When A Man's A Man

Here is a land where a man, to live, must be a man. It is a land of granite and marble andporphyry and gold-and a man's strength must be as the strength of the primeval hills. It isa land of oaks and cedars and pines-and a man's mental grace must be as the grace of theuntamed trees. It is a land of far-arched and unstained skies, where the wind sweeps freeand untainted, and the atmosphere is the atmosphere of those places that remain as Godmade them-and a man's soul must be as the unstained skies, the unburdened wind, andthe untainted atmosphere. It is a land of wide mesas, of wild, rolling pastures and broad, untilled, valley meadows-and a man's freedom must be that freedom which is notbounded by the fences of a too weak and timid conventionalism. In this land every man is-by divine right-his own king; he is his own jury, his owncounsel, his own judge, and-if it must be-his own executioner. And in this land where aman, to live, must be a man, a woman, if she be not a woman, must surely perish. This is the story of a man who regained that which in his youth had been lost to him; and ofhow, even when he had recovered that which had been taken from him, he still paid theprice of his loss. It is the story of a woman who was saved from herself; and of how she wasled to hold fast to those things, the loss of which cost the man so great a price. The story, as I have put it down here, begins at Prescott, Arizona, on the day following theannual Fourth-of-July celebration in one of those far-western years that saw the passing ofthe Indian and the coming of the automobile