Yet all the while, despite his habit of vigilance and the magnifying of his alert faculties to fit this new phase of his life, despite the grim hard deadliness to survive and to win, which he had deliberately heightened and intensified, he rode as one who had at last come upon the glory and dreams of fulfillment, of atonement, of salvation. The sacred promise to his father, which had so often spurred him on to heroic efforts, gained in the glamour of an adventure that called to all a man could feel. Fight and romance and love! It would take a terrible clash with the evil forces of that range to retrieve Pencarrow’s losses and to make his range prosperous, his person safe, his family happy. It was romance because of its setting, its drama against the purple background of that wild sage coun
