improve it for yourself?" said Clarence. "All these valley terraces are
bound to rise in value, and meantime you would be independent. It could
be managed, Jim. I think I could arrange it for you," he went on, with a
slight glow of youthful enthusiasm. "Write to me at Peyton's ranch,
and I'll see you when I come back, and we'll hunt up something for
you together." As Jim received the proposition with a kind of gloomy
embarrassment, he added lightly, with a glance at the farmhouse, "It
might be near HERE, you know; and you'd have pleasant neighbors, and
even eager listeners to your old adventures."
"You'd better come in a minit before you go," said Jim, clumsily evading
a direct reply. Clarence hesitated a moment, and then yielded. For an
equal moment Jim Hooker was torn between secret jealousy of his old
comrade's graces and a desire to present them as familiar associations
of his own. But his vanity was quickly appeased.
Need it be said that the two women received this fleck and foam of
a super-civilization they knew little of as almost an impertinence
compared to the rugged, gloomy, pathetic, and equally youthful hero of
an adventurous wilderness of which they knew still less? What availed
the courtesy and gentle melancholy of Clarence Brant beside the
mysterious gloom and dark savagery of Red Jim? Yet they received him
patronizingly, as one who was, like themselves, an admirer of manly
grace and power, and the recipient of Jim's friendship. The farmer alone
seemed to prefer Clarence, and yet the latter's tacit indorsement of Red
Jim, through his evident previous intimacy with him, impressed the man
in Jim's favor. All of which Clarence saw with that sensitive perception
which had given him an early insight into human weakness, yet still had
never shaken his youthful optimism. He smiled a little thoughtfully, but
was openly fraternal to Jim, courteous to his host and family, and,
as he rode away in the faint moonlight, magnificently opulent in his
largess to the farmer,--his first and only assertion of his position.
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