TABLE OF CONTENTS

ChapterI. Pag.[1]
”II.”[17]
”III.”[42]
”IV.”[55]
”V.”[83]
”VI.”[114]
”VII.”[146]
”VIII.”[170]
”IX.”[191]
”X.”[223]

HEART’S KINDRED

I

A hut of bark, thatched with palm-leaves; a gigantic rock at whose base lay old ashes; an open grassy space bordering a narrow mountain stream, and a little garden—these made the home of the Inger, where a man might live and die as a man was meant, neither planning like a maniac nor yet idling like an idiot, but well content with what the day brought forth.

Toward a June sunset, the Inger sat outside his doorway, fashioning a bowl from half a turtle shell. Before him the ground sloped down to the edge of the garden, and beyond dropped to the clearing’s edge. When he lifted his eyes, he could look for miles along thick tops of live oaks and larches, and beyond to a white line of western sea. At his back rose the foothills, cleft by cañons still quite freshly green. Above them, the monstrous mountains swept the sky, and here their flanks were shaggy with great pines. The whole lay now in that glory of clear yellow by which the West gives to the evenings some hint of a desert ancestry.