"Jack, don't you love your old dad any more?"
She whirled and ran to him with outstretched arms and clung to him, sobbing.
"Oh, dad—dear dad," she groaned. "You've broken my heart; you've broken my heart!"
The others filed softly out of the room and stood bareheaded under the winter sky.
Bud Mansie, his meager face transformed with wonder, said: "Fellers, what d'you know about it? Our Jack's grown up."
And Black Gandil answered: "Look at this Pierre frowning at the ground. It was him that changed her."
CHAPTER XII
THE BURIAL
The annals of the mountain desert have never been written and can never be written. They are merely a vast mass of fact and tradition and imagining which floats from tongue to tongue from the Rockies to the Sierra Nevadas. A man may be a fact all his life and die only a local celebrity. Then again, he may strike sparks from that imagination which runs riot by camp-fires and at the bars of the crossroads saloons.