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higby 's day of reckoning comes at last
tears in shallow, vacant eyes. This Jim looked at her — really looked, and there was all the world of hunger and realization and starved love in the gaze.
1 ' Little baby ! ' ' he whispered, halfincredulously ; ' ' little baby — Nance ! 7 '
' ' Jim ! ' ' the child exclaimed. ' ' Why, Jim — how do you know who I am ? ' '
The man rose and lifted her in arms that strangled in their yearning grip. "Say 'Dad,' baby girl," he muttered, gruff sobs breaking thru; " say 'Dad'."
The shock of the falling beam had done it, and the Jim who, with his pardner Harry, staked the claim, drank at the bar and fought the deadly fight with Higby, lived again, alert and keen in every sense.
After the first poignant raptures, the explanations and the sad knowledge that Mary had gone where Jim could not reach her, the two followed the road into the town again.
Higby was afraid of the giant man who faced him, the accumulation of the defrauded years in his smoldering eyes, the eloquent figure of his little daughter by his side. And he was superstitious. He could not reconcile Jim, the corpse, with this dominant, avenging figure. The sheriff was called and a story told. Papers were produced — papers that Jim in his darkened years had kept by him in his hermit retreat. And, in the end, Higby went to make atonement for many things — for Harry, sleeping silent in his youth; for Mary, weary unto death; for Nance, with her spindly frame and quaint, white face — for the ghost of Smiling Jim.
And Jim filed his claim at last, built Nance the biggest, finest house Center Roads had ever seen, rode out with her as her knight and cavalier on a stable mate to " Wonder/ ' and laid a wreath of roses on the mound where Mary lay at rest.