The Man on Horseback

Front matter

THE MAN ON HORSEBACK

THE MAN ON HORSEBACK

BY

Chapter I

CHAPTER I

THE YANKEE DOODLE GLORY

Like a great, shimmering silver horn the morning mist swung out of the valley and Tom Graves swung along with it, sitting his tough, sinewy, thirteen-hand pony as easily as a lifetime of it can teach a man, and lifting the mare gently with knee and soft word and knowing hand when ruts or slippery timber falls clef the road or when it dipped too suddenly into rock-strewn levels.

Fourteen miles beyond, an hour and a half's ride if the pony was as keen as the man, was Woodfell, a one-horse, one-man homestead of drab, slat-built house, splintering, zig-zag fence, rickety corral, and a brown, hopeless blotch of illy tilled fields. There he would stable his horse with "Swede" Johnson, the squatter, pay more or less gracefully that flaxen-haired individual's habitual overcharge for a meal consisting of bread mixed in the flour bag and baked in the frying-pan, inky, boiled coffee, stringy bacon that tasted of fish, and rice pudding remarkable for its shortcomings as to raisins, and resume his journey on foot into the Hoodoo mining district. Tom Graves was easily moved to laughter. He would laugh, at other people and at himself, with his mouth that was wide and generous, his flashing, even, white teeth, his square fighter's chin, his nose that, starting in a haughty Wellingtonian curve, finished disconcertingly with a humorous tilt to starboard. He would laugh with every inch of his muscular, well-knit body, with his very hair that was uncompromisingly bristly and as uncompromisingly red; and he laughed now as he said to himself that the district was rightly named.

The Hoodoo! The evil, lumpish spirit of man's aspirations, man's hopes and faith!

Once that part of Idaho had been famed for its rich placer claims that had washed every day into the thousands; then a misleading and glittering outcropping of gold-studded quartz, and a mad wave of adventurers, Americans, Canadians, Englishmen, Scots, and Scandinavians, surging in and making the gaunt hillsides ring with the staccato thud of pickaxe and the dull, minatory rumble of powder and dynamite. Finally disappointment, misgivings, an indiscriminate swallowing of both capital and labor in one tremendous avalanche of failure… And the merry band of Argonauts, shaking off their dismay as a spaniel shakes off water and cocking their beavers at the face of misfortune, had followed the gold lure into farther fields, the Kootenais this time.

To-day the Hoodoo district was empty of life except for a couple of ancient Chinamen from California, satisfied with washing their daily dole of five dollars of gold in a forgotten claim; a few optimistic Spokane prospectors who dreamt glimmering mirages of mica; and John Truex, called "Old Man" Truex throughout the Inland Empire.

He was a relic of former days, a man who had once hobnobbed with such notorious characters of localNorthwestern history as Soapy Smith and Swiftwater Bill and who, well past three score and ten, white-haired, patriarchal, yet erect and lithe, had built himself a two-story cabin of logs neatly dovetailed, in the

heart of the bleak, frowning Hoodoos. It was surrounded by a flower garden, odorous with old-fashioned blossoms, and flanked by a nostalgic strawberry patch, shooting thin roots in fifteen inches of well-fertilized soil that he had carried in bags from the rolling Palouse and spread with loving hands on the narrow rock ledge that framed his cabin.

He still called himself a prospector, still was sure that some day he would strike it rich, and he was the partner of Tom Graves, half owner in the latter's prospect hole that was called grandiloquently the Yankee Doodle Glory and was the joke of every mining man from Seattle to the Idaho Panhandle.

Not that Tom Graves was a miner by profession.

He had been born thirty years earlier in the Palouse, had never been west of Spokane nor east of Butte, and had followed the range all his life. As a boy he had helped his father in a decade's hopeless fight against the sprouting of grain, the fencing of free land, and the nibbling of sharp-toothed sheep, afterwards riding herd to various cattle men, and finally becoming horse wrangler to Charles Nairn, the owner and manager of the Killicott ranch.

He was a typical Man on Horseback, an atavistic throwback to an earlier age when men rode free and large, and before steam and electricity and machinery came to cumber, some say to lighten, the world's burden. But he was not displeased when his friends referred to him as "the miner," or introduced him to traveling salesmen or visiting ranchers as the "King of the Hoodoos." For he had a healthy American appetite after money and the decent things that money can buy.

He remembered how the Yankee Doodle Glory had come into his possession at the end of a memorable day and night two-handed, stud-poker session with Dixon Harris, the horse wrangler of a neighboring ranch.

Tom had won steadily, hand after hand, pot after pot, until finally Dixon Harris had risen to his feet, had taken a greasy, yellowish, thumb-stained paper from his pocket, and thrown it across the table.

"I am flat, Tom," he had announced. "Thirty seeds to the bow-wows an' next pay day a hell o' a long ways off. Take this here Yankee Doodle Glory an' call it even. Somebody stuck me with it when I wasn't lookin' an' now I'm goin' to stick you, you old son-of-a-gun. Turns about's fair play!"

And Tom Graves had laughed and had taken the title certificate–the mine was patented–in payment of Dixon Harris' gambling debt.

The Yankee Doodle Glory was a standing joke in the community. It had had a variegated, picturesque, and not altogether honest career. It had been sold and re-sold to capitalists from Boston, London, Minneapolis, and New York, abandoned and picked up again, disposed of at auction in Spokane amidst the roaring laughter of those present for thirty-five cents cash ("an' you're paying damned high for what you're getting!" the auctioneer had added facetiously); money had been spent on it lavishly for blasting and timbering, tunneling and assaying, and never a speck of color, neither gold nor silver, neither copper nor galena, had ever been discovered in its frowning, hopeless depths.

Men out there in the Northwest spoke of "passing the Yankee Doodle Glory" as men in other places speak of "passing the buck"; and now laughing Tom Graves was the owner.

But though he had had half-a-dozen chances of palming it off on newcomers fresh from the East he had always stoutly refused to do so.

"It isn't because I don't want to stick 'em," he had said, blushing like a girl, "but I'm going to develop this here property of mine, see?" And so he had formed a partnership with "Old Man" Truex by the terms of which the latter contributed the labor, the tools, and the dynamite, while Tom ceded to him a half interest in the mine and gave an occasional sum of money whenever he could save it out of his munificent wage of sixty dollars a month.

And then, two days ago, he had received a succinct and ungrammatical telegram that read:

"Git here in a helluva hurry struck it apowerful and aplenty.

"(Signed) Truex."

Chapter II

CHAPTER II

GOLD

"Look a-here, Tom," said "Old Man" Truex late that evening as he was busying himself amongst his pots and pans that shone and twinkled and glittered like so many kindly, ruby-eyed hobgoblins, "what are you goin' t'do with your half of all them opprobrious riches down yonder in the Yankee Doodle Glory?" He waved a hand through the window towards the Hoodoos that coiled back to the star-lit firmament in a great wave of carved, black stone.

Tom was toasting his legs in front of the glowing hearth. He was tired and sleepy and happy. All morning he had ridden; then the long up-hill pull on foot from "Swede" Johnson's homestead to the cabin; and finally three hours' climbing and slipping in and about the prospect hole of the Yankee Doodle Glory under his partner's guidance. It had not meant much to him: just a flat facet of shimmering quartz where the old miner's pickaxe had uncovered it, something like a trail of haggard, indifferent light that disappeared in the frowning maw of a rudely blasted, rudely timbered tunnel, and a small heap of what to him had appeared to be rubbish, but which his partner had handled as a fond mother handles her firstborn and had designated as: "Gold, my lad! Virgin gold, or I'm a Dutchman!"

"Sure it isn't fool's gold?" Tom asked now with a laugh.

"Fool yourself!" In his excitement Truex missed the flapjack that he was tossing browned side up into the skillet, so that it dropped on the ground with a flopping, sizzling smack. "I tell you it's the real thing. Look a-here, Tom. I guess them years on the range have stunted yer perceptions. Of course you don't know the hills as I do. You can't know–oh–the struggle, the fight, the treachery, the damned cheating deceit that's in them rocks. But," wagging his patriarchal beard, "nor can you know the promise of them hills. Wealth that comes to you suddenly after you've given up hope and are mighty near to blowing off yer head with a stick o' powder! Why, by the Immortal and Solemnly Attested Heck!"–this was his pet swear word–"I tell you I have ranged these here hills since I was knee-high to a wood louse and I've never seen such a vein of–"

"Say! What is a vein?"

"Gosh A'mighty! Go to bed, Tom, before I brain you with my skillet. Only take this bit o' information along and hug it in yer dreams: You've got enough gold down there in the Yankee Doodle Glory to buy enough what you want!"

"Oh!" Tom Graves yawned and kicked off his high-heeled boots. "I always did have a hankering after the coin. There's that new saddle Dixon Harris got up from Gallup's. Cost him seventy seeds an he's willing to part with it for fifty, spot cash. Guess there's enough gold in my half for that?"

"Tom," he said very solemnly, "I tell you there's enough gold in there so's you can do what you darned please. You can go to Spokane and join the Club and be a man o' leisure. You can walk up Seventh Avenue and have the pick of the all them swell dumps there. You can surround yer bow-legged self with Chink cooks and autermobiles and baskets of champagne and… Say, what d'you call them things full o' small bones that tastes like punk chicken and sticks in yer throat?"

"Fishes?" suggested Tom sleepily.

"No! Not fishes! I had it once when I sold that there Sally Miller prospect hole to that Eastern guy. Wait! I have it! Terrapin—that's the name! Why, man," he continued seriously, sitting down on the edge of his narrow bunk and scratching his shins, "there's so much gold down there in that hole it makes me afraid at times, Afraid!" he repeated in a strangely sibilant whisper.

"Say, you're locoed!" Tom laughed. "'What's the matter with you, old-timer? Afraid of gold?"

"I ain't afraid of the gold. Gold is all right." Truex shook his head. "But, Tom…" he crossed the room and put his hand on the younger man's shoulder, "when you were down there, in that tunnel of the Yankee Doodle Glory, didn't you—oh—hear something?"

Tom looked up sharply.

"I did. But it wasn't exactly hearing. It was more like…" he hunted for the right word. "Well, something like… I don't know what!"

"All right. You did notice it then!" Truex broke in triumphantly. "And so did I!"

"Isn't it always so ina mine? Ina tunnel? Like an echo?"

"No, It isn't. And it wasn't like an echo. Nor did I notice it until my pickaxe knocked off that bit o' sure-enough quartz, the morning I sent you that wire! Say, Tom," he went on, very earnestly, "it's maybe because I am an old fellow and sorta supersti . I've followed the gold trail these fifty years or more, an' I know! I have seen mighty strange things in the hills. I could tell—things. And, Tom, down there in the Yankee Doodle Glory, when I found that bit o' quartz with the true color sticking in it like raisins in a pudding, I had a funny feeling. I… I was scared, scared stiff. Well, never mind," he wound up, returning to his bunk and taking off his clothes. "To-morrow you got to get up right early and take a sample of that there ore to Newson Garrett in Spokane. He'll make us an assay. Good night."

"Good night," mumbled Tom, who was already half asleep.

Chapter 3

CHAPTER III

THE UNKNOWN METAL

A long career as chemist and assayer had made a pessimist and misanthrope of Newson Garrett.

Miners had come to his laboratory and had offered him large, certified checks, asking nothing of him in return except that he should rectify his reports by taking off a couple of figures from the rubric entitled Silica and add them to that labeled Gold. Other miners had proposed to kill him on the spot when he told them that what they had taken for virgin gold were only shimmering, deceptive bits of iron crystal, Still others, told by him that they had struck it rich, went straightway on a lengthy spree in the old Cœur d'Alene Theater to wake up a week later with a splitting headache and a brown taste, and to discover on returning to their mines that somebody had jumped their claims in the meantime.

So he was morose and silent.

"It'll take another Treadwell, another Leroy, to make me excited," he used to say at the Club over his glass of Vichy and milk, "and those days are over. Why, to-day a fellow thinks he's all the Guggenheims rolled into one and multiplied by the sum total of all the Vanderbilts when his stuff runs two ounces to the ton!"

But, five days later, when Tom Graves ambled into his office, still dressed as if he had just come fresh from the range, in blue jeans tucked into high-heeled boots, a gray flannel shirt, and sombrero, but all neat and clean, even slightly dandyish in the careful knotting of the blue cotton necktie, the rakish angle of his hat, and the elaborate pattern stitched on his boot legs, Newson Garrett smiled. He smiled all over his large, puttyish, hairless face, and held out a flabby hand.

"Mr. Graves," he said in his exact, well-modulated diction that still smacked of Harvard after a lifetime in the Northwest, "permit me to shake you by the hand."

"Sure, I'll permit it if you ask like a nice little girl. But, what's the festive occasion? Why this exuberance of comehitherness, Garrett?"

"Your mine!" replied the other. "Your Yankee Doodle Glory! The jest of the decade has turned into the marvel, the envy of the decade, my dear sir. It is wonderful. I might say extraordinary. It will make history in the mining annals of the Inland Empire. See for yourself," handing Tom the typewritten assay report of the quartz samples which Truex had given him.

Tom read:

There is also present an element, probably some metal that could not be determined, as it did not respond to ordinary tests."

Tom looked up with a laugh.

"Say, put it in plain American. All this is Siwash tome. What docs it mean?"

"It means that you are rich beyond the dreams of avarice. It means that you are a budding Rockefeller. It means that the Yankee Doodle Glory, if the vein runs true…"

"Truex says it does…"

"He ought to know. He is an expert at blocking out ore bodies in his own crude way."

"I guess so." Tom pointed at the paragraph at the bottom of the assay report. "Say, Garrett, what's this?"

"Just what it says there. You see, when I assayed the ore samples, though I used all the known tests, there was one little ingredient, a metal most likely—I am trying not to be too technical—that I was unable to separate."

Tom leaned across the counter. He thought of his partner's curious words, and of his own curious sensation, something like an echo, yet less decided, more far away, he had experienced when he had entered the tunnel of the Yankee Doodle Glory and had come face to face with the ore ledge which his partner's pickaxe had uncovered.

"This unknown metal or whatever you call it," he asked, "did it—well—affect you any? Your ears, I mean…?"

"Yes!" Garrett gave his words the emphasis of a suddenly lowered voice. "It did affect my ears in a very strange," he thumped the table in an access of quite unhabitual excitement, "a perfectly unscientific manner." He was going to say more, but checked himself. "Never mind," he went on, "you are rich. You've got the gold. As to this unknown ingredient, this unknown metal, I have made sure that it will not interfere with any smelting process you may decide on, And I shall send it East to a friend of mine who has a great scientific laboratory to see what he makes of it. Don't you worry about it."

But Tom Graves did worry a day later when Truex suddenly came to town and went straight to his room in the Hotel Spokane.

"Tom," said the old miner, "I'm through with the Yankee Doodle Glory. I'd swap my half of it for a chaw of Macdonald's plug." And being pressed for a reason he repeated his former statement that he was afraid, He said that, in continuing blasting the tunnel and running it smack up against the vein, he had uncovered an even richer ore body, but that the strange sensations, as of a far-off echo, had increased a hundredfold.

"Garrett says something about a new metal," rejoined Tom Graves,

"Forget it. Metals don't affect your ears. I don't want nothing to do with that there mine."

"But," said Tom philosophically, "half of it is yours."

"I don't want nothing to do with it, just the same. I'm scared. I don't want to ever enter that tunnel again!"

"You won't have to, We'll develop the mine in style. It won't cost much, will it?"

"No. We got enough ore in sight to pay for all the machinery we need, an' I've a little money saved up. But," he repeated, irritably, "I tell you, Tom, I'm goin' to sidestep that there mine, I don't want nothing to do with it—not a damned thing. I'd rather…"

"All right, all right, old-timer. Keep your hair on, I'll take a run over to the Club and have a talk with Martin Wedekind."

The latter was a German-American of the best type. He came of an excellent Berlin family, but his father, dead these many years, had been of such a grimly Calvinistic turn of mind that he had not been able to understand why his own children should have been born with a grain of original sin. To the father, the whole of life had meant nothing but a continuous and emphatic moral action. He had brought up his two sons accordingly, and had strained their souls to such a horrible pitch of self-righteousness and hard idealism that they threatened to snap and recoil,

And finally, in the case of Martin, his younger son, it had recoiled. He had been guilty of a small sin and had been shipped off to America thirty years earlier.

He had come straight West, had done well there, and had become an American heart, soul, and politics, including even the saving prejudices. He hated the very sound of the word hyphen.

"There are two classes of hyphenates," he used to say when he warmed to the subject. "There's the sort who get here via the steerage with the clothes they stand in, make their stake, thanks to the splendid hospitality, the fairness of equal chance, and the unlimited possibilities of America, and return to Germany as first-class passengers with money jingling in their jeans. Over yonder they pose as Simon-pure Yankees and read the New York Herald, while here in America they swear by Bill the Kaiser and read the New Yorker Herold. They are the breed who hate America and dislike Germany, who try to straddle the fence, who would kick at the climate of both Hell and Paradise, who are neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. Then there’s the other variety, the intellectual hyphenates—and often they have good American names and not a drop of German blood in their veins—who spout statistics about German efficiency, meaning by that darnnable word a comparison between what's best in Germany with what's worst in America. I hate both breeds, I'm an American. No. I am not sorry that I wasn't born over here. If I had been, I wouldn't have been able to appreciate so thoroughly what America is, and means, and does."

To-day Martin Wedekind was retired from active business affairs and spent his time between his home in Lincoln Addition and the Club, where he played his afternoon game of cards or dominoes and took his whiskey straight, like a native born. His wife was a New England woman and he had an only child, a daughter. He was a little on the autumn side of fifty, tall, heavy, slightly stooped, with peering, twinkling, kindly eyes, a mass of close-curled hair, a thick, graying mustache, and great hairy hands that he used freely to gesticulate with.

He did so this afternoon when the Club steward announced Tom Graves, whom he had met the year before on a visit to the owner of the Killicott ranch. At that time an impromptu friendship had sprung up between the two men in spite of their difference in age and fortune and, at least on Tom's side, not altogether hindered by the fact that Bertha, Martin Wedekind's daughter, was blond and violet-eyed and straight of limb.

"Hullo, Tom! Hullo, capitalist!" was his hearty greeting as the young Westerner ambled into the room with that peculiar, straddling, side-wheeling walk which smacked of stock saddle and rolling prairie.

Tom grinned sheepishly as he sat down. "I guess the news of the rich strike in the Yankee Doodle Glory is all over town by this time?" he asked.

"Sure. Garrett spilled the beans."

"Damned good beans," commented Tom, "fine and rich and nutritious and juicy."

"Yes. But look out, young fellow. Every con agent in the Inland Empire is going to lay for you with a flannel-wrapped brick and a cold deck."

Tom waved a careless hand.

"A fat lot of good it'll do them," he laughed. "My mother was Scotch and as careful as a setting hen, and l'ye followed the range all my life. Bulliest little training-school to kick some horse sense into you. Well, Wedekind," he leaned across the table and his eyes lit up with a frank, boyish appeal, "you're a good friend of mine, aren’t you?"

"None better!" came the kindly reply.

"Fine and dandy. You see, I want to talk to you about that mine."

Wedekind smiled.

"Need a stake to start your developing work?" he asked, slapping his check book on the table. "Name your figure, my boy."

Tom shook his head. "Thanks. It isn't that. It's just some advice I want about my partner. The old son-of-a-gun has gone loco…"

"Gold gone to his head?"

“Not a bit. Gold's gone to his feet, They're cold, Wedekind, as cold as clay." And he told the other about the curious sensation, as of a far-off echo, he and his partner had experienced in the tunnel, adding that Truex resolutely refused to have anything more to do with the Yankee Doodle Glory, and showing Garrett's assay report with the paragraph about the unknown substance on the bottom.

“Garrett says it's all right?" asked Wedekind.

“Sure. As right as rain. Says that foreign metal or whatever it may turn out to be won't interfere with the smelting."

"Well, there's nothing to worry over then. I guess platinum was an unknown metal once, and even gold and silver were unknown daring the iron age."

"But Truex won't play."

"You don't need him, Tom. You work the mine yourself. I'll give you a line to Fred Gamble, the engineer. He has done some work for me. And you make a contract with Truex… Never mind. I'll take the matter up with him myself." He looked at his watch. "What are you doing to-night?"

"Oh, nothing special."

"Fine. Come on up to the house and take pot luck. Mrs, Wedekind will be glad to see you. And Bertha, too."

"I haven't seen your daughter since last year,” said Tom, as he walked down the broad staircase of the Club side by side with Wedekind.

The latter laughed.

"She's changed some," he replied. "You know she has been visiting my brother Heinrich in Berlin for over five months. Just returned. Oh, yes," he repeated rather musingly, "she’s changed some."

Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV

BERTHA WEDEKIND

"Well, Tom, I am glad to see you!" Mrs. Wedekind, small, delicate, white-haired, with something about her reminiscent of old lace and lavender, beamed upon him through her gold-rimmed spectacles. "And rich, aren’t you?"

Tom Graves felt slightly embarrassed. References to the lucky strike in the Yankee Doodle Glory and his suddenly acquired wealth often made him curiously ill at case as if it were a reflection, quite undeserved, on his character and his manliness.

So he smiled vaguely and apologetically and shook her hand without knowing what to reply, while Martin Wedekind, guessing what was going on in the young Westerner's mind, came to the rescue.

"Yes, Fanny," he said to his wife. "Who would have believed last year that the Killicott ranch harbored a prospective capitalist?" He turned to Tom and led him to the sideboard with its hospitable array of bottles and glasses and syphons. "Shall I mix you one in honor of the occasion?"

But Tom Graves was not listening, for Bertha Wedekind had come into the dining-room, an exquisite little figure with her wheat-colored hair that rippled over the broad, smooth, low forehead in a curly, untamable mass, her violet-blue eyes, her pure oval of a face, pink and white and flower-soft. Her youth incompleteness seemed a lovely sketch for something larger, finer, more splendid; just a sketch of happy, seductive hints with the high-lights of womanhood yet missing.

Tom took her narrow, white hand, looking upon her admiringly and approvingly. She was dressed in foamy silver lace over shimmering rose-pink satin, with contrasting moire ribbons in deep purple and a cluster of purple satin orchids at her high waist line.

Tom laughed. He remembered how he had seen her the year before, on the Killicott ranch where she had been spending the summer together with her parents, in riding breeches, a khaki coat, a blue silk tie loosely knotted around her slim throat, and her hair pinned up carelessly beneath a flopping, mannish stetson, riding the range alongside of him and glorying in the speed and tang and zest of it.

"By Ginger, Bertha," he said, "you've sure changed some. Now that gown of yours," he was studying it naively. I lay you my rock bottom dollar it's from Paris."

Bertha smiled rather languidly.

"I am afraid you would lose your bet, Tom," she replied. "This gown is not from Paris. I bought it in Berlin. Had it made there…" And, as if returning to a subject that was uppermost in her mind: "You don't have to go to Paris any more for gowns or, oh, 'most anything. You can get everything you want in Berlin. Not only frocks and frills, but beauty, and culture, and big things, worthwhile things! Why, compared to Germany, America is…"

"Daughter," cut in her mother dryly, "aren't you forgetting that you are an American?"

"Dad is a German. Aren't you, Dad?"

Martin Wedekind flushed an angry red. "I was born in Berlin. But I am an American—every inch of me—all the time!"

"Uncle Heinrich told me in Berlin that…"

"Leave your Uncle Heinrich out of the question. He and I have gone different ways. I tell you that 1 am an American, while he is a Prussian officer. And—" turning to Tom and smiling bitterly, as if remembering something that had happened very long ago and that he had never been able to eradicate completely from his mind, "you know what Prussian officers are, don't you?"

Tom shook his head. His range of actual experience was limited by Spokane to the west, by Butte to the east, and the British Columbia border to the north. Of course he had known foreigners, but they were mostly Britons, Canadians, and Scandinavians, men very much like himself, men blending easily into the great, rolling West.

"I'll tell you what they are," continued Wedekind heatedly, "for I know them. They are brass-buttoned, brass-gallooned, brass-helmeted, brass-souled, saber-rattling vulgarians. They are…"

"Father! Please!" came Bertha's hurt, indignant cry, and at the same time, simultaneous with the Chinese servant's felt-slippered appearance, Mrs, Wedekind interrupted with a conciliatory:

"The soup's on the table!"

Martin Wedekind laughed.

"Never mind, little fellow," he said to his daughter, calling her by his favorite nickname, "you and I aren't going to quarrel over…"

"Over anything or anybody, Dad dear." Bertha finished the sentence for him, and gave his arm an affectionate little squeeze.

But even so there was a sort of embarrassed hush during dinner now and again when the conversation turned to Berlin; and, somehow, it seemed impossible to keep away from the subject. Bertha was young and impressionable. She had just returned from Germany after her first visit abroad; and all she had seen there, and felt and heard, was very vivid in her memory, and very important.