looked into my friend's face. There was a peace on the lips that might have been taken for a smile. I am an Anglo-Saxon, with a liberal share of the self-curbing instincts of my race, but I think that if the whole troop had been there in full daylight I could not have withstood the impulse which made me stoop and press my lips to Pierre's. As I was about to lift my head I was seized with a still less rational impulse. I put my ear to those lips. In the excitement of my shaken nerves I mistook for a sound in the ear what was—what must have been—an echo in the memory. Fancy or truth, I heard these whispered words:
"When need is, they come back."
THE CONTRACT OF CORPORAL TWING
Two men sat on a sandstone ledge, looking out across the desert. Behind them stood a third.
To the north, just visible over the edge of the dun-hued cliff, two hawks wheeled and circled in the cloud-flecked sky. These and the figures on the ledge were the only life in the compass of hills and bluffs which ringed them round on every side.
It was that transitional period when—the last of the snows a month gone, the terrible heat of
