon a stone
half-way up one side of the rude chimney. As he had foreseen, it
came away in response to a little lift—Gard’s hiding-place for his
treasure had been a most casual thing at best—and a recess lay
revealed.
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