were women, and we take after them. As Barclay stood in the door of his car debating whether or not to go in, the light from the chimney of the sawmill on the hill attracted his attention, and because he was in a mood for it, the flying sparks trailing across the night sky reminded him of the fireworks that Fourth of July in 1873, when he and Jane Mason and Bob and Molly spent the day together, picnicking down in the timber and coming home to dance on the platform under the cottonwood-bough pavilion in the evening. It was a riotous day, and Bob and Molly being lovers of long acceptance assumed a paternal attitude to John and Jane that was charming in the main, but sometimes embarrassing. And of all the chatter he only remembered that Jane said: "Think how many years these old woods have been here--how many hundred years--maybe when the mound-builders were here! Don't you suppose that they are used to--to young people--oh, maybe Indian lovers, and all that, and don't you suppose the trees see these young people loving and marrying, and growing old and ugly and unhappy, and that they some way feel that they are just a little tired of it all?" If any one replied to her, he had no recollection of it, for after that he saw the dance and heard the music, and then events seemed to slip along without registering in his memory. There must have been the fifth and the sixth of July in 1873, for certainly there was the seventh, and that was Sunday; he remembered that well enough, for in the morning there was a council in his office to discuss ways and means for the week's work in the county-seat trouble. Tuesday was the day which the new law designated as the one when the levy must be made for the court-house improvements that would hold the county-seat in Sycamore Ridge. At four o'clock, after the Sunday council, John and Bob drove out of Sheriff Jake Dolan's stable with his best two-seated buggy, and told him they would be back from Minneola at midnight or thereabout after taking Jane Mason home, and the two boys drove down Main Street with the girls, waving to every one with their hats, while the girls waved their parasols, and the town smiled; for though all the world loves a lover, in Sycamore Ridge it has been the custom, since the days when Philemon Ward first took Miss Lucy out to drive, for all the town to jeer at lovers as they pass down street in buggies and carriages! And so thirty years slipped from Barclay as he stood in the doorway of his car looking at the Arizona stars. A flicker of light high up in the sky-line seemed to move. It was the headlight of a train coming over the mountain. A switchman with a lantern was passing near the car, and Barclay called to him, "Is that headlight No. 2?" And when the man affirmed Barclay's theory, he asked, "How long does it take it to get down here?" "Oh, she comes a-humming," replied the man. "If she doesn't jump the track, she'll be down in eight minutes." Inside the car Barclay heard a watch snap, and knew that Lycurgus Mason didn't believe anything of the kind and proposed to get at the